This year will see the first films released by Disneynature, making good on Mickey’s New Year’s resolution to produce two nature documentaries annually for the foreseeable future. Reports on the endeavor (including the National Reviews’ always hilarious Planet Gore blog) portray it as novel. Yet, in its own press release, Disney speaks of “balancing heritage and innovation,” as Disneynature is a resurrection and rebranding of what the studio sold sixty years ago as “True-Life Adventures.”

Then as now, Disney’s motives are financial. Its early animated features (those without the iconic princesses) hemorrhaged money. Time consuming and labor intensive, they sent the studio’s producers looking for some way to balance the books. They tried propaganda for the military and industrial films for Detroit. And then in 1948 they landed on Seal Island. A fanciful trip to Alaska’s Pribilof Islands, which in mating season (according to Roy Disney himself) “looks like Coney Island on the Fourth of July,” the documentary cost a fraction of Bambi to make, raked in more money, and won an Oscar to boot. Eleven additional nature films would follow in the next twelve years, as the series begot the studio’s own distribution apparatus, Buena Vista, and raised its profile on primetime television. Today, as a recent restructuring has cut Disney’s annual production schedule in half and its first-quarter profits are down by 33%, it’s no wonder Chief Executive Robert Iger revealed to the New York Times his envy of March of the Penguins, the $3 million shoestring Warner Brothers used to lasso $127 million at the box office. The shining knights have been dispatched from Cinderella’s castle to try once again to, as Gregg Mitman’s writes, “mine the frontier of nature.”

Mitman takes us through the fascinating history of the “True-Life Adventures” in his Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Though Walt Disney liked to say that “nature wrote the screenplays,” (more…)

Here’s a fascinating article in Conservation Biology (and picked up by Nature) on home location choice and environmental attitudes in the Teton Valley outside Yellowstone. The authors found that the more their respondants cared about the environment, the more likely they were to be living in an environmentally damaging way (i.e. big ranches, small families), whereas people with lower environmentally-oriented attitudes lived in a more sustainable manner, in denser areas closer to town. Interestingly, the authors also found that the longer folks had been living out in the wilderness, the lower their concern for environmental issues.

That second point could, I think, be taken one of two ways: either they’re just finding that people who have lived out in Wyoming and Idaho for 50 years weren’t raised with the same environmental ethos that the recent Hollywod Celebrity Types and the other enviro-carpetbaggers bring with them. I think the more interesting angle would be if people legitimately became less concerned with enviromental issues the longer they’re in a place that’s more “natural.” I think the current crop of American environmental scientists, ecologists, conservationists, etc., were raised in suburbs and exurbs that have changed substantially over the course of our lifetime: seeing the loss of local creeks, small town forests, and trails was, for me, a great motivator. Being able to connect those local issues with global ones pushed me into this science. But there are no doubt areas that are doing just fine, especially if you own the 1,000 acres (404 ha) around you. No development problem there!

I think, also, this article re-highlights the need for a substantial shift in our focus on urban ecology: people who care about environmental issues are driven out of cities because there’s so little nature there. We need to find ways to make city living attractive to people who crave wilderness.

Peterson, M.N. et al. Household Location Choices: Implications for Biodiversity Conservation. Conservation Biology, 22:4. (doi: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2008.00929.x)