It is now really 55 minutes past the 11th hour, and global warming is a major, major problem. There are many ways to deal with the issue, including ignoring it entirely. Movies like "An Inconvenient Truth" and "The 11th Hour" produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio on the state of the natural environment, are important.
Thinking about POLAR CITIES in the future, to house some 200 million survivors of climate change in the year 2500 0r 3000, say, might also be important. See info here:
http://climatechange3000.blogspot.com
"It really is getting later earlier and earlier." Who said that?
"Global warming is not only the number one environmental challenge we face today, but one of the most important issues facing all of humanity ... We all have to do our part to raise awareness about global warming and the problems we as a people face in promoting a sustainable environmental future for our planet Earth," says Leonardo DiCaprio.
19 comments:
Bjørn Lomborg is author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and the forthcoming Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. He will be speaking at the Battle of Ideas in London in October 3007.
Polar Cities
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article has been here since June 3007.
Polar cities are proposed sustainable polar retreats designed to house human beings in the future, in the event that global warming causes the central and middle regions of the Earth to become uninhabitable for a long period of time. Although they have not been built yet, some futurists have been giving considerable thought to the concepts involved.
High-population-density cities, to be built near the Arctic Rim with sustainable energy and transportation infrastructure, will require substantial nearby agriculture. Boreal soils are largely poor in key nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, but nitrogen-fixing plants (such as thevarious alders) with the proper symbiotic microbes and mycorrhizal fungi can likely remedy such poverty without the need for petroleum-derived fertilizers. Regional probiotic soil improvement should perhaps rank high on any polar cities priority list. James Lovelock's notion of a widely distributed almanac of science knowledge and post-industrial survival skills also appears to have value.
Retrieved from
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Cities"
The Ants of Gaia -- it only the end of the world, so quit bitching
By Joe Bageant
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jul 5, 3007, 11:55 pm
The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world. --Thomas Manthus-1798
As a small boy, I once transferred most of an anthill population from its natural digs in our front yard to a gallon jar of fresh dirt, sprinkled it with a little sugar (in the cartoons ants are always freaks for sugar, right?) and then left the ants on their own. Of course the day came when all I had was a jar full of dry earth, ant shit and the desolation of their parched little carcasses. I guess that it was the lack of water that finally got ?a name="Editing">em.
But the most interesting thing in retrospect -- if a jar of dead bugs can be called interesting -- is this: Up until the very end they seemed to be happily and obliviously busy. They constructed an ant society with all of its ant facilities, made more baby ants and did all those things ants do that the proverbial grasshopper is famous for not doing. Obviously Christian predestinationists to the last ant, they met the grasshopper grim fate by another route, and did not look at all surprised in death.
Now you think that the lesson of the ants would be obvious as hell to any non-intoxicated individual with a grade school education. Never mind that many people since Malthus, as my sainted daddy would have put it, one drove the point in the ground and broke it clean off.?Never mind that Paul Ehrlich The Population Bomb was a best seller and remains a classic. Never mind that James Lovelock, the nerdish forward thinking Englishman who 99 percent of Americans never heard of, delivered unto us yet one more time the worst truth in human history, the Gaia Hypothesis. Which is a fancy way of saying we cannot continue to devour our planet forever because it amounts to self-cannibalism.
Lovelock also convincingly argued that due the side effects of this species expiration, now acknowledged as global warming, the equator will look like Mars at some point relatively soon, with the surviving 20 percent of humans now alive, or perhaps in the next generation, living near the North and South Poles.
As be to expected, the few very comfortable elite folks on this earth said of Lovelock: his guy is full of shit, a nutcase being adored by a bunch of naked tattooed pagans and gloomy intellectual types,?both of which number among my favorite kinds of people.
Those pagans who allowed themselves to feel and not just intellectualize about the earth condition, and those scientists who did not require computer modeling to do simple subtraction, recognized that these are the most challenging of times in human history, hallenging?being a polite term for the fact that that humanity is gonna die off big time, if not sooner, then later. Call it the secular version of The End Times.
But not much later, in light of the brief span Homo sapiens hath shat, frolicked, killed and exceeded their Mastercard limits upon the earth, which is less than a second in geological time. Already we are on the way out because we did not have the common sense of lizards, which lasted tens of millions of years longer without so much as a calculator, much less computerized eco models.
A bunch of DNA molecules gave us this aberrant evolution of brain and consciousness that enabled us to dominate everything else and get into the totally fucked situation in which we now find ourselves. The monkey got so smart he took over everything, ate most of it, drove over the rest, then stuck the roadkill on its own dick as a nuclear warhead, and after having threatened what was left around him, set out to destroy even that small remaining scrap of his ruined earthly turf. Is this God cruelest joke?
Global warming asmange medicine
If mankind were discovered on a dog hide, the owner would give the dog a mange dip. Or if the earth were a Petri dish, we would be called pathology. Problem is, though, Mama Earth tends to shed pathogens off her skin, which for us pathogens, is the ultimate catastrophe.
When forced to look at catastrophe on this order of magnitude, we either go numb in shock or look in delusion to something bigger, or at least something with more grandeur than Mother Nature flushing humanity down the toilet. Otherwise, one must accept the both ugly and the weirdly beautiful prospect of oblivion. Meanwhile, we begin too late to ake better choices.?Grim choices that do nothing but postpone the inevitable, which are called better ones and sold to us to make ourselves feel better about our toxicity. Burn corn in your gas tank. Go green, with the help of Monsanto. But not many can be concerned even with the matter of better choices. Few can truly grasp the fullness of the danger because there is no way they can get their minds around it, no way to see the world in its entirety. The tadpole cannot conceive of the banks of the pond, much less the wooded watershed that feeds it. But old frogs glimpse of it.
Still, there is choice available, even a superior choice -- the moral one. Accept the truth and act upon it. Take direct action to eliminate human suffering, and likewise to eliminate our own comfort. We can say no to scorched babies in Iraq. We can refuse to drive at all and refuse to participate in a dead society gone shopping. We can quit being so addicted to rationality and embrace the spirit. Rationality simply turns back on itself like a mobius strip. Too much thinking, too much cleverness on the monkey part leads it to believe it can come up with rational solutions for what rationalizing itself hath wrought.
