When most of us hear “oil spill”, we think gooey black death on the surface of the ocean.  But Crude, a documentary directed by Joe Berlinger, focuses on a major oil spill on land—the great, wobbling black pits dumped by Chevron in the Ecuadorian Amazon.  The film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and is only now getting limited screenings across the country, tells the story of the legal drama over those billion of gallons of oil.  But the real story of Crude isn’t the environmental catastrophe—it’s the lengths the poor villagers have to go to compete with the rich oil companies.  Along the way, the “good guys” learn to stretch a buck, grab some media attention and exploit the power of celebrity.  Perhaps Berlinger could have learned something from the plucky lawyers he follows.  Crude is a capable and important documentary, but without slick production values and a media juggernaut behind it, the film has been playing to a lot of empty theaters.

Which is not to say Crude is a bad film—far from it—and it tells a story that Americans haven’t heard nearly enough about.  From 1972 to 1993, Texaco, now owned by Chevron, dumped billions of gallons of oil in tributaries of the Amazon River in Ecuador.  Cancer rates among the local people soared.  Crude follows the class action lawsuit brought by 30,000 villagers against Chevron through two lawyers—Pablo Fajardo, a young Ecudorian lawyer who’s never tried a case before, and Steve Danzinger, a street-smart schmoozer from the U.S.  Berlinger is patient with the myriad details of the case, spooling out new information only as it comes up in the lawyers’ arguments.  While things feel a bit jumpy at times, Berlinger manages to fit a lot into this two hour documentary and still deftly maintain the tension of a legal drama.

The film is certainly compelling.  Where it falters—and, I suspect, why it hasn’t gotten wider release—is in making the movie entertaining rather than simply enlightening.  Crude is almost exclusively composed of jerky, grainy camera shots of people’s faces.  Music and humor, which have become a key component of many commercially successful docs like No Impact Man and pretty much all of Michael Moore’s ouvre, are absent in Crude.  Berlinger also missed a major opportunity by not taking more beautiful shots of the exotic landscape of the Amazon.  And save for one lovely song in the opening, the indigenous people the lawyers are fighting to save get next to no screen time, unless they’re talking about cancer.  As a filmmaker, Berlinger should know that it’s often images that truly capture heart and minds.  Iconic photos of oil-coated seagulls and grime-caked fish have made ocean oil spills household words in the U.S.  Berlinger should have visually captured the ecological destruction in Ecuador.  But except for some wisps of oil on the water and a couple dead chickens, we’re left taking the villagers’ subtitled word for it.

That leaves Crude a well-told story sorely lacking in pizzazz.  Without it, Crude can’t compete commercially with the gorgeous images of Planet Earth, the funny family drama of No Impact Man, or the extreme gonzo journalism that gave the independent doc The Cove a media boost.  No Impact Man, after all, has been playing at local theaters for months.  Crude, which grossed $80,000 in its first four weeks, is in Boston for just two weekends, at the Museum of Fine Arts—not exactly a big-time movie venue.

This is especially ironic because the film itself is practically a guide to how the little guy can get noticed.  Danzinger, the American lawyer, is well aware of the odds they’re up against, and he knows how to play the game.  He dictates lines to Amazonian villagers testifying in the US and yells until he gets the President of Ecuador to visit the oil pits.  “We still haven’t found a way to break through the consciousness of the American people,” he laments, even though the case had been going on for 13 years by then.  Danzinger’s coupe d’etat, and the climax of the movie, is when he gets Trudie Styler, the wife of Sting, to visit the afflicted villages.  This leads to the movie’s most nauseating moments, when Police sings “Message in a Bottle” over a montage of puffy-lipped and vacant-eyed Styler visiting oil pits and Amazon villages.  The scene is both a stomach-turning paean to celebrity and a reminder of how important notoriety and cold hard cash are for any cause.  No one, apparently, really cares about Amazon villagers dying of hydrocarbon-induced cancer unless Sting’s wife is there prancing around them with her immaculate white parasol.

