Abstract
A Concerned Citizen: Civics in Action, produced by Bo Boudart Productions, directed by Bo Boudart, and written by Susan Utell and Bo Boudart (41 minutes).
I first met Dr. Riki Ott at the public library in Lafitte, Louisiana (Jefferson Parish), during a downpour that had washed out much of the road that links that rural fishing community with the main highway. Lafitte is situated on Bayou Barataria and the local ecosystem and seafood-based economy had been deeply impacted by drifting oil plumes from the Deepwater Horizon/BP Oil Spill and a subsequent series of fishery closures right on the cusp of shrimping season. My mission that day was to update concerned citizens on the extent of the damage and recruit community members to participate in the epidemiological component of our National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) project. Our University of Texas Medical Branch Center for Environmental Toxicology was being funded by the NIEHS to assess damage to the Gulf food web and describe emergent health impacts of eating seafood from affected fisheries.
Ott’s intentions were far more comprehensive and galvanizing; the differences between my own outreach message—dry and relatively drained of passion in order to avoid alarming affected communities or any accusation of subjective bias—and her intense (but measured), detailed (also totally accurate), and ultimately provocative “call-to-arms” was stark. Ott stressed the need for medical diagnostics that considered environmental exposures—aerosolized particles, hydro-carbons, direct contact with fresh or weathered oil, and problems associated with the oil dispersant, Corexit 9500A—and this struck a deep chord with our shared audience. Many residents of oil-damaged south Louisiana had already sought out medical advice for respiratory distress, been diagnosed with bronchitis, and given a course of antibiotics. Of course, this regimen produced unsatisfying results and deep frustration with the experts; Ott’s message gave them another perspective and the hope of a logical explanation.
A Concerned Citizen chronicles the work of Riki Ott. It begins as a biopic chronicle of how Ott’s concept of engaged citizen science grew from her father’s legacy. Fred Ott was a noted environmentalist whose efforts were largely responsible for a ban on the use of DDT in Wisconsin. The film shows how his inspiration informed her choice of careers as a marine sediment toxicologist and, later, a small-scale, sustainably oriented commercial fisher-person and segues into her own struggles with Exxon Shipping’s massive environmental pollution of Prince William Sound in Alaska.
The film briefly explores the lingering nature of the environmental and social impacts of the Valdez Spill and shows how the spill changed social and economic life in the Sound and its impacts on the physical health of fishermen and their families. Following the course of litigation to determine Responsible Party liabilities for damage, the film touches briefly on the convoluted nature of Natural Resource Damage Assessments. Revisiting the case after many years of abatement efforts emphasizes the glaring fact that penalties, fines, and voluntary actions by Exxon were ultimately inadequate, in light of the extensive damage to the fishery and the scale of the economic distress caused by the spill. The timeline for these processes was so drawn-out and tortuous that many of the small-scale fishermen with standing in the case died, moved on, or had given up with no actual resolution, while the fishery has yet to recover its former productivity.
The film also documents the extent of the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill and a wide array of health impacts experienced by citizen informants along the coastal Gulf region. Ott directs considerable focus on the threat to citizen health caused by oil dispersants (Corexit 9500A and analogues) during the early months of the crisis. In brief interviews with exposure victims from Alabama and Plaquemines Parish (Louisiana)—close to the epicenter of the spill—we learn how governmental regulatory agencies on many levels and regional healthcare practitioners failed to protect the public or answer important questions about the extent of environmental health threats. So, was there actual collusion in an apparent program of disinformation, evasion and neglect? As viewers, we’re left to draw our own conclusions.