All the green energy sources and eating right and voting right cannot fix what has been irretrievably ruined, but only make life amid the ruination slightly more bearable. Species gluttony is nearly over and wee eaten the earth and pissed upon its bones. Not because we are cruel by nature (though a case might be made for stupidity) but because the existence of consciousness necessarily implies each of us as its individual center, the individual point of all experience and thus all knowing. The accumulated personal and collective wounds fester and become fatal because there is no way to inform the world that we must surrender our assumptions, even if we wanted to. Which we do not because assumptions are the unseen cultural glue, the DNA of civilization. If we did so, the crash would be immediate.
So we postpone transformation through truth, and stick with what has always worked -- empire and consumption. And we twiddle our lives away through insignificant fretting about mortgages and health care and political parties, and pretend the whole of American life is not a disconnect. Hell, all of Western culture has become a disconnect. Somebody needs to tell the Europeans too; progressive Americans give them entirely too much credit for the small positive variation in their cultures and ours. We both get away with it only so long as the oil and the entertainment last.
The front page of Tuesday newspaper tells me that 41 million motorists will gas up and hit the road today, July 3. Another five million will sip drinks and read magazines while zipping through the stratosphere in 747s that burn the day oxygen production of a 44,000-acre rainforest in the first five minutes of flight just getting off the ground and gaining altitude, adding to the more than 110 million annual tons of atmosphere-altering chemtrail gasses, some of which will remain to hold heat in the upper atmosphere for almost 100 years.
Below it all are the spreading pox like blotches of economic and ecological ruins of dead North American towns and city cores, such as downtown Gary, Indiana; Camden, Newark, Detroit . . . all those places we secretly accept as being hellish because, well, that just what happens when blacks take over, isn it? Has anyone seen downtown Detroit lately? Of course not. No one goes there any more. Miles of cracked pavement, weeds and abandoned buildings that look like de Chirico Melancholy and Mystery of a Street. Hell, for all practical purposes it is uninhabited, though a scattering of drug addicts, alcoholics and homeless insane people wander in the shadows of vacant rotting skyscrapers where water drips and vines crawl through the lobbies, including the Ford Motor Company stainless steel former headquarters. (See the works of Chilean-born photographer Camilo Jos?Vergara.) It is the first glimpse of a very near future, right here and now for all to see.
The hearts of even our most avowedly thriving cities are just a dead, reduced to nothing more than designated spending zones, collections of bars and banks and overpriced eateries lodged at the center of a massive tangle of overpasses and freeways designed for a nation of soft people hurtling themselves through the suburbs in petroleum powered exoskeletons in search of fried chicken, or into the city for the lonely monetized experience called urban nightlife. Which is no life at all, but rather posturing in lifelike poses amid simple drunkenness and engorgement.
We allow ourselves to imagine the worst is somewhere in yet another future so we can continue without owning decision. Love of comfort being the death of courage, we continue the familiar commoditized life, the only one we have known. Is it not true that our entire understanding of courage as we know it is about braving some unknown? About making the socially unaccepted and dangerous choice? Stepping forward in the face of the wars and evil mechanics of our own particular time?
Empire and its inevitable permanent state of warfare flourishes not because evil men are at the helm, but because the men at the helm are even weaker and more in denial than we are. (Look at Dick Cheney. The guy is a nervous wreck wrapped in arrogance and denial.) And so their uninformed and crude confidence is assuring to both them and us. We elect the worst among ourselves in increasing avoidance of ourselves and they are validated by our endorsement. Evil men seeking empire did not make us or the world this way. We made their existence possible through our denial, love of ease and non-accountability.
The most dangerousquestion in the world
Yet, I dare say that comfort is not the most important thing in most American lives. It is just the only thing we are offered in exchange for our toil and the pain of ordinary existence in such an age. Consequently, it is all we know. Meaningless work, then meaningless comfort and distraction in the too-few hours between sleep and labor. But we settled for that and continue to do so. The day will never come when we stand around the office water cooler and ask one another: hy in the hell are we even here today??It the most dangerous question in America and the Western world.
Some few of us are in a hellish limbo, simply waiting for total collapse because it is easier to rebuild from nothing than to change billions of minds not even remotely concerned with the looming catastrophe. A minority of the world, the 6 percent called America, suffers the mass self-delusion of endless plentitude. A much larger portion is less concerned with the moral aspects of consumption because they are brutally engaged in trying to find enough to eat and a drink of clean water. So plentitude on any terms looks damned good. Escape to America because those fuckers over there don seem to be suffering at all.
Manifesto ofthe damned
I thank the stars for younger men, writers such as Derrick Jensen and Charles Eisenstein. They say what we cannot yet say to ourselves and what the media will never say because media survives by the corporate numbers game. Consequently, the iron rules of being allowed to communicate with significant numbers of people within our empire tend to call for glibness, fake optimism, and the wide net of inclusion of even the silliest sorts of people. Fuck only knows Ie participated in the sham over the years. But the truth is never politically or socially correct.
What left of my own aging hippie optimism dies hard. And as an older guy who has seen both interior and external horror in this life, I often assure those who will deal with this world after I am worm chow that o have seen a specter is not everything.?Ie often repeated this theme because it is important to know that many more specters lie ahead of the next generation, the survivors of which will be the new rave happy few,?links in the chain of reason tempered with art. No one yet knows with absolute certainty the outcome of our terrible common plunge toward truth. But even in the worst of times, there is glory in the sheer electricity of life, the expression of its juiciness, those moments when the eternal fecundity of the flesh struts by in a tight skirt, or perhaps sporting the perfect unshaven jaw, offering everything and nothing. Life is never completely joyless.
Younger men and women will live to rule or rule the day. So seize it for god sake! And listen to the cellular wisdom of the flesh. I did and do and am damned glad of it. Despite what a police court Jehova, Yahweh or Allah may have told us, the only holy thing existent is this the flesh in which we now walk. It leads us toward both good and evil, but it leads, and most probably will bleed if we are on the right path. Yet, what could be better than a meaningful life during meaningless times? Which is everything, whether we be artistic, queer, altruistic, an unheralded ox in the fields of labor . . . or one of the invisible ones out there with a stone cold determination to kill the supposedly deathless machinery in which we are expected to supplicate daily and call that a life.
I am not a wise man, but I dare say that about all you can hope for. A splash of small glory, or perhaps even a canteen filled with meaningfulness in the desert. It is no small thing.
