Wendell Berry, to be precise, which in itself isn't a bad thing. The writer reads from his poem "Santa Clara Valley" in the opening and closing moments of "The Unforeseen," and his cadences have a sonorous, apocalyptic ring: "What had been foreseen was the coming of the Stranger with Money/ All that had been before had been destroyed: the salt marsh/ of unremembered time, the remembered homestead, orchard and pasture."
The film gives us glimpses of Austin before the fall - 1972, when the state capital was still a sleepy college town - and introduces us to Gary Bradley, a real estate developer whose ups and downs wind snakelike through the story. He's the kind of man who looks at a patch of forest and says "Think of it as a blank canvas."
At the heart of both the issue and the city is Barton Creek Springs, which rises from a natural aquifer to feed the Barton Creek Pool, a swimming hole that generations of Austinites have enjoyed. (Executive producer Robert Redford reminisces about childhood weekends spent there learning to love nature; in a touching way the film, produced for The Sundance Channel, closes the loop.)
During the 1980s, Bradley blueprinted a new subdivision called the Circle C Ranch, which opponents charged would sap and pollute the springs. Pressed for cash, the developer sold control of Circle C to Freeport-McMoRan, an international mining corporation named by the EPA as the "#1 discharger of toxic contaminants in the US." Not surprisingly, a populist environmentalist movement rose up, defeating the builders in an all-night public session of the planning commission in 1992 and successfully supporting an ordinance preserving Barton Creek Springs.
Then the developers took off the gloves. Dunn interviews corporate lobbyist Dick Brown, who growls that "Austin is the last bastion of the counterculture in Texas." Just to let us know where he stands, Dunn films him painting little bombs to attach to his model aircraft.
