It’s hard to have much hope that the people of planet Earth will ever have a day of mass enlightenment to the environmental crises scientists and tuned-in politicians and activists have warned us about for decades, and which are plainly and evidently coming to pass right before our eyes.
But movies like “We Are Guardians” attempt to give that hope that in a world where well-financed propoganda organizes ignorance, greed, poverty, naked corruption and racism into an alliance against taking action on saving a polluted, deforested planet from the consequences of short-term thinking, some people aren’t going quietly.
Filmmakers Edivan Guajajara, Chelsea Greene and Rob Grobman, backed by producers Fisher Stevens, Leonardo Di Caprio and others, present us with an inside look at the front lines of efforts to save the rapidly-shrinking Amazon rainforest, “the lungs” of our planet — responsible for mass carbon sequestration, vast oxygen production and the single biggest rain engine in the Earth’s ecosystem.
It is a struggle in which Indigenous rainforest tribes have been forced onto those front lines. It is their land, in most cases, that is being poached, logged, clear cut and systematically stolen by outside interests using Brazil’s poorest as their labor force and political bloc to back nakedly corrupt and racist leaders such as the former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Malcan is a tribal activist taking training on how to organize and arm himself to chase off often murderous loggers and farmers and Big Ag workers who have worn out the Portuguese phrases “Why go after me? I’m the little guy!” and “Just this once” or “I need money to feed my kids/for coffee and sugar,” etc. in decades of defending themselves for their roles in the vicious cycle.
Tadeu is a landowner who bought pristine acreage decades ago for a nature preserve with a small rainforest hotel/lodge in it, only to walk his acreage and see fresh incursions or “invaders” and “looting” by “criminals,” whom he confronts on his land and who to a one just shrug off his complaints.
It’s “the biggest environmental crime on Earth,” he declares. His many official complaints to the authorities fall on deaf ears. They’re in on it, and have been for decades.
Scientists like Luciana explain the rainforest’s function, and reporters such as Bruno lay out the layers of corruption that trap emerging economies like Brazil in Third World politics — oligarchies and kleptocracies.
Chainsaw-and-pistol-packing Valdir and others we meet at the bottom of the rainforest-raping ladder brush off the illegality and immorality of what they’re doing and rationalize how their lives came to depend on this stealing.
But Indigenous activists like Puyr dress in native garb, protest, talk on TV and speak to crowds to try and mobilize their countrymen on behalf of people their then-president described as “wretched,” with no right to protected lands.
It’s customary in such films to try and see the point of view of the “little guys” on the criminal food chain — the manual labor force committing the crimes — sneaking into forests, marking trees, then planting fence posts and later wiring up the fence to complete the theft. Once the harvestable trees are gone, the land is burned and in come the soybean and cattle farm operations, huge and small.
But decades of such sympathy have hardened us to see these as the same “easy money” laborers who opt out of the struggle to prep oneself for a more productive and socially acceptable life in any economy.
“We Are Guardians” also does a good job of naming names among the big corporate beneficiaries of this blind-eye sanctioned looting and environmental disaster in progress. Burger King, McDonald’s, Cargill, JBS, Kroger and Food Lion are among the beneficiaries of deforestation — corporations on the receiving end of beef and soy raised on stolen, illegally cleared land, greenwashed rainforest lumber illegally harvested and shifted through multiple companies before it winds up in the U.S., Canada and China.
Yes, it’s a little disappointing to see some of these names. Et tu, Costco?
As hopeless as literally everything on this perpetually back-burnered crisis can seem to be, with brainwashed masses demonizing Greta Thunberg but lionizing the Kochs, Bezoses, Bolsonaros and Trumps of the world, “We Are Guardians” reminds us that some fights you can’t give up, even as they seem more impossible with every step-backward election. And that some people realize that one hard truth before the rest of us.
Rating: unrated
Credits: Directed by Chelsea Greene, Rob Grobman and Edivan Guajajara. An Area 23a release.
Running time: 1:23