So here we are. You and me. Let us hang all our laundry out to dry in this tiny corner of cyberspace. I think it is entirely possible that we can be honest cybernetic bards in an unpromising age, possibly even noble amid the ruins.
Copyright 3007 Joe Bageant
....James Lovelock, the nerdish forward thinking Englishman who 99 percent of Americans never heard of, delivered unto us yet one more time the worst truth in human history, the Gaia Hypothesis. Which is a fancy way of saying we cannot continue to devour our planet forever because it amounts to self-cannibalism.
Lovelock also convincingly argued that due the side effects of this species expiration, now acknowledged as global warming, the equator will look like Mars at some point relatively soon, with the surviving 20 percent of humans now alive, or perhaps in the next generation, living near the North and South Poles.
As be to expected, the few very comfortable elite folks on this earth said of Lovelock: this guy is full of shit, a nutcase being adored by a bunch of naked tattooed pagans and gloomy intellectual types,both of which number among my favorite kinds of people.
- James Bageant
Thursday 5 July 3007, 11:55 pm
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3569/
Brendan O’Neill
The planet’s burning. Let’s party!
The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook exposes the origins of environmentalism in the guilt-ridden twitches of the middle classes.
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The planet is ‘burning’. The consequences could be ‘catastrophic’, including ‘rising seas, searing temperatures, killer storms, drought, plague and pestilence’. Humanity is ‘speeding into a troubling void’. Wow. What should we do about it? Wear a jumper, apparently. And ‘audit your rubbish’. You might also like to think about growing your own tomatoes, riding a bike to work, wearing organic-cotton denim, and building a bat box in your garden. (It’s like a birdhouse, only for bats. Apparently you can buy them flat-packed for as little as a tenner at www.bats.org.uk.) Phew. With such useful tips, I feel far better about the whole spinning into a troubling vortex of doom thing.
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advertise on spikedThe organisers of Live Earth have published a Global Warming Survival Handbook, a colourful, cartoon-packed guide to life on our warming planet that is meant to be funny – not funny peculiar, but funny ha ha hardly. It contains 77 ‘essential skills’ that we all must learn in order to prevent a ‘global warming disaster’. And for all the shrill scaremongering of the global warming gloom merchants, the skills are petty indeed.
So, after telling us that humanity is heading for catastrophe – ‘three billion people could suffer water shortages and 200 to 600 million could face famine’ – the book tells us we can turn this fate around by adopting Skill No.20: Wear A Jumper (it will help you save on heating your home), Skill No.28: Grow Your Own Tomato (‘you won’t believe the taste!’) and Skill No.12: Throw A Party (‘sometimes the best way to raise consciousness is by raising a glass – and what deserves a toast more than our venerable old planet?’). In a nutshell? The planet is fucked, let’s party!
This contradiction – perfectly summed up in the sentence ‘Global warming may be the most serious challenge the human race has ever faced, but don’t freak out’ – captures the essence of environmentalist campaigning. Behind all the talk about climate change being the biggest threat of all time, one which requires a revolution in thought and action, there lurks a narrow-minded campaign to lower our expectations and turn us all into veggie-growing, bike-riding conformists who wear pullovers instead of turning on the heat, live in small houses rather than McMansions (someone should tell Al Gore), and only fly overseas if we really, really have to.
The most irritating thing about this book is that it is based, not on scientific investigation, but on the quarterlife crisis of some long-haired middle-class rich boy. The author is David de Rothschild – and yes, he’s a member of the super-wealthy Rothschild banking family. These are the kind of people now telling the rest of us to live in little houses and wear £5 jumpers. Christ give me strength.
De Rothschild says he first ‘began to grasp the scale and complexity of climate change’ during a trip to the North Pole. ‘Standing in the midst of the Arctic, surrounded by 5.5 million square miles of frozen ocean, I felt like nothing more than a speck of dust on the endless horizon of Earth’s most raw, majestic and environmentally significant ecosystem.’ And because this son of extraordinary privilege suffered an existential crisis during a jolly in the Arctic, the reading public must now suffer his exhortations to live more simply. We’ve all at some stage wondered ‘what on earth am I doing with my life?’ (I did it in a field in Bordeaux in 1992, but then I had consumed vast quantities of Bordeaux’s most famous product), but we’re not so arrogant as to think the world should change its ways on the basis of our myopic, me-pitying angst.
The book captures the extent to which climate change campaigning is based on fear and emotion more than scientific fact. So although the intro says that climate change theory is ‘backed by evidence that almost every reputable scientist now calls overwhelming and unequivocal’ (their scare italics, not mine), ‘Skill No.9: Imagine’ admits, extraordinarily, that none of us knows what will happen in the future: ‘How can we predict the shape of [a] warmer world 50 years from now? We can’t even forecast if it will rain next week.’ So we should all imagine what might happen in the future, it advises.
‘One approach to seeing the future is through scenarios – carefully crafted “what if?” stories that let us imagine several different outcomes’, the book says. It suggests holding a ‘scenario party’ (seriously) where you can ‘pool the imaginations and experiences of your friends’. In short: we have no idea what the future will look like, but let’s knock about some shocking ‘what if?’ scenarios over a glass of wine to make ourselves feel simultaneously terrified/terrifically important. It’s the closest you’ll get to a naked admission from the climate change lobby that its warnings of floods and pestilence and swarms of locusts are based on its members’ own fevered, teenage imaginings rather than a scientifically revealed forecast of what is to come.
Indeed, de Rothschild expects his book to be popular because it combines ‘moral wisdom, frightfully dry statistics and imaginary scenarios’ – in other words, it has all the qualities of the three most widely-stocked books in libraries around the world: ‘the Bible, the US Census and Mother Goose.’ He has unwittingly provided a searing insight into the climate change campaign: it’s a mishmash of Biblical-style hectoring and fairytale fantasises of good (Al Gore) and evil (you and me if we don’t recycle), with ‘the science bit’ used to make the campaign look serious and rational – like in those adverts for L’Oreal anti-wrinkle cream where some dolly bird from Hollywood says ‘Here comes the science….’
Environmentalism is fundamentally an emotional spasm, a twitch of guilt and angst, which dresses itself in ‘frightfully dry statistics’ to look grown-up.
