The 11th Hour (Documentary) (REVISED)

In this blog I would like to focus on a video I saw in class called, The Eleventh Hour.  It is a documentary film created, produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and is focusing on the environmental changes of the planet’s ecosystem. The film is consisted of many interviews from distinguished scientists, politicians and environmental activists including world famous physicist Stephen Hawking and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai. In The Eleventh Hour many important issues are being discussed such as water pollution, species extinction, deforestation and global warming.  Also many sustainable solutions are provided in the documentary in order to change the destruction of our ecosystem.

          Global warming is a major issue that concerns scientists for decades. It is caused by trapping more heat in the earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane are greenhouse gases that are trapping the sun’s heat being reflected to space and make the earth a sustainable planet for life. According to Stephen Hawking, “One can see from space how the human race has changed the Earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest and is now used for agriculture or urban development". Agriculture is believed to be the main cause of producing greenhouse gases especially methane. Even more greenhouse gases are produced by agriculture in United Stated than the entire world’s transportations emissions. In addition to that the deforestation is preventing the natural transformation of CO2 into oxygen, increasing so the rate of climate changing.  

           Some solutions are provided in the film such as turning into renewable energy sources and creating eco-towns. One of the speakers is the architect Paolo Soleri, the founder of Acrosanti an experimental town in Arizona that aims to be an eco-town minimizing the destructive impact on the earth.  But it would need much more than that, much more than creating eco-towns. We need to change the way we think. This is extremely difficult if we consider that human beings are products of about 500bilion of advertising each year. Corporations are the superior power in planet and they control the economy of planet earth. Kenny Ausubel, founder of the environmental organization called Bioneers, said, “Probably the greatest weapon of mass destruction is corporate economic globalization”. It is very difficult to change our way of thinking because we are being told what to believe in. I hope that people would one day wake up and realizing the damage we do in the planet and change our minds, but I am afraid this seems too optimistic.