Unfortunately, judging from the meager turn-out of seniors and a few students at the Museum of Fine Arts when I saw this movie, it seems that most people still don’t care.  It’s a shame Berlinger couldn’t have found a way to make this story punchy enough to get a wider release.  The tragic story of 30,000 poor villagers being poisoned by an American corporation is a bitter pill for American audiences to swallow, and Berlinger hasn’t done much to sweeten it.  And so the trial will probably go on for another 10 years, barely acknowledged by the American public, exactly as Danzinger feared.

Video by Jennifer Berglund and Julia Darcey

Boston's Long Wharf, from the Harbor. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Today, the Atlantic Ocean laps eight feet below the stone wall of Boston’s Long Wharf. The wharf is one of many that jut into the gray waters of Boston Harbor, reaching like outstretched fingers. When it was built 300 years ago, this popular tourist spot was an active commercial dock, stretching 1.3 miles from Quincy Market, the longest wharf in Boston. Over time, landfill was added around the wharf to extend Boston seaward, creating a city built on low, flat land that sits precariously close to the ocean.

As that ocean rises over the next century, Long Wharf and the city beyond it could be periodically swallowed back up by the sea. Climate scientists with the Union of Concerned Scientists warn that rising sea levels from global warming will create more severe and frequent floods along the Northeast Coast. They predict that by 2050, sea levels around Boston could rise as much as two feet. If these predictions hold, 10-foot floods—which used to be a once-in-a-century event—could engulf New England’s shores every two to four years. That’s enough water to swamp every wharf in Boston and fill the streets of downtown.

The Peter Stuyvesant, once part of Anthony's Pier 4 restaurant, sank in the icy waters of Boston Harbor during the Blizzard of '78. Credit: Boston Globe

A series of floods this severe would cost Boston billions in repairs to flooded buildings and submerged streets. Such a flood happened only once last century, during the Blizzard of 1978, when four days of snow created a 16-foot tall swell that shattered homes along the coast and swamped Boston Harbor.   The blizzard alone cost the state $500 million in damages. Three or four major floods every decade could cost Boston alone anywhere from $20 billion to $94 billion over the next century according to Paul Kirshen, a professor of civil engineering at Tufts University. These figures represent only property damages—they don’t include the other financial and psychological costs associated with living in a city that returns to the sea every decade.

A storm rolls into Boston Harbor. Credit: Rachel Blumenthal, rachelblumenthal.net

Imagine what such a flood would look like, standing at the edge of Long Wharf in the year 2050. At high tide, the ocean would ebb just five feet below the wharf wall. A storm blowing into the Harbor from the northwest would push massive waves towards shore, creating a storm surge five feet high. The rows of white boats lining the wharf would knock together in the wind, and then start to list as the water rises above their moorings. Before a drop of rain had even fallen, the ocean would flow over the lip of Long Wharf, swamping the white mast that stands at its edge.

When the storm hits, rain will pour into the sea, raising the ocean another 15 feet and sending it crashing through the city. The first building to be inundated would be the trendy apartments whose sea-facing balconies have long been the envy of Harbor-going tourists. Then seawater will flow over the Harbor and across State Street, where it will hit the entrance to the Aquarium T stop and cascade down the escalator into the underground. At its worst, the surge could push all the way to the concrete and glass gate of Quincy Market. For as long as the storm lasts, the market would sit at the water’s edge, just as it did when it was first constructed in 1826, before the city was built out into the ocean.

This is the sort of flood that could hit Boston not once a century, but once every five years or more as sea levels rise. The new flood of the century would likely be worse than anything ever experienced in Boston’s history. You can see the extent of the new 100-year flood in this picture.

The light blue shows the extent of Boston's new flood of the century, a flood so severe it used to occur only every 500 years. Credit: Union of Concerned Scientists

While increased flooding from global warming may be unavoidable, there are steps Boston can take to reduce the predicted $20 billion of flood damage over the next century. The simplest method is building seawalls along the coast that will block surges heading landward. Seawalls have the benefit of allowing construction to continue uninhibited along the coasts, but they are expensive and cause coastal erosion. A cheaper and more effective solution, according to Kirshen, would be to limit development and flood-proof existing buildings in the new floodplains.

Neither solution is cheap or completely effective at preventing flood damage, but they are far better than the alternative. If nothing is done, for a few days every decade, the land the city has wrested from the Harbor may be reclaimed by the sea. Payment, perhaps, for reaching our fingers too far into the ocean.