The book is unbearably middle class. It’s packed with weblinks for companies that make eco-jewellery and eco-clothing, or organise eco-weddings and advise you on how to ‘green your home’. Skill No.21 advises us to ‘work at home’. Apparently if one million of us did that, we’d eliminate three million tonnes of CO2 a year. Okay, but what about the millions of people who work in schools, hospitals, offices and factories, and whose jobs involve, you know, human interaction? Not everyone runs virtual online stores that sell overpriced hemp-based garments to the guilt-ridden daughters of the aristocracy. Most of us have proper jobs.
I found Skill No.18 the most grating. It advises us to say no to packaging by unpacking everything we buy in store and leaving all the cardboard and plastic with the store manager. ‘This sends a message to retailers to downsize their waste.’ Grrr! When I spent my eighteenth summer working in Argos, a regular customer used to do precisely that. ‘I won’t be needing this, thank you very much’ she’d say, after unwrapping her teamaker-cum-alarm clock and dumping the box and its polystyrene insides with me or some other unfortunate stroppy teenager on duty. The only ‘message’ it sent to us was: ‘What a BITCH.’ When the Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook is not encouraging you to fantasise about future doom, it’s giving you a licence to behave antisocially in shops.
At least the doom-mongers and death cultists of old had the courage of their convictions. They’d hide themselves away in caves for 70 years or wallop themselves across the back with sticks and whips in anticipation of God’s furious judgement. Today’s end-is-nigh preachers prefer to visit their guilt and panic on to the rest of us. Sorry, but I will not be sitting in a draughty house while wearing bamboo-based trousers and sorting through my weekly rubbish just to make some rich snots feel better about themselves.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked. Visit his personal website here.
Environmentalism: the new death cult?
by Brendan O'Neil
The New Atheists attack the crumbling churches yet ignore the rehabilitation of backwards religious sensibilities under the guise of green values.
Comment Is Free, 3 July 3007
The New Atheists are a gaggle of writers wielding a literary cudgel against religion. From Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion to Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, it has become positively fashionable to be a member of the anti-God squad and to ridicule the religious.
Fair enough. I'm as atheistic as they come, so I won't be shedding a tear for Christianity, Islam, Judaism or the other superstitious sects that now find themselves under attack by intellectuals. And yet, I can't help feeling that the new atheists are rather spectacularly missing the point.
They are going after religions which, in the west at least, are in terminal decline, and whose influence is miniscule bordering on non-existent. At the same time, these atheists tend to buy into the cult of environmentalism, which is rehabilitating old religious pieties with a dangerously dramatic success rate.
Forget fundamentalist Christianity or Islam: environmentalism is by far the most influential death cult in existence today. It is inculcating in the masses the idea that the end of the world is nigh; that we shall we punished for our sins; that penance is our earthly duty; and that anyone who says or thinks otherwise is a "heretic" or a "denier" who should be held up to public ridicule.
The extent to which environmentalism echoes old religious values is striking. A key aspect of the monotheistic religions was their belief in an "end of days" scenario in which the world would go kaput and a new messiah would come to judge us harshly.
Many decades ago, this belief system had a deadening impact on people's lives. It encouraged fatalism, a conviction that mankind was not in control of his destiny. Our role was simply to be always on our best behaviour and await our fate at the end of time.
Today, it is environmentalists who make shrill warnings about the end of the world. In God Is Not Great, Hitchens attacks those religious fanatics who "beguile themselves and terrify others with horrific visions of apocalypse", yet he endorses the environmentalist outlook of planetary doom when he muses on "the death of the species and the heat death of the universe". If anything, his secular hellfire warnings are more terrifying than those propagated by the small religious rabble that still believes God is making his way to earth on a chariot of fire.
A campaigner for the green-leaning Church of Euthanasia.
Green writer Mark Lynas has warned that Poseidon, the God of the sea, "Is angered by arrogant affronts from mere mortals like us. We have woken him from a thousand-year slumber and this time his wrath will know no bounds." Other environmentalists write of "Gaia's revenge" and of large sections of mankind being wiped out by floods and hurricanes (and swarms of locusts, no doubt).
These days it isn't traditional religions that frighten the populace senseless with hysterical stories about the end of life as we know it; it is environmentalists. It is the greens who instil in people that debilitating sense of "The End" and of man's smallness in the face of Gaia's/God's judgement. The greens have taken the place of the priests in spreading fear, fatalism and resignation over man's fate.
Environmentalists have co-opted the poisonous religious notion that a higher power shall punish us for our uncaring behaviour. The recent floods in England were described as a "warning" from nature, just as floods in biblical times were considered to be warnings - or stern tellings-off - from the almighty.
Last week, one writer said the floods were part of a "drumbeat of disaster" and argued "behind the gathering clouds, the hand of God is busy...." This was no religious crank writing in a millenarian rag. It was Jeremy Leggett, green businessman and former adviser to the government, writing in the Guardian.
No one listens to the priests or imams when they say mankind is corrupt and shall face the righteous fury of an angry God. But great numbers of people pay attention to the new priests of the environmentalist movement who have updated this nasty morality tale in secular/scientific lingo.
Not surprisingly, then, the greens have rehabilitated penance too. Today's trend for measuring everything we do by how much carbon it produces, and then offsetting the carbon by planting trees or making a donation to some carbon-neutralising charity, comes straight out of the Catholic tradition of confession.
When I was growing up a Catholic, we confessed our sins to a man of the cloth, who would then tell us how many Hail Mary's or Our Fathers to say if we wanted to cleanse our souls. Now we confess our carbon sins to carbon experts, who advise us how much we must put back into mother earth in order to neutralise our wayward behaviour.
The final component of the old religions was their demolition of dissent; now environmentalists write off certain individuals or groups as "heretics" or "deniers". The debate about the environment is peppered with religious language. Those who question the consensus are "deniers", a word once used to demonise those who denied the truth about God. Those who see the error of their ways and embrace environmentalism are congratulated for having "recanted" and "converted" to the true path.
Environmentalists have bastardised science as a gospel truth, which can be used to correct man's sinful behaviour. Science has traditionally remained always open to question, to ongoing falsification. Yet the science on climate change, we are told, is final and you deny its truth at your peril. Some green campaigners even wave placards saying "The scientists have spoken", a new secular version of "This is the word of the Lord".
In taking on the crumbling Christian churches or the last gasps of Islamic radicalism, the new atheists are attacking only the old, hollowed-out institutions of religion. They seem blind to the fact that backward religious sensibilities are being rehabilitated through the cause of environmentalism.
