Manufactured landscapes

The beginning of the movie killed me, how many rows can you show of people doing the same exact thing over and over and over again! They march all their employees out every day and they all look like clones, all dressed the same, in a pattern of 5 rows, four people deep. The get talked down to like little school children of everything they did bad the day before. This movie gave me a headache with doing the same thing over and over again inside the factory. I get that this artist was inside the factories to see where all these manufactured materials start but he didn’t have to show every little action in so much detail. It was sad to hear some of these peoples stories. Such as the one where at one village where it was also a site for recycled products such as TV monitors and when they compacted them down to size lead would leak out and when it rained the lead would pour into the lakes and streams. It got so bad that they now needed to send away for their water. This movie makes me think how lucky I am to be in America, the land of opportunities and the privilege to go to college and get a great job not sit at a desk all day doing one action repeatedly. Like the girl who had worked at the factory for 6 years and said she can do over 400 breakers a day! That looked like very tedious work! I like the comment that the guy said about ships being able to connect us and their part of the reason globalization has been able to take on the proportion that it has. Another story that was disheartening was the little boys who worked neck deep in oil mills, hauling buckets of oil. It is very dangerous and cheap work, my heart went out to them. As the movie progressed I start to like it a bit more, I like how it goes to a place of manufactured landscapes, gives a little story about it then shows the artist, Canadian photographer- Edward Burtynsky pictures of that place. People pointed out through out the film that his photos make this manufactured landscape look beautiful, I have to disagree on that, natural is better. It was stated in the film that, these people look at work “for their country”. The worlds largest damn took 17 years to complete but kept out floods, helped with transportation and electricity. 1,100,000 had to relocate to work on the damn, that is shocking to me! 13 cities had to be moved to be flattened out to make way for this damn. The people living there were the ones being paid to tear down their own communities. The urbanization in China is like no where else in the world, what used to be 70% agriculture and 30% urban is now 70% urban and only 30% agriculture. “We are changing the nature of this planet” was quoted and I strongly believe in this, we are taking a beautiful atmosphere and turning into ugly sky rises.