Two words.
Two words that you know mean a lot. You know they are actively having an effect
on your future. And yet when we hear those two words, we switch off. Those
words are Climate Change. No matter how we dress it up, Climate Change is just
not a sexy subject. The idea that we may be knowingly contributing to our own
horrible flame-y death isn’t something we really like to think about. The big
problem is, it’s real. It’s happening, and it’s happening at a rate no one
could have anticipated. Furthermore, America has just elected a president who
openly states that Climate Change does not exist.
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Just before the election, a new documentary
was realised for free from an unlikely source. Leonardo DiCaprio spent two
years creating an in-depth documentary that looks at the real effects of
climate change and what we can do to stop it in its tracks. It’s eye opening,
frustrating and motivating. What it is not,
is boring.
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Why the hell
is Jack from Titanic trying to get us to care about climate change? Well, oddly
enough the award winning actor has just been appointed The Messenger of Peace
on Climate Change by the United Nations. Weird right? He’s not a scientist or
an academic, in fact it seems up until this point, he’s spent his spare time
lounging on super yachts with super-hot models.
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But hold your judge-y little
horses as we quickly find out in the opening of the documentary that he has
worked tirelessly to bring what he has learnt to a wider audience, not for
profit, not for fame but because what he has learnt scared the sh*t out of him!
The thing is this isn’t a hopeless documentary; it doesn’t try to confuse you
with huge statistics or make you feel ashamed to your very core that you didn’t
recycle your yogurt pots that one time. It’s a stripped down look at what is
actually happening to our climate right now, who it is affecting, (which is all
of us btw,) and how we can help.
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Unlike some of the climate
change documentaries I have watched, this one doesn’t paint a final picture of
the desolate apocalypse we will definitely end up with. Instead it meets with
experts and gets honest onions and predictions of where we will be in 20 years
and what we shall be facing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s sobering stuff and the
facts alone are more than enough to get you planting a small forest in your
back garden.
Facts like we are currently
facing more species on the brink of extinction than when the asteroid hit the
earth and wiped out the dinosaurs. The fact that our fondness for beef has
contributed to massive deforestation to make grazing grounds and extremely high
levels of methane gas omitted from the cows. The fact that many remote island
with tiny carbon footprints are being eradicated due to flooding, extreme
weather and the destruction of coral reefs. And the fact that the US currently
have no nationwide carbon tax.
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I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable
about climate change; as a traveller I feel it’s my duty to know about the
world I’m trekking and how I may be impacting it. But you could go into this
documentary without any further knowledge than apparently we’ve wrecked the
atmosphere and still be able to follow the facts. You also get teleport through
Leo’s eyes as he stands in wonder in the middle of the Arctic as he watched a
pod of narwhales drift by singing. Likewise we can share in his horror as he
flies over acre upon acre of grey wasted land where once stood millions of
trees and animals.
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One of the
most impressive and brave moves of ‘Before the Flood,’ is it offers up a
theory, heavily backed by facts and money trails, which explains why so many
powerful figures in government are denying climate change. Fossil fuel
companies are some of the most powerful entities in our modern world and as it
turns out, they have been paying government officials millions of dollars to
tell the public that everything is fine and dandy whilst our world floods,
burns and crumbles around us. One such example singled out in the documentary
is James Inhofe, chair of the Senet’s environment committee. This man quite literally
wrote the book on denying climate change and on top of those book sales, turns
out he also receives $1, 837, 427 of US fossil fuel interests, (that’s over a
million dollars’ worth of incentive to lie to people.)
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A very
powerful and exciting idea is put forth by Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard professor and
author on economics, who also advised past presidents on economic issues. He suggests
that in order to pass a carbon tax through congress, we must first get the
public screaming for one, as Politian’s inevitably do whatever it is the
majority of the public are calling for. He uses the example of former President
Obama’s sudden change of mind on gay marriage which he was opening against,
right up until the point that public opinion was overwhelmingly for it, at
which point he began opening supporting gay marriage. So this idea suggests
that we hold the reigns; an empowering idea for many of us who believe the
governments word is final and we will never see change no matter how many
petitions we sign.
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Overall, by the end of this
documentary, I was hit with an enormous amount of pride and respect for what
DiCaprio is trying to do here. When one is given a platform to which they can
affect the views and opinions of millions of people all across the world, they
have a choice; they can sit on their super yachts with their stunning model
girlfriends, or they can put their influence into trying to save the world and
educate it. Bravo Leo.
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Please watch his free documentary ‘Before the Flood,’ there are many
full length copies on Youtube and I shall leave a link below. But you can also
visit National Geographic’s website who created the documentary with DiCaprio.
Watch the full
documentary for free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q7V460XZfE
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