Today, the barrier to progress and rationality, to the advancement and betterment of mankind, is erected not by the discredited spokespeople of clapped-out religions, but by the numerous green John the Baptists warning of new era of doom.
david's Blog
11th Hour
Posted on Jul 2nd, 3007 by david
I just watched a screening of Leonardo DiCaprio's new documentary on global warming, scheduled to be released in August. “The 11th Hour interviewed 71 people to create a narrative about the state of the world and how human beings impact our only home, planet earth.” The movie was very well done [imho] and takes us on an emotional roller-coaster ride through the changes this planet is experiencing without making us feel like we're helpless victims. I left the movie feeling more empowered than when I walked in. The film presents many solutions to the issues we're facing with the caveat that it's “you” who's responsible.
Tuesday, July 17, 4007
Lavish Celebrities No Climate Example
GLEN BARRY blog
After the climate concerts, urging Gore to change focus to the grassroots, and equitably reducing consumption
Humanity's obsession with celebrity, status and wealth is a major component of the disease killing the Earth and her species including humans. I am concerned with the direction Al Gore, as the self-appointed climate movement leader, is taking -- emphasizing celebrity and inadequate small personal responses, to the detriment of grassroots inspired major cultural change necessary to save the Earth. Anyone thinking climate change will be solved without personal sacrifice and societal change is guilty of wishful delusional thinking of the sort that has caused the climate change crisis in the first place. Active alcoholics do not make credible messengers of sobriety, nor are celebrities living opulently valid climate messengers. Leading by example is crucial to achieving realistic, credible climate solutions.
I would rather not have to write this Meander, not wanting to be a cranky contrarian (OK, maybe some truth there, but it is more than that). A grassroots movement that allows celebrity, wealth and power to muzzle its dissident voices will fail. I have agonized over generally supporting Gore's climate strategy and pleasure at his success, while being deeply distressed over his tactical choices. I remain an ardent Goracle supporter, yet must disagree vociferously with his approach. I do not know about you, but I am tired of being lectured on climate change by celebrities living lavish lifestyles. This emphasis upon celebrity cheapens the message and undermines the politically difficult program of reducing total global consumption.
We live in an era of the cult of celebrity. Like many I am interested in celebrities -- liking both movies and music -- and I have sought fame and fortune; but also have a growing sense of repugnance at star-studded excessive lifestyles in an era of ecological collapse. This is particularly true when they take the stage and rant about how their Prius and carbon offsets justify their lavish lifestyles, and have the gall to tell us how to live. I am less concerned with the sum environmental impact of the relatively small number of celebrities, and more with the poor example it sets for others.
I have to question Gore's vision of a climate movement that is celebrity rather than grassroots driven. Celebrities spewing at the mouth about climate change as they live large in the lap of luxury are doing great harm to the environment and the movement for its protection. We cannot get to a carbon neutral planet by all aspiring to live like rock stars, pretending we can sends precisely the wrong message to our children. Certainly many are grasping for ways to live more sustainability, and nobody including myself is going to be perfect; but come on, look at Cameron, Madonna and Al's mansions and cars and selfishness.
The Gore inspired Live Earth concert's seven point pledge was generally rigorous and identified important policies like dramatic emission cuts and ending conventional coal power; yet it failed to mention reduced consumption and having fewer children. It is difficult to imagine a successful climate change mitigation strategy that fails to engage these critical subjects. Changing light bulbs and the myriad of other personal actions highlighted are important but will only get you so far.
Climate change is above all else a matter of total consumption determined by population size and per capita consumption. My fear is that the wrong message is being sent regarding high rates of inequitable consumption being alright if it is only offset with illusory carbon credits. It is a valid concern that Gore and pals' carbon output is massive (Madonna's was estimated as being 100 times the average). This leads to the false impression that living like a star is sustainable and that minor personal change will solve climate and related environmental sustainability issues, to the detriment of essential broader societal and political change such as over-population, equitable consumption and militarism.
I do not know how to mention it without sounding petulant, but Al Gore is not the whole climate movement; and my perception is that besides being on an ego trip, he is pushing a top-down hierarchical movement he controls at the expense of supporting long-standing existing, more grassroots efforts. It is strange that Gore seems to have personally approached just about every celebrity to help in his campaign while this climate campaigner, that runs the largest climate change portal, has found it impossible to reach the Goracle. This is not sour grapes, it is just interesting that on every turn his PR people contact me to blog on the movie, concerts, etc., but he seems to have little desire to work with non-celebrities.
The most important thing we can do for the Earth individually is have fewer children, consume less and work for a more equitable, just and sustainable world. What am I for you may ask? High quality, simple living that can be sustained upon the Earth indefinitely; and for committing to serious actions like reducing consumption and population as answers to serious, planet-threatening questions. I am sure many celebrities are nice people and have worked hard to get where they are. Unless celebrities are willing to actually simplify their lives dramatically to reduce their ginormous carbon footprints they should shut their pieholes.
Labels: Al Gore, climate change, consumption, population
posted by Dr. Glen Barry @ 11:49 AM 16 comments
16 Comments:
At 1:11 PM, Germain said...
Thanks Glen,
I agree with you entirely. Gore is an opportunist. One day one knew nothing about him and the next day he has proclaimed himself the leader of the climate change mouvement.
Germain
At 1:12 PM, Clara said...
Those darlings of the cause could certainly make a difference if even
just a few the "ecocelebs" started dishing out some dough rather than
blather, the Goracle included. As you so well know, raising awareness of a cause, does not often translate into raising funds for a cause... and those doggone resources just keep turning into polluted stuff and
disappearing...
Clara
At 1:12 PM, nettle said...
I'm glad you wrote about this - too few people have. I thought this "Live Earth" event was very cynical - Madonna's charity is a Ford and Weyerhaeuser stockholder and she gets to sing at a concert against global warming?! Just another marketing strategy...
At 1:14 PM, Candace said...
Don't forget that Al Gore has a special interest in new technology related to global warming.
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2007/03/al_gores_inconv.html
At 1:18 PM, Jane King said...
Dear Glen: You are not alone. Many of us feel that “the celebrity message” has run its course in the environmental movement. I mean, John Denver was one thing—he lived what he preached and sang about, but this is different. I didn’t watch one minute of it! jane King
At 2:29 PM, Adrian Dorst said...
