Institute History
Description
The American Dream of owning a house with a white picket fence goes head to head with environmental sustainability in Laura Dunn's lyrical and beautifully crafted documentary The Unforeseen.
Dunn tracks the career of Gary Bradley, a west Texan farm boy who went to Austin and became one of the largest real estate developers in the state. In the '80s, Bradley had plans to transform miles of pristine hill country into large-scale subdivisions. But the development jeopardized Barton Springs, a watering hole treasured by locals, and served as a lightning rod for mobilizing environmental activism that flourished under Governor Ann Richards. When George W. Bush took the state's executive reins, however, development patterns changed, and the water quality at Barton Springs, as well as the surrounding landscape of Austin, was irreversibly transformed.
The Unforeseen is a meditation on the destruction of the natural world and the American Dream as it falls victim to the cannibalizing forces of unchecked development. It is an intricate tale of personal hopes, victories, and failures, and debates over land, economics, property rights, and the public good. In a time when development and property values have skyrocketed in nearly every major city, Dunn makes a plea for our development-oriented society to consider restructuring the relationship between our values and the environment that sustains us.