11th hour reviewed

I'm just back from a couple of days with family - 240 emails and blog comments plus post - so please bear with me re responses as I'm at work the rest of the week and meetings in the evenings. Anyhow local Whiteshill and Ruscombe Parish councillor Greg Dance kindly sent this review of Sunday nights channel 4 film the 11th Hour and said he was happy for me to use it on this blog......so see below - I've not seen it yet but have been meaning to catch it for a while - trouble is I've still got no telly....

Photo: pinched from NY Times - Leonardo DiCaprio on the set of “The 11th Hour”

Screened 25th May Channel 4

I watched the film with a certain expectation that it would use only cliche's and stay safely in the typical climate change area so much frequented by the British media. But it went further than that, it actually mentioned peak oil which more mainstream media is now beginning to cover, and interestingly it said much about US!

This to me is the most important point. People generally find it difficult to accept that they are a problem to the planets ecosystems. Instead they prefer to look for other causes and blame nature itself sometimes, almost for not being designed for human habitation! Its the human attitude that is wrong and the expectation that somehow, as fossil energy becomes impossibly expensive we will use some other methods instead to stay exactly as we are. Business as normal.

The film made a point that its our distancing ourselves from natural processes in our ways of living that is why we are probably heading for our own extinction. Its like a group of people in a shared accommodation setting where a kitchen, utility room and bathroom/toilet are all shared. Often the cleaning and tidying is "someone elses problem". The Earth gets the same treatment, somehow humans fail to realise that they have nowhere else to go. If we ruin the ecological ability of the Earth to support our needs like oxygen, water, food and safe shelter we only can blame ourselves.

And it seems most humans have no idea about our dependence on the oceans and seas roles in providing for conditions that keep us alive.

The film mentioned also an unsurprising reference to the USA government attitude to scientific concerns which call for radical reevaluation of their obsession with economic growth as the prime priority in policy making.

They are in common with too many other governments who employ economists to set the direction of policy which is why we end up buying wast amounts of over marketed "must have" consumer rubbish from far distant places who have military style command economies and appalling attitudes to their workforces.

All this activity is in the name of money and though it, advantage in social status and an intention to be seen to be "cool" by doing nothing in expensive settings. Well if the god aka economics is followed slavishly in future as it has been before now we can guarantee that nature will shrug our race off its surface and carry on without us. We need the Earth, but from its perspective, it would do better without us messing it up!