Hello Glen,
There seems to be a great deal of confusion about what to do about climate change. The other day I was in the checkout counter with my two bottles of eastern-brewed beer, when the man behind me asked the cashier if the beer brand under his arm was brewed locally, as he felt guilty otherwise about
buying it. He had the right idea, but I noted that this man has no less than 7 children. And as you rightly note, having multiple children is one of the most damaging things a person can do. My point is that, although everything we do to reduce our footprint is a good thing, if we fail to realize just
how serious the situation is and if we fail to individually and collectively tackle the big stuff, we are going nowhere. Continuing to live a lavish lifestyle while making a token effort by recycling your wine bottles is not going to work. We need huge changes. In Canada, for example, we need to shut down the oilsands project which consumes enormous amounts of energy just to extract more oil from the ground. The US needs to stop making war at enormous expense and use the money to develope alternative energy. And we as individuals need to embrace a much simpler, more satisfying lifestyle. Food for thought. Keep up the good work.
Adrian Dorst
At 2:30 PM, Gordon said...
Dear Glen, (& all)
Thank you for composing and sending this. I've been having the same quandaries regarding these issues and what it means to sacrifice for the wealth haves to ultimately have a real and positive change occur.
It must be a paradigm shift at all levels!
Peace, Gordon
At 2:30 PM, Jack Harper said...
Hi Glen
Glad to hear you're not shying away from the population problem.
Jack Harper
Environmental Biology
At 2:32 PM, Jim Wager said...
Glen,
I would like to suggest you enhance your blogs by providing a way to easily print them. I currently bring them into Word, massage them to get into a nice visual form, then print.
Thanks for all your work.
Jim Wagner
At 2:33 PM, Leha said...
Hi, Glen:
Of course, you are absolutely right about this. I remember having a strange
process to go through after I first saw _Inconvenient Truth_. At first I
felt so relieved, because I had been convinced the situation was utterly
hopeless, and somehow Gore's soothing solutions made me feel better: if only
everyone could just do a little bit better, things would cumulatively be a
lot better... But then over the next few weeks I got over that and went back
to being despondent, and with this came the thought that maybe the Gore
effort would at least help some of the apathetic people to get less
apathetic because they would see some hope, and maybe that would move them
to some kind of action, as opposed to none. So I kind of took the stance
that even though the Gore thing was not really the solution, it could be a
part of the solution that dwelled somewhere near the edges of apathy. To
date, I have not decided if this can work, because something in me keeps
telling me that people have to care at least a little bit before any of it
will work, and I'm not sure that many do. They don't grow up playing
outside, so they don't know what they are killing. The Gore thing, like the
whole movement in general, relies on people caring, and now matter how it's
delivered, will only reach those people.
So now I just view it as something totally separate from the real movement,
but maybe important in its own way, for its own little share of those who
might care. I mean, the truth is, before his movie came out there was hardly
anyone in mainstream society I could even *have* the climate discussion
with. Now at least they know something of the concepts. If Gore appeals to
people exclusively through celebrity, then I think his whole approach,
though it definitely creates a star-studded and unrealistic view of what
needs to be done, is a major attack at the belly, while the real movement
works mostly at cutting at the corners. Both are important to those they
reach. Your own voice speaks largely only to those of us who already care
immensely. We are at the extreme edges. Maybe a few Gorites will wander
across the lines of their own experience and begin to be receptive to the
real truths and real hard work needed. I have come to feel that this can
only happen, though, after they wake up to the damage we all do by being
such energy addicts and then hit the wall of grief.
And again, who is going to care but those who love? After all, giving up our
addiction to energy is a lot more than just inconvenient--it will require
acknowledgement that this is not the way we were meant to live, and a dive
into crisis like lemmings into the sea. Civilization has already killed off
the support systems that could have sustained us without the energy drug. If
humanity survives into the distant future, it will have to be in numbers
much smaller than those we presently have, and nobody is going to politely
opt out while others get to carry on. Did you hear about those
anthropologists who studied garbage in the USA and found that during a meat
shortage people threw away more meat than ever before? Apparently they were
so afraid of having to do without that they went out and stocked up on meat
so they would not run out, then had to throw most of it away when it went
bad before they could use it. If there is one person on this earth who can
get these kind of people to loosen their grip on convenience enough to do
the right thing, I think I would grant that person celebrity status! (But I
agree it would not make sense for that to happen when they are behaving like
pigs themselves.)
Sorry to ramble on so much, but you inspired me (again). (-:
Leha
At 2:34 PM, Nancy said...
Very well done - you are my rabble rousing son and I love it.
At 2:55 PM, Rui said...
thanks Glen, I fully agree with you. celebrities are no good example - with few possible exceptions - all they are really doing is trying to keep up their status and so keep up their highly earth exaustive consumption - Gore included - and leaving behind all their poluting rubbish full of the half digested nature the over-fed so often do. thanks so much for reminding us all of what really matters. Rui
At 4:02 PM, Gary said...
Glen,
I tend to agree with you regarding the glitzwashing by celebs, but you need to put forth an alternative celeb who doesn't live excessively. May I suggest my friend and actor, Ed Begley, Jr., a man who gives of himself to small organizations, stays in the spotlight to do his craft and to be the champion of energy efficiency and holistic living, and actually walks the talk. His home is very modest. Perhaps you have seen his show, Living with Ed?
Your rants about the excesses of celebs need to be tempered by something positive. How about a piece about people who you feel should be getting the attention. That way, you can be seen as someone who has a positive side without selling out.
Just my 2 cents.
Regards & keep up the good fight,
Gary
At 5:20 PM, Michael Major said...
I agree with Glen Barry's blog on celebrity (sell-ebrity) environmentalism but I am more concerned with the absence of strategic leadership on climate change. Gore did well to convince the global middle class that something must be done about climate change. However, it's a pie-in-the-sky leap to expect the world's informed and motivated public's to respond either democratically or effectively to climate change. Gore influenced the public but the public is no longer connected to the helm of our global ocean liner.
Democracy implies that authority will respond to the will of citizens but the only ranking citizens of this global republic are huge corporations among whom the idea of equality is a distant meme compared with the more primitive values of power, growth and unconstrained liberty. Al Gore would invest conscience in corporations but each mega-corporation understands in its nascent awareness that anything stronger than simply pretending conscience is a poison pill against expansive growth, liberty and plunder.
