TV REVIEW : ‘American Dream’ Is Nature’s Nightmare

In “Earth and the American Dream,” a documentary airing at 8 tonight on HBO, even the environmental destruction is eerily beautiful.

The 90-minute environmental history lesson was co-produced and directed by Bill Couturie, who won an Oscar and a Peabody Award for his documentary “Common Threads: Stories From the Quilt” and two Emmys and another Peabody for the HBO documentary “Dear America: Letters Home From Vietnam.”

It is a striking, well-crafted if emotional review of environmental abuse. At one point, Couturie, to illustrate the Pilgrims’ fear of barbaric nature, even turns the image of a squirrel into a malevolent beast.

It is also history told in the format popularized by the Burns brothers’ “Civil War” documentary: photographs and quotations of the people who were there; revealing lines spoken by well-known actors from pamphlets and advertisements of the time.

George Washington (Karl Malden) intones: “Our lands were originally very good. But use and abuse have made them quite otherwise. . . .”

And in an especially smart rendition of the birth of modern consumerism, a blunt ad man from the 1950s cries: “The population explosion is a great big gaping jaw we’re all trying to fill up with whatever we can cram down there. . . . We can make it an American middle-class universe, and we can make a lot of money on it.”

Yet the form has its limits. Lack of a narrator makes it hard to give context, to cite the exceptions, to give complex situations their due.

A segment on the automobile, for instance, first focuses on the brazen legs of flappers and their Wall Street speculator boyfriends, dancing the 1920s away as they raced between parties in a new toy. The gasoline-powered automobile would seem to have begun as a fad of the careless rich.

In fact, cars provided cheaper, more convenient and less messy transportation than the horse. The first successful automobiles were “electrics,” and they were the ones favored by the urban rich. The struggling gasoline models finally caught on when Henry Ford made them even cheaper than the electrics, and because ordinary people out in the boonies didn’t have electricity anyway.

Likewise, it’s undoubtedly true that no Indian chopped down forests or slaughtered buffalo on the gluttonous scale of the Europeans. Yet self-made environmental disasters may well have helped destroy several pre-Columbian American civilizations.

I also recall from a couple of years ago a prosperous restaurant owner in Sitka, Alaska, who was also an executive of one of the region’s Native American corporations. The U.S. Congress had turned over vast tracts of land to these tribal companies and now they were fighting environmental proposals to restrict logging.

“No one knows better than we do how to care for Mother Earth,” the executive told me in all sincerity. At the time, Alaskan environmentalists were furious because many of the native corporations--not least hers--were raising cash by clear-cutting their private forests right down to the salmon-spawning stream beds.

“Earth and the American Dream” is billed as a “familiar story from a fresh perspective.” In fact, it’s a familiar, admittedly valuable tale told from an all-too-familiar perspective.