ABSTRACT
This chapter will frame an analysis of Koyannsqatsi, Powaqqatsi alongside The Constant Gardener around representations of Africa, while signalling a renewed interest and engagement with environmental justice issues.1 As Frederick Ferre affirms ‘we need to learn in new modes of ethical holism, what organic interconnectedness means for human persons’ (in Attfield and Belsey 1994: 237). These readings follow this general lead, while also endorsing and proselytising for the primary environmental ethic around a moral attitude and respect for nature. All the while, critical commentators rightly question how the West can expect the extremely disadvantaged Third World to give up the possibility of acquiring some of the luxuries and benefits which the rich industrialised world enjoy, irrespective of the overall ecological cost to planet earth. While some well-meaning commentators have gone so far as to assert that global poverty is too large a problem to be solvable, without destroying our way of life, which in turn reinforces Western impotence towards extreme poverty. Meanwhile, astute critics and academics, including Thomas Pogge and Naomi Klein, have effectively demonstrated the inherent fault-lines within such a thesis. By all accounts these examples have moved a long way from exemplifying crude colonialist and imperialist agendas and speak to a more fruitful post-colonialist and I would add a distinctly environmental and ethical agenda.