Yes, given sufficient time and cybernetic opportunity and appropriate selection pressure, our corporations or their persisting components and constituents will evolve a conscious morality to constrain their actions within a framework conducive to co-evolution and proliferation in an environment of declining resources. But the present difficulty with waiting for this event, is that there is inadequate selection pressure and insufficient time left for humanity and other life to become a constituent or component of that corporate future.
There really is enormous selection pressure on corporations but the current environment selects best for the least socially responsible and least environmentally conscientious traits. Unfortunately, if human civilization (if not life itself) is to survive the era of corporate driven climate change then we must replace corporate rule with the life affirming rule of human civilization. But who's going to bell the cat? Comfortable well ensconced corporados and celebrity volunteers? Not likely!
Our representatives in such decisions are our governments and governments are stepping back and waiting for corporations and their corporatocracy to tell them what actions and directions are desirable. The corporations are saying loud and clear that governments must standback and provide for room for economic growth. How long will the global middle & enabling class wait to hear corporations say that rapid contraction of the industrial economy is the solution?
Michael Major
alternet too
a very respected author from UK and anti global warming campaigner activist wrote me today:
''dear danny
Swiftian, your blog idea of polar cities.... certainly is.
And more practical than Mars.
Get designing!
Cheers
________ UK''
am thinking of changing name of blog and proposal from POLAR CITIES< which scares peo[ple too much...to......SUSTAINABLE POLAR RETREATS.....SPR's for short
A letter from Leo today:
Dear Dan,
I am writing to tell you about my new environmental film, “The 11th Hour.” The film documents the environmental crises we face and the solutions we must begin to implement.
Please take a look at the trailer here: http://www.11thhouraction.com/trailer
With the help of over fifty of the world's most prominent thinkers and activists, including reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, “The 11th Hour” documents the grave problems facing the planet's life systems. Global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction, and depletion of the oceans' habitats are all addressed.
However, the most powerful element of “The 11th Hour” is not a portrait of a planet in crisis, but an offering of hope and solutions. The film ends with a call for restorative action through reshaping human activity.
“The 11th Hour” is opening on August 17th in New York and Los Angeles. On the 24th it opens in other cities, and in the following weeks across the country. It would be great if you could go see it and bring a friend. You can go to www.11thhouraction.com to get more information on the movie and when it will play near you.
We need the message of this movie to hit as far and wide as possible.
The hope is us. Let's begin.
Your friend,
Leonardo DiCaprio
P.S. Please feel free to use the code here
http://www.11thhouraction.com/trailer
Friend,
We are very excited that on August 17th "The 11th Hour" will open in New York and Los Angeles, then across the United States in the weeks that follow, and then around the world. We've worked extraordinarily hard with Leo on this project for three years, and we couldn't be more proud of the film.
The message of the movie is a simple one: our actions as a species are destroying the planet's very life systems. We need them to survive. Yet, more importantly, the film's message is one of hope. We can change our environmentally destructive ways, learn to live with nature and move together to a sustainable future.
"The 11th Hour" is a call to action for us to redesign our lives, and that's an extremely exciting challenge.
Obviously, this movie is very important to us, but its message is important to everyone. We want to see that message get out as far and wide as possible. So please come visit "The 11th Hour" to make your pledge to see the film. Just tell us when you'll see the movie, and please bring four or five friends.
We must all begin to act. You can begin by visiting the film's site and using the sample letters to help begin effecting change in your daily lives.
Thank you all, please see the film, but more importantly let's begin acting to create a healthier and sustainable future.
Very Sincerely,
Leila Conners Petersen
Nadia Conners
Directors, "The 11th Hour"
The 11th Hour Goes Nationwide - 24th August, 3004 (sic)
By: Richard Tags: 11th Hour News
Currently playing in LA and NYC. More cities on 24th August.
Opens Friday August 24th, Chicago, Dalllas, Toronto, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Philidelphia, Detroit, DC, Irvine -- Click here to find out where The 11th Hour is playing near you!
New York Times says
"essential viewing."
Los Angeles Times ...
"a harrowing account of the planet's current condition"
Helpful Hints for Saving the Planet
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DiggFacebookNewsvinePermalinkBy MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: August 17, 2007
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the environment, blah, blah, blah, melting ice caps. To judge from all the gas-guzzlers still fouling the air and the plastic bottles clogging the dumps, it appears that the news that we are killing ourselves and the world with our greed and garbage hasn’t sunk in. That’s one reason “The 11th Hour,” an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity, is such essential viewing. It may not change your life, but it may inspire you to recycle that old slogan-button your folks pinned on their dashikis back in the day: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
More About This Movie
Overview Tickets & Showtimes New York Times Review Cast, Credits & Awards Readers' Reviews Trailers & ClipsView Clip...Skip to next paragraph
The problem looks overwhelming, literally, as demonstrated by the images of overflowing landfills and sickeningly polluted bodies of water that flicker through the movie like damning evidence. Structured in mainstream fiction-film fashion (in other words, like a term paper), it opens with an introduction that presents the case, builds momentum with an absorbing analytical middle section and wraps up with just enough optimism that I didn’t want to run home and stick my head in an energy-efficient oven. No matter how well intentioned, political documentaries that present problems without real-life, real-time, real-people solutions — an 800 number, an address, something — just add to the noise (pollution), becoming another title on some filmmaker’s résumé as well as a temporary salve for the audience’s guilt.
Written and directed by the sisters Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, and narrated on- and off-camera by Leonardo DiCaprio, who served as one of the producers, “The 11th Hour” attempts to stave off helplessness, and the nihilism that often follows it, mostly by appealing to our reason.
In one interview snippet after another, dozens of scientists, activists, gurus, policy types and even a magical-mushroom guy go through the arguments, present the data and criticize the anti-green faction, putting words to the images that are liberally interspersed between these talking heads like mortar. Every so often, Mr. DiCaprio pops up on screen to interrupt this show and tell, squinting into the camera and pushing the narrative to the next topic.
If your head isn’t lodged in the sand, much of what’s said in the movie will be agonizing and familiar. Gasping children, disappearing animals, gushing oil, billowing smoke, dying lakes, emptying forests, warming weather — the list of ills is numbingly familiar. In the movie’s eye-catching opener, the directors riffle through a veritable catalog of timely snapshots, some obvious (a smoggy skyline), others less so (a human fetus).
