"The 11th Hour" - La 11e heure - Le dernier virage
Les espoirs qui remplacent la réalité - Hopes that replace reality!
home | climate | energy | sustainability | water | back
Text transcript from the movie trailer[narrator] (time min:sec) listen (image=watch) If you haven't got Flash installed, you can try watching the trailer with Apple quickTime7 or with one of the trailers here: http://www.comingsoon.net/films.php?id=20177 Transcript: All of which who are concern for life. (1 minute) [images: waste, forest fire, sign "lost children" held up by hispanic people, more catastrophe flashes, then the words: THE HOPE IS YOU] If everybody is making a change it adds up to something meaningful. (1:17) [Message: the consumer must do it. This is blaming the victim since the leaders seduce us into ever more consumption and promote endless growth.] our comment: français
articles top
"The 11th Hour" by Warner Bros is fiction - making money with people's worries and illusionary "solutions". DiCaprio may be honest in his intentions, but the film provides the wrong messages. The film's subtitle "Turn Mankind's darkest hour into its finest" provides the hope. The trailer is wrong by claiming that we could solve every problem with technology. At the end we hear: "What a great time to be born, what a great time to be alive, because this generation gets to completely change this world," with background images of playing and happy children. This is doubly wrong. Firstly, today no child is happy seeing the images of an increasingly threatened tomorrow. Secondly, it is not up to our children to change the world for the better. We, their parents and grandparents, have to do it. We wield the power. We must modify our ways dramatically if our beloved children and grandchildren want to have tomorrow at all. The movie's utterly delusive message is: Don't worry too much, just a little bit to watch the movie. But it will all be fine. The most perverse message is that our children will do the job, as "they get to completely change this world. What a fuckin' sham. WE ourselves have to do it. WE must stop growth and reduce. One may ask why technology will never be able to save the world and - on top of that - allow us to maintain our exuberant lifestyles. He is a concise answer: Technology and capital cannot replace or recreate extinct species, cut-down rain forests, depleted ground water streams, eroded agricultural lands, etc.. Nor can it protect against the weather extremes and floods because of climate change that has already started; Some related links are: an outrage from 1996 a general overview of sustainabilty on population control Soylent green is people - 40 million in New York and the oceans dead - beautiful background music: Beethoven's Pastorale. Sweet dreams ... Helmut Reference data for comparison: Your comment or question |
to 
halt 
| ecostory | feedback
back
ecoglobe
since 1997
top
article 7921-7d05-0813
Helpful Hints for Saving the Planet
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: August 17, 2007 NYT website. (Copyright notice |
MOVIE REVIEW
'The 11th Hour'
'The 11th Hour' shows environmental damage beyond global warming. But it ends with action and hope.
By Kevin Crust
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 17, 2007 calendarlive.com/ website. (Copyright notice |
ECO-HERO
The Man of the Hour[picture] Environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio, at the Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon in southeast Iceland. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. 2007 vanityfair.com/ website. (Copyright notice)
Leonardo DiCaprio: actor, activist. photograph by Annie Leibovitz May 2007 If you go to leonardodicaprio.com, you will find that it is split down the middle. The left half is labeled "Leonardo," and will bring you up-to-date on his filmmaking career (doing rather nicely, with a recent Oscar nomination for his performance in Blood Diamond and, to some tastes, an even stronger performance in best-picture winner The Departed). The right half is labeled "Eco-Site"; it offers guides to various environmental concerns, tips on differences anyone can make, and links to dozens of green organizations and information. Not many stars share their fan face time with gorillas and ferns, but this is the image DiCaprio puts forward to the world: a literal expression of twin passions. A longtime environmentalist—remember his interview in 2000 with then president Bill Clinton for an ABC Earth Day special?—DiCaprio is currently on the boards of both the Natural Resources Defense Council and Global Green USA and has been a tireless promoter of green causes and events. Later this year will see the fusion of his two passions with the release of The 11th Hour, a feature documentary on environmental ills and possible cures, a kind of state-of-the-earth address with gorgeous pictures and eloquent experts, which DiCaprio is producing, co-writing, and narrating. As he says in this remarkable film, as hopeful as it is alarming, "So, we find ourselves on the brink." On the brink of what, it is made plain, is up to us. Below, a sneak preview of The 11th Hour. The Hour Is Near Excerpted from the film The 11th Hour, a documentary created by Leonardo DiCaprio; directed by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners; the film, to be released by Tree Media Group and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, will be in theaters later this year; all rights reserved. So, we find ourselves on the brink. It's clear humans have had a devastating impact on our planet's ecological web of life. Because we've waited, because we've turned our backs on nature's warning signs, and because our political and corporate leaders have consistently ignored the overwhelming scientific evidence, the challenges we face are that much more difficult. We are in the environmental age whether we like it or not. So, what does the future look like? We know the United States, the greatest consumer and source of waste, needs to make a transition to a greener future, but will our pivotal generation create a sustainable world in time? What will guide this massive change? And does nature hold the answers we need to help restore our planet's resources, protect our atmosphere, and therefore help all life survive? —Leonardo DiCaprio The problem that confronts us is that every living system in the biosphere is in decline and the rate of decline is accelerating. There isn't one peer-reviewed scientific article that's been published in the last 20 years that contradicts that statement. Living systems are coral reefs. They're our climatic stability, forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers, water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity. They go on and on as they get more specific. But the fact is, there isn't one living system that is stable or is improving. And those living systems provide the basis for all life. —Paul Hawken, environmentalist and entrepreneur. I think the most basic thing to understand about our global economic system is that it's a subsystem. The larger system is the biosphere, and the subsystem is the economy. The problem, of course, is that our subsystem, the economy, is geared for growth; it's all set up to grow, to