environment

Wiebo’s War (Director: David York): David York opens his enga­ging film with an inter­esting scene. Wiebo Ludwig, the sub­ject of the film, is sit­ting around a table with sev­eral of his sons and the film crew, and Wiebo is con­cerned that most of what he stands for “won’t come across” because the dir­ector and crew are atheists.

It’s a bold move, and poten­tially one that will put many people off Ludwig right away. But it’s also a neces­sary tactic, because for the next 90 minutes, it will be dif­fi­cult not to be pulled in by Wiebo’s cha­risma, pas­sion and evident good sense.

In the mid 1980s, Wiebo Ludwig, an ordained min­ister with the his­tor­ic­ally Dutch Christian Reformed Church, decided to uproot his family from their Ontario home to go and live “apart from the world” in northern Alberta. It was an exper­i­ment in holy living, but also in self-sufficiency and community-building. Along with another couple and all of their chil­dren, they settled on a parcel of land they dubbed Trickle Creek. As their chil­dren grew older, they inter­mar­ried and had their own chil­dren. They raised animals and were able to sup­port them­selves in both food and energy.

But these were not technology-shunning ascetics like the Amish. They wanted to farm and wor­ship God, but were happy to be part of the wider world when they needed it. Unfortunately, the world quickly impinged on their bit of paradise.

In the late 1980s, the oil and gas industry moved in when they dis­covered that Trickle Creek was sit­ting over a huge reser­voir of nat­ural gas. One of the most shocking rev­el­a­tions of the film is that des­pite the Ludwigs’ deed to their land, they only own the top six inches, and have no own­er­ship or con­trol of the min­eral rights that the EnCana gas cor­por­a­tion is so eager to exploit. Whether this is Canadian law or just Alberta’s, I still think it’s some­thing that needs to be challenged.

York’s film uses lots of material shot by the Ludwigs over the years, including flaming tap water, an image used more recently by Josh Fox’s Gasland (review), which would make a great com­panion piece to this film. There’s also hor­rific footage of dead and deformed live­stock, and in one indelible scene, a still­born infant.

In the 90s, the Canadian news media was abuzz at a cam­paign of sab­otage against the oil and gas industry including explo­sions at well sites. Ludwig was con­victed in con­nec­tion with these acts and served 18 months in prison. Many years pass but now there is another string of bomb­ings in northern British Columbia, and Ludwig is again the prime sus­pect. Even though York fol­lows him for sev­eral years as these events play out, we never really know the extent of Ludwig’s involve­ment. We do, how­ever, begin to under­stand the extent of his family’s des­per­a­tion to live unmolested.

Since Wiebo is eager to declare that his actions flow from his bib­lical prin­ciples, I think it’s cogent to examine them. Ludwig and his family are in a unique pos­i­tion, able to fulfil the bib­lical func­tion of the prophet, which is to speak the truth to power. But in the pro­cess they are also sub­ject to another bib­lical maxim: that a prophet is without honour in his own country. Their sep­ar­a­tion from the com­munity allows them the freedom to cri­ti­cize the oil and gas industry because they are not eco­nom­ic­ally dependent upon it. The people in the towns around them don’t have that luxury, and so there is a built-in resent­ment that is only stoked higher by the Ludwigs’ reli­gious beliefs and prac­tices, which are sub­ject to small-town gossip and dis­tor­tion. It’s a fas­cin­ating dynamic to watch at work, and it is behind another of the film’s unsolved mys­teries, the shooting death of a local girl on the Ludwig’s prop­erty after two truck­loads of drunken teen­agers arrive in the middle of the night to harass them.

It dawned on me that if this film had been set in the devel­oping world, audi­ences would feel imme­diate sym­pathy and even solid­arity with someone who was res­isting a greedy cor­por­a­tion and an apathetic gov­ern­ment. Because it’s so close to home, I think reac­tion will be more mixed. The oil and gas industry has been quick to brand Ludwig an “eco-terrorist” and the Canadian media has been happy to advance this char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion. York’s film will help shade the black and white cari­ca­ture we’ve been provided with, although Ludwig remains a com­plic­ated man. His ini­tial mis­giv­ings are not ground­less, and for a man who claims to answer only to God, his par­ti­cip­a­tion in the film is pretty remark­able. If it brings some addi­tional crit­ical atten­tion to the prac­tices of an industry that powers so much of Canada’s eco­nomy, it will be worthwhile.

Tagged as: #hotdocs11, christianity, environment, faith, oil

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