Woodstock Film Festival 2010 Preview: Jon Bowermaster's "SoLA"

by Jay Blotcher, October 01, 2010

Hurricane Katrina was not the first wholesale devastation suffered by Louisiana, nor will British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion be the last insult.

In the alternately lyrical and sobering SoLA: Louisiana Water Stories, longtime journalist and filmmaker Jon Bowermaster, 56, traces a chronic pattern of maltreatment of this delta state. The wholesale suffering, Bowermaster explains, stems from several factors: among them, natural gas and oil companies, illegal loggers, corrupt politicians, wetland developers. Even the heroic Corps of Engineers, the fabled levee builders, miscalculated; their exuberant taming of the waterways of the mighty Mississippi has eroded the fragile ecosystems that traditionally protected residents from hurricanes and floods.

Bowermaster, a resident of Stone Ridge for 23 years, is rarely at home. His 11 book projects have taken him to places as remote as the Antarctic Peninsula and Aleutian Islands and French Polynesia, transported in modes as varied as seaplane, kayak, sailboat and on foot. (He refers to those past exploits as “adventure for adventure’s sake.”) A few years ago, he switched gears to making films for National Geographic Television, but maintained the same themes: an examination of the tenuous and increasingly dangerous relationship between man and nature, accompanied by an unabashed plea for environmental sanity.

Everyone has a tale to tell of this beleaguered area and Bowermaster locates some of the most urgent, heartfelt and eloquent testimonies for SoLA. We meet environmental scientists, professors and neighbors who woke up one day to the growing pollution around them and became environmental activists. If dissenting voices are absent in this bracingly informative documentary, Bowermaster offers no apologies. “We didn’t go and talk to the petrochemical plant owners, we didn’t go and talk to the oil companies. Over the years I’ve talked to enough of those guys. I know what I’m going to get from them. So we made more of a personal piece about Louisiana by just allowing people who live there to speak.”

Interweaving first-person stories with facts and figures—and generous amounts of buoyant Zydeco music—SoLA builds the argument that state and federal governments have simply sold out the Pelican State to big business, which has fecklessly exhausted its resources and utilized it as a glorified sewer. (Louisiana plays host to one-third of this country’s hazardous landfills.)