expand. Whereas the parent system doesn't grow; it remains the same size. So, as the economy grows, it displaces, it encroaches upon the biosphere, and this is the fundamental cost of economic growth. It's what you give up when you expand. You give up what used to be there. —Herman Daly, ecological economist. There's a more fundamental problem, and that is, as the world economy has expanded relative to the size of the earth itself, we have reached the point where economic activity often does a lot of damage. What we need to recognize is that, in many cases now, the indirect costs of the products, the goods, and the services we buy may be greater than the direct costs. —Lester Brown, founder, Earth Policy Institute. Economists don't include all of the things that nature does for us for nothing. Some technologies would never be able to do what nature does. For example, pollinating all of the flowering plants. What would it cost us to take carbon dioxide out of the air and put oxygen back in, which all the green things do for us for nothing? It's possible to do a crude estimate of what it would cost us to replace nature. Well, it turns out, [one researcher] estimated it would cost us $35 trillion a year to do what nature is doing for us for nothing. Now to put that in perspective. If you had added up all of the annual economies of all the countries in the world at that time, it would come to $18 trillion. So, nature is doing twice as much service for us as the economies of the world. And in the madness of conventional economics, this is not in the equation. —David Suzuki, geneticist and broadcaster. Somehow in the last few decades in business school, they were trained that the object of their business is growth, as if that were an end. It's not an end, it's a means. And if we flip the ends and means, then we can get the end back, quality of life. We have to look at the contradictions because the wrong kind of growth reduces our quality of life, and we have to take that back. —Stephen Schneider, climatologist. I think the industrial system has to be re-invented. Today the throughput of the industrial system, from mine and wellhead to finished product, ends up in a landfill or incinerator. For every truckload of product with lasting value, 32 truckloads of waste are produced. That's mind-boggling, but it's true. So we have a system that is a waste-making system. And clearly we cannot continue to dig up the earth and turn it to waste. —Ray Anderson, industrial engineer and businessman. One can see from space how the human race has changed the earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared for agriculture or urban development. The polar ice caps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night the earth is no longer dark, but lit up. All this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit, but human demands and expectations are ever increasing. —Stephen Hawking, cosmologist. Some people suggest that in order to live sustainably we have to go out in the woods and put on animal skins and live on roots and berries. And the simple reality is that we do have technology. The question is, how can we use our understanding of science and our understanding of technology along with our understanding of culture, and how culture changes, to create a culture that will interact with science and with the world around us in a sustainable fashion? —Thom Hartmann, broadcaster, educator, businessman. The great thing about the dilemma we're in is that we get to reimagine every single thing we do. In other words, there isn't one single thing that we make that doesn't require a complete remake. And so there are two ways of looking at that. One is like: Oh my gosh, what a big burden. The other way to look at it, which is the way I prefer, is: What a great time to be born! What a great time to be alive! Because this generation gets to essentially completely change this world. —Paul Hawken We're at a point in our history, with 6.4 billion of us, that we have to imagine what it would be like to redesign design itself, see design as the first signal of human intention, and realize that we need new intentions for our future where materials are seen as things that are highly valuable and need to go in closed cycles—what we call cradle to cradle, instead of cradle to grave. And we have to agree that energy needs to come from renewable sources, principally the sun, and that water needs to be clean and healthy as it comes in and out of the system, and that we should treat each other with justice and fairness. So, the design itself changes from mass production of things that are essentially destructive to mass utilization of things that are inherently assets instead of liabilities. —William McDonough, architect and designer. How we make things in our industrial process is a 180-degree difference from how life makes things. Look at how we make, for instance, Kevlar, which is our toughest material. We take petroleum, we heat it up to about 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, we boil it in sulfuric acid, and then we pull it out under enormous pressures. Now, imagine us making our bones or our teeth, or imagine an abalone making a shell. Abalones can't afford to heat it up to really high temperatures or do pressures or do chemical baths, so they've found a different way. Now take the spider. This beautiful orb-weaver spider is basically taking flies and crickets and transforming them in water in the abdomen and what comes out is this material that's five times stronger ounce for ounce than steel. Silently, in water, at room temp. I mean, this is master chemistry, and this is manufacturing of the future, hopefully. And there are actually people who are now trying to mimic the recipes of these organisms. Beautiful architecture and incredible manufacturing and we're starting to learn how to mimic that. —Janine Benyus, co-founder, the Biomimicry Guild. If we think about the tree as a design, it's something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides a habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy, makes complex sugars and food, creates micro-climates, self-replicates. So, what would it be like to design a building like a tree? What would it be like to design a city like a forest? So what would a building be like if it were photosynthetic? What if it took solar energy and converted it to productive and delightful use? —William McDonough This country can move awfully fast, if it wants to. Keep in mind that after December 7, 1941, Roosevelt went to Jimmy Byrnes and said, You're my deputy president for mobilizing the economy. Anybody crosses you, they cross me. Within six months, Detroit was completely retooled, not making cars anymore, making military trucks, tanks, fighter aircraft, and in three years and eight months from the beginning of that war, we had mobilized, we had defeated imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, together with the British and our other allies, and had begun demobilization. Three years and eight months. —R. James Woolsey, former director of the C.I.A Copyright Copyright © 2007 CondéNet. - Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/05/dicaprio200705 We reproduced this article for reference reasons only.
|