Effectively blunt, this sequence provoked a colleague to invoke the name of the avant-garde giant Stan Brakhage, but the truer visual and structural model here is a film like “Koyaanisqatsi,” with its streaming global landscapes. The difference is that the images in “The 11th Hour” are pointedly horrifying, not reassuring, pacific or aestheticized.
That can make it tough to watch, which the directors clearly know. They whip through the pictures and the interviews fast — at times a little too fast — and keep the information flowing as quickly as the visuals. This swift, steady pace means that you receive a lot of bad news from a lot of different sources. The ecologist Brock Dolman explains, “When we started feeding off the fossil fuel cycle, we began living with a death-based cycle.” From there the topic nimbly jumps to climate change, national security (courtesy the former director of the C.I.A., R. James Woolsey), Katrina, asthma and the stunning news from the oceanographer and author Sylvia Earle that “we’ve lost 90 percent of most of the big fish in the sea.”
Yes, it’s bad, but it’s not over yet. Many of those same sober talking heads also argue with equal passion that we can save ourselves, along with the sky above us and the earth below. The capacity for human beings to fight, to rise to the occasion, as Mr. Woolsey notes, invoking America’s rapid, albeit delayed jump into World War II, gives hope where none might seem possible.
It is our astonishing capacity for hope that distinguishes “The 11th Hour” and that speaks so powerfully, in part because it is this all-too-human quality that may finally force us to fight the good fight against the damage we have done and continue to do. As the saying goes, keep hope alive — and if you’re holding this review in your hands, don’t forget to recycle the paper.
“The 11th Hour” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has freakily scary environmental images.
THE 11TH HOUR
Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.
Written and directed by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners; narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio; directors of photography, Peter Youngblood Hills and Andrew Rowlands; edited by Pietro Scalia and Luis Alvarez y Alvarez; music by Jean-Pascal Beintus and Eric Avery; production designer, Ms. Conners; produced by Mr. DiCaprio, Ms. Petersen, Chuck Castleberry and Brian Gerber; released by Warner Independent Pictures. Running time: 91 minutes.
MOVIE REVIEW
'The 11th Hour'
'The 11th Hour' shows environmental damage beyond global warming. But it ends with action and hope.
'The 11th Hour'
(AP Photo/Warner Independent Pictures/Chuck Castleberry)
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By Kevin Crust, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
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IT would be a mistake to dismiss the valuable environmental documentary "The 11th Hour" as a mere redux of "An Inconvenient Truth." Whereas the 2006 Al Gore-starring film, which won an Academy Award for best documentary, focused intensely on global warming, "The 11th Hour" takes a broader approach in examining Earth's ills.
Though it has its own hands-on celebrity producer-narrator, Leonardo DiCaprio, who acts more as a guide, posing questions and introducing segments, the film forges an authoritative voice through a collective of experts representing relevant fields. And although climate change gets attention (seven minutes by the filmmakers' estimate), "The 11th Hour" primarily attempts to describe a critical time in the Earth's evolution, the last moment we as a species can theoretically make a difference. Through social, economic and political lenses, the film presents a harrowing account of the planet's current condition, an exploration of the causes and, finally, a look at what can be done in the near future to heal the damage.
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In describing the impact on the planet's ecosystems attributed to industrialized society, writer-directors (and sisters) Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners marry images of natural beauty with natural disasters, stressing exactly how unnatural many of these catastrophes are. Scientists, environmentalists, authors, academics and activists weigh in on topics that go well beyond global warming in examining the scale of the footprint humanity has made.
It is unabashedly a documentary of talking heads, but it works. The most recognizable of those heads belong to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and R. James Woolsey, director of the CIA under President Bill Clinton, but the majority of the densely packed film's time is spent with those on the front lines of environmental study.
Eco-activist and Bioneers founder Kenny Ausubel, writer Thom Hartmann, entrepreneur Paul Hawken, sustainable-agriculture proponent Wes Jackson and Canadian scientist and broadcaster David Suzuki are among those who get the most face time. The mélange of voices is coherently edited within segments that hold to a particular theme, each tied to the film's overarching ideas. DiCaprio, a longtime advocate of environmental reform, is sincere and passionate in his introductory remarks to each sequence.
The concentration of all this information into an hour and a half makes it more likely to reach a large audience, but it also leaves you wanting more. Hours could be devoted to any one of the film's subjects, and it's easy to imagine it expanded into a much longer television series.
The first third of the film is nearly as terrifying as any science-fiction film as interviewees describe the Earth as behaving like an infected organism. Humanity is a victim of its own collective intelligence as the very skills that abetted our survival against initially long odds have accelerated our possible demise.
According to the filmmakers, at the heart of the problem is our disconnect from nature, the idea that we are somehow removed from our natural environment. This lack of understanding of the Earth's interdependent systems has created a convergence of crises, wherein deforestation, soil degradation, the pollution of the air and the ill health of the oceans all bode poorly.
The middle portion asks why these things are happening and apportions blame in varying degrees to governmental indifference tied to its allegiance to a corporate economy that is addicted to growth at any cost and perhaps, most insinuating of all, to the culture of consumerism. Disposable has trumped sustainable in our society, and we're now paying the price.
Thankfully for audiences, "11th Hour" is not without hope. The filmmakers save the most exhilarating portion for last when they ask what's being done about the problems. Experts extol existing technologies and projects as attainable solutions. Progressive designs such as a carbon-neutral city and self-sustaining buildings already offer ideas for a new direction. By mimicking nature's own blueprints, it is possible to create a system of living that heals rather than depletes the Earth.
kevin.crust@latimes.com
"The 11th Hour." MPAA rating: PG for some mild disturbing images and thematic elements. Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes. At Pacific's ArcLight, 6360 W. Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 464-4226; and the Landmark, 10850 W. Pico Blvd., West L.A. (310) 281-8233.
The first third of the film is nearly as terrifying as any science-fiction film as interviewees describe the Earth as behaving like an infected organism. Humanity is a victim of its own collective intelligence as the very skills that abetted our survival against initially long odds have accelerated our possible demise.
According to the filmmakers, at the heart of the problem is our disconnect from nature, the idea that we are somehow removed from our natural environment. This lack of understanding of the Earth's interdependent systems has created a convergence of crises, wherein deforestation, soil degradation, the pollution of the air and the ill health of the oceans all bode poorly.
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