The 11th Hour

Channel 4, on the 25th May 2008, showed the film “The 11th Hour”. This was a call to ordinary people about the environmental disasters that are happening now and what will happen next if we do not start to take action to stop climate change. Sadly its message was drowned out by the very heavy use of propaganda techniques.

There were two extremes shown, the good environmentalist and everyone else. When showing the good side you would hear soft music and see long clips of some beautiful environment. When showing the other side you had loud fast music with a lot of short clips of destruction, pollution and human suffering. What you never see is the middle ground, the life we live every day.

Below are a number of quotes from the film that I found interesting.

The biosphere is sick, a planet that is behaving like an infected organism.
Thom Hartman, author of “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight”

What I hear in my dreams are the generations in the future screaming back to us in time, saying, what are you doing, don’t you see, we are at this critical point in time, and we have evolved to be the leaders of our biological community and we are misleading, we are coursing the devastation to the very foundation of our life system, that has given us birth and we are ultimately committing suicide.
Paul Stamets, Mycologist, Author of “Mycelium Running”

Even to think we are separated from nature is some how a thinking disorder.
James Hillman, Psychologist

If we were to have to go back to simply living off current sunlight, lacking technology, the planet couldn’t sustain more than half a billion to at the most a billion people.
Thom Hartman

We don’t know where the global warming will stop. But the worst case scenario is the earth will become like its sister planet Venus. With a temperature of 250 centigrade and raining sulphuric acid. The human race could not survive in those conditions.
Stephen Hawking

...coming close to what many scientists call the tipping point. A tipping point where we loss control of climate. And when we loss control of climate, then things like Katrina [the Hurricane], Katrina scale events will simply become the norm.
David Orr, Chair, Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin College

The human impacts, it is happening first and fastest in the Arctic. We are starting to see that things are happening even faster than what scientists have indicated. By the end of the century, perhaps even in a few decades, the Arctic will be quite ice free.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, International Chair, Inuit Circumpolar Conference

The UN estimates that by the middle of the century that there maybe 150 million environmental refuges at any given time from climate change.
Bill Mickibben, Author, Founder, Stepitup07.org