In this summer's blockbuster hit Transformers, "Decepticons" from an alien species, wreak havoc on Earth – things look bad, humanity seems doomed. But just in the nick of time, against all odds, our young heroes save the planet.
It’s an enduring Cliché: From Superman and Wonder Woman to Batman and Spiderman, we love to watch our celluloid heroes save us from whatever creatures are threatening our world. In Leonardo DiCaprio's new documentary, The 11th Hour, the creatures are us. And the ways in which we are wreaking havoc on planet Earth are far more frightening than anything dreamed up by Hollywood:
--Injecting poisons into the atmosphere causing our children to choke and wheeze in an epidemic of asthma.
--Dumping toxic chemicals into the oceans, killing 90 percent of the big fish.
--Poisoning our food supply with pesticides, mercury, herbicides and more.
--Hacking down whole forests vital to the sustainability of life on Earth.
--Burning huge fossil fuel reserves, creating emissions that disrupt the fragile atmospheric balance that regulates temperature and makes Earth habitable.
-- Contaminating our drinking water, melting our icecaps and killing off species forever.
How would we react if an alien species did this to our planet?
“Would we be outraged? I’m sure we would,” Leonardo said when I asked him this question at a Beverly Hills press conference.
“We face a convergence of crises, all of which are a concern for life,” he says in the documentary. “Every living system is in decline – the forest cover, the soil, the oceans. There isn't one living system that is stable or improving. And those systems are required for life." Life on Earth in peril? In a fiction film, people would be gathered around their TV sets, brows furrowed in worry, clutching their children to their breasts, anxiously awaiting some glimmer of hope for how humanity can fight back. But this is real. So is public anxiety even higher? Not according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Their analysis shows that so far global warming hasn’t even ranked with Anna Nicole Smith and Paris Hilton in the top-ten news stories.
At the Cannes premier, Leonardo spoke about of the frustrations of working with a TV network on an environmental documentary in the late 1990’s. Every truth by a scientist had to be “balanced” by a lie from the industry. "We had to make it just two people arguing the same point back and forth and at the end of the day it just became moot." DiCaprio was determined to make 11th Hour different. "This was really a homemade movie," DiCaprio said, “three of us in an editing room…We made it with private funding so that no studio and no network could impose their agenda on it.” Despite DiCaprio’s stature in the industry, the movie was made on a shoestring. “This is all stock footage. We didn’t have nature crews going out there to Africa to get some of these scenic shots. It was done by a lot of people donating services. It was people with HD cameras interviewing people in my mother’s garage.” Irmelin DiCaprio’s garage served as the stage for DiCaprio’s quest to learn firsthand from “some of the great experts and visionaries of our time.” With his team, he built the film with an impressive array of 54 leading scientists, Nobel Prize winners, and professors, ranging from Scripps Institute oceanographer Jeremy Jackson and Stanford University Environmental Director Steven Schneider to former CIA director James Woolsey and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, founder of Green Cross International. “The evidence is now clear: industrial civilization has cause irreparable damage. Our political and corporate leaders have consistently ignored the overwhelming scientific evidence,” DiCaprio warns in the film as his experts ring in with a peal of alarm bells: “Not only is it the llth hour, its 11:59… What we saw with Katrina is just a prologue… The worst is yet to come. The UN estimates that by the middle of the century there may be 150 million environmental refugees… There are too many of us using too many resources too fast… The rate of decline is accelerating… The tragedy is the potential extinction of humankind." Cambridge math professor and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, whose medical condition requires him to speak with an eerily authoritative computer voice, sent chills down my back as he explained: “The danger is that the temperature increase might become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already… the warming of the seas may trigger the release of large quantities of CO2 trapped on the ocean floor. In addition, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets will reduce the amount of solar energy reflected back into space and so increase the temperature further. We don’t know where the global warming will stop, but the worst case scenario is that earth would become like its sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 centigrade, and raining sulfuric acid. The human race could not survive in those conditions.” Now hold on just a minute. We humans may be willing to take a lot of abuse, but are we going to let 'em threaten our planet? Destroy the human race? Fry poor Fido and our prized rose bushes? No way. We won’t take that lying down! We know the drill –we’ve seen it in movie after movie – at the last minute our mighty heroes will muster the courage and fortitude to persevere in a life and death battle to save our beleaguered planet. I asked DiCaprio who’s going to be the hero who swoops in to rescue us at this 11th hour? “I think there’s gotta be millions of heroes. That’s my answer to that,” DiCaprio said. So he won’t be our celluloid hero who saves the day? We have to be our own heroes? Isn’t that asking a bit much? “During this critical period of human history, healing the damage of industrial civilization is the task of our generation,” DiCaprio says in the film as his experts demonstrate that we already have the technological know-how to reduce the human footprint on Earth by 90 percent. “Our response depends on the conscious evolution of our species and this response could very well save this unique blue planet for future generations.” What led an actor like DiCaprio to take on such a complex and seemingly overwhelming cause? “I became an actor at a very young age but I also had a deep respect for nature. I was sort of a little biologist– I watched documentaries on rain forest depletion and the loss of species and habitats for animals around the world and it affected me in a very emotional way. So later in life I wanted to investigate and learn more about ecological issues. That sent me eventually into a room with Al Gore about 10 years ago who explained to me what climate change was and global warming and the science behind that and the decades of research that he’d done on the subject matter. It really propelled me to want to be more vocal about the issue because it seemed to me we’re at a real tipping point – the weather patterns, the floods and hurricanes – all these things made me more proactive in the environmental movement.”
Leila Conners Petersen and her sister Nadia Conners directed the documentary and Brian Gerber produced it. We interviewed them between sessions in the editing room where they were putting final touches on the images of our planet being battered by multiple assaults on its very life systems.
“We’re kind of in a pitched battle to save what we have and not to continue the destruction,” Nadia Conners told us.
“Are you frightened by the threat of global destruction?” I asked.
“When we first started making this movie, I was worried about the bad news, and felt that we were going down as a civilization and as a planet. But After interviewing all these people, I couldn’t be more hopeful. I feel that we are really going to turn this around and that not only is the planet going to be better off, but human beings are going to be better off.” “I don’t believe that people maliciously wake up in the morning saying I’m going to hurt the earth today,” her sister Leila added. “All of this is simply a by-product of the way we constructed society. So we just have to redesign our society at every level so that it doesn’t destroy the planet.” Conners didn’t seem at all daunted by the scope of this task. Instead she cites her favorite line in the film, author Paul Hawken saying: ‘What an exciting time to be born, what an exciting time to be alive, because this generation gets to completely remake this world.’ 11th hour is a stunning film. It is packed with facts we human beings need to know to save our planet. It is the ultimate horror movie, action flick and feel-good movie all wrapped up into one. We all owe it to ourselves and our future to all go see it. In the memorable words of Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”
© 2007 Arthur Kanegis. Kanegis reviewed The 11th Hour for Scene4 Magazine. Kanegis' interviews with the film directors Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen are available at http://www.scene4.com/html/arthurkanegis-i0807.html In addition to reviewing films, Kanegis is a screenwriter, producer and President of One Films, LLC. Contact: ArthurKanegis@Hotmail.com.
