Plotting an escape route
Greg Greene goes back to Suburbia
BY Tara Irwin
Photography by Steve Payne
For the last few years filmmaker Greg Greene has been a man consumed. In 2004, he released the documentary The End of Suburbia, a wake-up call about peak oil—the idea that the global supply of oil will soon fail to meet the demand, necessitating tremendous changes in the way we live. Three years later Greene is about to release the sequel to that film, Escape from Suburbia, continuing the all-consuming work.
In the sequel, Greene delves into personal, individual reactions to peak oil. He turns his lens on a single mom in Toronto who left a secure career in business finance to dedicate herself to local sustainable initiatives, and a gay couple in New York who have devoted themselves to learning skills they will need to survive in an energy-constrained city. Higher-profile subjects include Republican congressman Roscoe Bartlett and Canadian climate-change activist Guy Dauncey.
“I’m fascinated by the triggers that motivate major life changes and what factors or situations ultimately awaken people to the crisis. It’s all based on psychology,” says Greene, who hopes the diverse cast of the sequel will demonstrate that peak oil is an issue all of us should be concerned about.
The original film, shot for around $20,000, surpassed all expectations, achieving wide distribution and grossing over $1 million. And the film came at the right time, with gas prices rising higher then ever before around the time of the film’s release. At the same time, prominent figures like Al Gore and Prince Charles were provoking interest in peak oil, bringing what had been a fringe topic into the public spotlight.
The documentary makers got the film into the hands of those who make decisions about Canadian cities when they distributed 400 copies of the film at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference last February. Since its release, Greene has also allowed interested groups to screen the film for free.
As a result, The End of Suburbia got many communities and individuals talking about the issues surrounding peak oil—from small concerns like the rising cost of a commute to a drastic shift in our economy and society away from fossil fuels.
Greene intends to add to this conversation with Escape from Suburbia, due out in April. As with the first film, there are no plans for a large-scale theatrical release, but the director hopes the non-profits and community groups who latched on to the first film will do the same with the sequel. The film will also be available directly from the website, www.escapefromsuburbia.com.
While some of us will want to plot an escape from suburbia after seeing Escape, Greene himself is staying put. He and his crew will start working on the third installment immediately following the sequel’s release, which will look at solutions. “We met so many incredible people working on the solutions to the problems we were exposing,” says Greene. “We’ll go to Iceland to explore their move toward geothermal and hydrogen energy, to Brazil to document everything happening with ethanol, looking at everything happening globally, all from a bioregional level.”