The second half of A Concerned Citizen explores Ott’s practice of blending engaged science and civic activism—particularly, her educational outreach to youth and young adults. She describes the political stonewalling—from the mainstream political, regulatory, and even institutional science sectors—that she encountered while working to secure justice from industrial polluters as an inflection point in her thinking. Ensuing scenes feature her outreach to youth focused on a curriculum for active, embodied political engagement that she has developed as an alternative to the current pedagogical norms, which offer more distanced, abstract approaches that are generally uncritical of the standard relationships among legislators, policy-makers, lobbyists, and the potentially dangerous industries seeking to evade or dilute regulations. She very accurately identifies a few of the primary sources of our lack of robust regulations as (1) “dirty money,” consisting of unattributed donations and lobbyist influence contaminating our political bloodstream, (2) the concept of corporate personhood as it has developed from the 1880s until its apotheosis in the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010 that (for simplicity’s sake) equated first Amendment rights to free speech with unfettered political contributions, and (3) the gaping lack of opportunities for committed, uncompromised, and highly informed young people to effectively engage with city councils, state governments and agency groups setting regulatory rules or writing environmental health policy.
Ott’s curriculum employs an interactive, color-coded (very lo-tech, it seems) timeline that “graphs” the varying fortunes of citizen versus corporate rights within our system, and really underscores some of the basic contradictions inherent in a participatory democracy based on a “free market” capitalist model. Using examples of the damage inflicted on all of us by corporate personhood and the idea that government by the people should logically and morally prioritize community health over corporate profits as core touchstones, Ott introduces students to a spectrum of citizen actions as counterweights to corporate control of the American political process. The tone and tenor of this section of the film calls to mind strategizing sessions of organizations like Indivisible, Move On, the Texas Organizing Project, or the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders.
Scenes of Ott using components of her curriculum in classrooms and young activists using her ideas in addressing their peers at rallies or talking to city governments are exhilarating and positively inspirational. As in Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, these moments provoked an “activating catharsis” that left me poised to take what I learned and apply these skills in real world situations begging for an infusion of uncompromised, intelligent democracy. I would like to see more footage devoted to details of how this curriculum works in practice, how parents and educators interested in using Dr. Ott’s ideas might go about institutionalizing this approach to civics within a school district, and how these ideas might be adapted for use with a range of age groups. The film provides directions to the project website—see Ultimate Civics (https://ultimatecivics.org)—but watching the action outcomes of educational process unfold even further would, perhaps, give viewers added incentive to access the site and, hopefully, attempt to implement the curriculum.
Riki Ott’s approach has obvious allies and parallels in the world of progressive/popular education—the (Howard) Zinn Education Project—particularly its materials on climate change mitigation and adaptation informed by climate justice—and any learning situation informed by the liberatory pedagogy of Paulo Freire or Myles Horton come immediately to mind. The do-it-yourself rationale behind her curriculum also parallels the energy and intentions of Public Labs Barn Raising workshops that train citizen scientists to take samples and otherwise monitor their local environment, interpret scientific data, and suss-out meaning (including back-stories) behind data-driven policy documents. Watching A Concerned Citizen left me feeling hopeful, more connected, less bound by the deeply cynical and paralyzing alienation that permeates our current national politics.
But with that feeling comes a word of caution. After screening this film in an educational/community organizing setting, it seems absolutely essential that some very practical answer be given to that existential question universally asked by every “concerned citizen” provoked to act by environmental injustice and corporate greed: so what can I do that will have a significant impact? The answer, of course, depends on the issues and social context faced by community members in specific situations, but it would ideally take the form of some more or less kinetic action rather than merely academic coursework or even less formal discussion of the vital need for real participatory democracy and direct action that never leaves the classroom.
The banner on the Ultimate Civics website declares its purpose as “inspiring youth to engage in activating democracy and emerge as game changers,” a spot-on synopsis of the rationale behind Dr. Ott’s pioneering work as a civics educator. This praxis-oriented formula best serves the needs of students and society in the crucible of a real-world laboratory: an actual climate justice campaign, a petition to more strictly regulate an industry proximate to neighborhoods and schools, a movement for expanding access to healthcare, leveraging greater equality in educational resourcing throughout a school district, city or state, and more. There are plenty of issues, environmental and otherwise, like these to work on (literally, almost anywhere), but many fewer educational milieus receptive to a curriculum that engages and actually empowers students to push against the inertia of time-entrenched politics and social culture. If conditions for a school district’s acceptance and implementation are conducive, Ultimate Civics could be a prime mover in dispelling apathy, powering student agency and creating the conditions for genuinely positive change. And watching A Concerned Citizen would certainly get the ball rolling in the right direction.