The 11th Hour

An interesting interview with one of the producers of Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour, and check out the trailer at the link:

...KW: I know that documentaries are becoming increasingly popular, but how is this film different from Al Gore's, and why would anyone want to see another film on eco-catastrophe?

NC: Our films are totally different - we contextualize environmental problems so that you come away with a greater understanding of how and why we got here - an essential component to understanding how to reverse the damage that has created our problems. Additionally, we deal with global warming only for seven minutes out of 90 - the rest of the film examines the state of environmental degradation and ecosystem collapse as a symptom of a larger problem, which we see as the industrial revolution and the way our culture relates to the planet as a resource to be consumed. Our film is a journey through man's relationship to the planet - how we got to this critical point - the forces in our society that are stalling us, keeping us here - and the hope for the future. We focus the entire last third of the film on solutions.

KW: I watched the trailer, and it looked a compilation of every Hollywood disaster movie ever made, except that it was all real. Do you think those disaster movies that were big in the 1980s and 1990s were in some way a premonition of the reality we are facing today?

NC: I think on a deep level we know we have been destroying nature and we have projected onto other forces, like alien invasions in films, the very thing we are doing to ourselves. We have been living extremely out of balance with not only the planet, but with ourselves, so if cinema is a kind of reflection of our unconscious, then one could see we are in crisis for sure. The problem with a lot of these disaster films is that they play upon fear without delivering any purpose or meaning. What is all this destruction in the service of? What kinds of stories are we really trying to tell? Frequently, nature is positioned as the enemy - we are battling a volcano, a quake, a tidal wave, a comet. This idea of us against the world is something that has been perpetuated for a long time in human civilization, and it does not ultimately serve us - we have to see ourselves as a part of nature.

KW: You've got some great people appearing in the film, including Diane Wilson, whom I have interviewed. Gloria Flora appears in the trailer and talks about the importance of voting. I happen to know that as the supervisor of one of our national forests, she became a victim of right-wing politics. Does her story come out in the film?

NC: We interviewed 71 people for this film, and 54 people made it into our 90-minute cut. As you will see, the film is really a seamless dialogue amongst these specialists, visionaries and experts, who have been on the front lines of this issue for decades. Unfortunately, we did not have an opportunity to get into their personal stories, but frequently we selected people because of their vast knowledge of these issues and of how hard it has been to do their work unobstructed. For instance, we had an interview slated with James Hansen during the summer he issued his report to Congress on global warming. He was subsequently shut down or censored from talking to anyone - including us.

KW: The film seems like it will emphasize technical solutions to our problems. Does that mean there is nothing we can really do until science comes up with these solutions?

NC: We do talk about existing technologies as both transitional solutions and long-term solutions, but technology is nothing without an evolution in culture. We need to regain our citizenship - we have been turned into full-time consumers, and as a result, the infrastructure of our physical and mental society is in collapse. How are we going to demand that the administration - this one or the next - build green or develop better transportation systems or retool the wasteful processes of the industrial production system if we don't engage as humans on a political level? The technologies exist right now that can dramatically reduce our impact on the planet - but they are not being implemented at the scale needed to make the difference we desperately need right now. We need a societal movement on the level of the civil rights movement to take back the power we have lost, so that we can begin to push for changes that serve the greater good of people and the planet, and not just the corporate few...