‘Hooked on Growth' to debut selections at ecofest

Local filmmaker and activist Dave Gardner is a native of Colorado Springs, but, as 18-year-olds are wont to do, left when he graduated high school. Gardner spent 20 years living in Dallas, then came back in ’93 because he was “sick of the rat race in a huge growing city. There were people shooting each other on the freeways and spending their life on the interstate stuck in traffic,” Gardner said. “I loved what my hometown looked like in ’93. But I arrived just in time for the growth boom of the ’90s. I watched the brand I selected change in front of my eyes and become a little more like Dallas with each passing year.”

Gardner said he had been struggling to get Colorado Springs to think more sustainably for 10 years when “I finally decided to marry my passion for sustainability with my professional skills as a filmmaker and produce a documentary.”

Selections from the film, called “Hooked on Growth,” will air at this Saturday’s first-annual Pikes Peak Eco-Festival and is the result of four years of Gardner examining the world’s “addiction to growth.”
“It even includes my personal story of my efforts to advance sustainable thinking in Colorado Springs,” Gardner said.  

Gardner began speaking publicly about what he saw as the pitfalls of growth in 2001, challenging county commissioners and city councilors to quit subsidizing new developments, making it artificially cheap to expand the city.

“Nobody listened and I was treated pretty rudely by City Council and commissioners,” Gardner said. “They don’t like my solution because they don’t see the problem. I ran for city council this past April on a platform that said a large reason our city is in the miserable state it is financially is because we’ve been counting on a growth bonanza that has never materialized.”

Gardner points to recent budget discussions by the Colorado Springs City Council as evidence.
“They’re gutting things like transit and the Parks Department, yet they’re not touching things like incentives for the USOC. And they’re reluctant to implement impact studies to assess the true costs that growth inflicts on our community,” he said. “This is all really great evidence that growth’s link to prosperity is so entrenched in our modern culture, we can’t even see the evidence that that’s no longer the case. It’s become like a religion. I call it the worship of growth everlasting.”

In his film, Gardner said he ties the Pikes Peak region to what’s happening on the global level, making the case that continued population and economic growth are not sustainable.

Gardner wants to be finished editing the film and release it by 2010.

“I’m not anticipating making a lot of money by licensing or selling it,” he said, “but DVDs will be available for a low price over the Internet. I’m hoping folks will hold house parties and there will be local community screenings, perhaps even film festivals if it happens to strike the right chord.”

Details
Screening and discussion of selections from “Hooked on Growth,”
part of the first annual Pikes Peak EcoFestival
Saturday from 1:30 to 3 p.m.,Rock Ledge Ranch Historic Site,
30th Street and Gateway Road