The Unforeseen

Teresa Caldeira is a professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley.

“We're gonna reshape the future, and it's gonna be fun to do, and we're gonna get rich.” Such is the ethos of an ambitious Texas land developer in Laura Dunn's heartbreakingly beautiful-and sometimes simply heartbreaking-exploration of an American Dream at war with the American landscape. When unchecked suburban sprawl threatened their beloved Barton Springs, the people of Austin came together and enacted laws to safeguard their environment, only to have their wishes undone by a heavily lobbied legislature that “burned Austin to the ground.” Executive produced by Robert Redford and Terrence Malick, The Unforeseen is a lyrical and visually inventive meditation on the destructive nature of “progress” and a call for constant vigilance against the “cancer model” of growth. A must for anyone interested in land use, clean water, deregulation, Willie Nelson, democracy, or our future on the planet.

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