The Global Citizen					August 31, 2000

THERE'S "SURVIVOR" AND THEN THERE'S REAL SURVIVAL
Linda Harrar is an independent filmmaker based in Boston, but she's usually traveling the world producing documentaries for NOVA and other PBS programs.  Through the lens of the camera, she sees a lot.  In the editing room she sees it over and over.  It sinks in deep.
So she had a strong reaction to the CBS "reality TV" series "Survivor."
"I have searing memories of true struggles to survive," she wrote in an email last week.  "In Mexico City we filmed people living in cardboard houses in a dump, recycling the garbage they slept on.  In Brazilian favelas we met women who had borne 20 children because they had no access to contraceptives.  Elderly grandparents in Kenya have stepped in to raise AIDS orphans.  In Haiti we filmed children with swollen bellies and orange hair, telltale signs of malnutrition." 
"I try to include hope in my programs, and include people who struggle against the odds and do succeed.  They are legion."  And, of course, these true survivors bear no resemblance to the folks who volunteered to go to the CBS-chosen island, where they would be on camera day and night, and live on fish and rats plus plentiful rice and clean water supplied by the network.  And there was a medical team just off-camera if someone became ill.  And a million-dollar prize for the person left on the island after a series of unpopularity contests eliminated all other contenders.
Linda points out, "Reality for half the world's population is surviving on less than $2 a day.  A billion people lack clean drinking water.  On Indonesian islands near where 'Survivor' was filmed, people eat rats regularly -- because they have to."
"Around the world, a quarter of a million children die each week of malnutrition and preventable diseases.  It doesn't cost much to take the first step in protecting a child's life --  $17 in vaccinations."  Linda figures it probably cost $500 to send the 'Survivor' helicopter to drop off a slice of pizza.  That would be enough for the vaccinations for 29 kids, and of course it's a pittance compared to the total cost of making that show, not to mention the million dollar prize at the end.
A million dollars.  Vaccinations for 59,000 children.
Was it the million dollars that made people watch?  Was it the suspense of not knowing how the story would come out?  Was it a sort of atavistic enjoyment of watching other folks get low-down and grubby?
Are the networks correct in their assessment that we would never watch a real cliff-hanger about the life challenges of truly endangered people?  Or are they wrong but unwilling to find that out, because watching actual reality TV wouldn't put us in the right mood for ads for junk food and shampoo?  What kind of world would it be, if we used the miraculous possibilities of television to be in touch with our real world, to get to know each other, instead of dulling our minds with plastic-fantastic fake dilemmas dreamed up by producers in L.A. and New York?
Or is it simply true that, as T.S. Eliot once said, "Humankind cannot bear much reality"?
Linda Harrar quotes James Grant, the former director of Unicef, who once asked a young Ethiopian girl, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"  Her reply: "Alive!"
Says Linda, "That's what I call a real Survivor." 
(Donella Meadows is an adjunct professor at Dartmouth College and director of the Sustainability Institute in Hartland, Vermont.)