White People and the Wilderness

Affluent people feeling #humbled and #blessed

In our community, watching an international film festival about wild places feels like coming home. On the big screen, local endurance rider Lael Wilcox is racing down mountain bike trails. In another film, Alaska’s most impressive athletes—salmon—run up Devil’s Canyon of the Susitna to spawn, overcoming 25 mile-per-hour currents in the Class VI gorge. Girdwood resident Ben Sturgelewski directs Banff’s featured ski film, the tour cut of “Ruin and Rose.”

We have some of the world’s premier explorers as neighbors, as well as some of the world’s most threatened ecosystems.

This year’s Banff Film Festival played to sellout crowds at Wendy Williamson auditorium with entries that jumped from the apocalyptic to the insipid.

‘Being Hear’ explores efforts to preserve soundscapes from noise pollution. Yet viewers may consider that their own ears can become inured to the sound of waves, sand and gravel washing upon itself at the sea’s edge, glacial silt hissing against the bottom of a boat rapidly bobbing downstream. In the age of virtual reality, our own perceptions are as much at risk as the species and landscapes that are actually disappearing. Far from losing the ability to see what is right in front of them, the desert-bound children of ‘Ruin and Rose’ can envision the whole world in a grain of sand, or rather a pow-filled paradise in a little snow globe left behind in a world wrecked by global warming. Skiers slashing spines are (we) yuppies’ answer to Ghost Shirt dancers—those who profit from climate change will not begrudge us those last moments of euphoria.

Not that climate change will stop yuppies from exalting in their own exercise. ‘SHIFT’ documents a crew of indigenous youth who build mountain bike trails near Carcross in the Yukon Territories. The images are striking: Native Americans build trails and white people ride multi-thousand dollar carbon bicycles on them. Lest you think that mountain biking is hedonistic, ‘SHIFT’ is a moral salve, suggesting that white people riding bikes on trails provides salvation to minorities. Forget about political change or charity—buy yourself a new mountain bike. The premise of ‘SHIFT’ is that Native Americans near Carcross, who have apparently been looking for something to do ever since Europeans annihilated their culture, now have something to do with themselves.

“Danny MacAskill’s Wee Day Out” graciously leaves out rationalizations of consumerism and shamelessly flaunts bike tricks in the countryside outside of Edinburgh. MacAaskill rides and jumps his bike from bridge to stone barn to signpost, after pedaling airborne off the train and landing cleanly on the railroad track. This short movie is a joyous ode to adult boyhood.

Banff doesn’t celebrate only young affluent white people: “Four Mums in a Boat” is a largely self-produced movie about four middle-aged British mothers who row and float across the Atlantic in a modern rowboat, taking more than two months. The craft is almost as remarkable as the women’s patience: It is self-righting, has GPS-directed steering and an automatic water pump that makes seawater drinkable, with all the electronic equipment powered by solar panels. This feat of rowing is part of the Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge, which must be one of the most expensive races in the world, though the costs are not addressed in the film.

The entire Banff Film Festival is not as vapid as a couple of these movies suggest.

‘The Super Salmon’ addresses a real issue, the survival of the Susitna River’s salmon runs.

However, too many of Banff’s films are a modern day reiteration of a longstanding western tradition: Documentation of privileged people who, fortunate enough to have avoided remunerative physical labor, instead pit themselves against challenges of the wilderness. The inordinate focus on wealthy people’s existential challenges is unfortunate, since their emotions and petty struggles pale against the grandeur of the wilderness.