The 11th Hour
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Today, while we are watching we created one of the biggest problems facing all of humanity: climate change. What does it look like when we don’t pay attention to the massive amounts of CO2 we dump in the air and water? How does it look when our actions shift the natural chemical balance of our atmosphere into a state several degrees warmer? We have witnessed, in recent years the highest average temperatures in recorded history. A couple of degree difference in today’s temperatures may not sound like much. But it only took a few degrees to shift out us of the last ice age. And a few degrees may be all that separate us from a ‘’catastrophic change’’. Some day the heat will become a plague in our world. We don’t know where the global warming stop, but the worst-case scenario is that earth would become like its sister planet, VENUS…!!!! With a temperature of 250 centigrade and raining sulfuric acid, and of course the human race could not survive in those conditions. Global warming is happening first and faster in the Arctic. We started to even see that things are starting to happen faster than what scientists indicated!! By the end of the century, perhaps even in a few decades the Arctic will be quite ice-free!! Global warming is going to change rainfall patterns; its going very likely to increase our experience with floods and droughts, and it’s almost certainly going to change the pattern of river flows through the year. And these are all very fundamental aspects of how we manage and use water. It threatens our food security, our sea level security and our security against storms and hurricanes. What we saw in Katrina can be just prologue. I think that the worse is yet to come on the front. Global warming impacts defy the imagination. The reality with air pollution is there is no ''AWAY''. The impacts can range from headaches, drowsiness, lethargy, to much more serious impacts, not only aggravating asthma, but causing it. We’ve put too much into the ocean, too much pollution and we’re wrecking the edge of the ocean. We’ve lost 90% of most of the big fish in the sea in half a century!! 7 countries in the world no longer have any intact or original forests, and in the US 95% of the old growth forests are already gone!! And in many cases these forests aren’t going to grow back. In the case of rain forests, we have seen firsthand that when those trees are removed, they don’t come back. Thus the land becomes dry and the nutrient cycling that those trees used to do is no longer functioning. What that leads to next? DESERTS!!! We’ve seen them and we’ve watched them grow around the world. As we have removed trees along the edges of very dry areas,that desertification has spread where there used to be forests. In some parts of the African world it’s been told to people: ‘’ let’s not cut trees. Let us not destroy especially the forested mountains. Because if you destroy the forests on these mountains the river will stop flowing and the rain will become irregular, and the crops will fail and you will die of hunger and starvation. The problem is people don’t make these linkages.
One of the things that we don’t see or think about when we look at a tree is what’s the volume? How much water can be contained there? And it turns out to be 57,000 gallons of water in a 10-to 12- inch flash,flood. It can grab that much water, prevent it from running off. Take that one tree away and you got a flood, you got soil erosion!! You’ve lost 57,000 gallons from the local water supply. Then that water is rushing downstream, hurting people, hurting communities, ultimately polluting the ocean. The evidence is now clear: industrial civilization has caused irreparable damage, and our impact is only accelerating. The questions then arise, why aren’t we responding? But more important, what are the forces that are blocking change? Probably the greatest weapon of mass destruction is corporate economic globalization. Today, ecosystems, forests, streams, lakes, rivers have no rights. They are property, which mean they can be bought,sold, destroyed, traded, and carved up. Under this structure of law, you’re either property or you’re a person. And it’s very clear that nature is property. And so the reason why we have these reams of documents in libraries about solutions, solar, how to produce food in a sustainable way, transportation, changing production methods and putting in place a sustainable economy that respects the planet is we’ve lacked the authority to drive those things into law. Because in reality we have a constitution that empowers the corporate few to make decisions that trump the majority. And it has been our failure to drive real law into place because we don’t have the authority!
There are very responsive political leaders. They’re responsive to wealth, money and corporate power.‘’Exxo mobil’’, one oil company is worth more than the sum of the value of all the auto companies in the whole wide world!! That is a big company, people say: Gee, why aren’t politicians responding to the global climate crisis? Because they respond to higher power, unfortunately. And right now, that higher power is the fossil-fuel industry. Therefore, the political systems have failed us. Now what we need to do is find a harmony between people and nature by recognizing that the nature has rights too. Some technologies would never be able to do what nature does. For example, pollinating all of the flowering plants, what would it cost us to take carbon dioxide out of the air and put oxygen back in it, which all the green things do for us for nothing!
IT’S POSSIBLE TO DO A CRUDE ESTIMATE OF WHAT IT WOULD COST US TO REPLACE NATURE. THE ESTIMATION= IT WOULD COST US $ 35 TIRILLION A YEAR TO WHAT NATURE IS DOING FOR US FOR NOTHING!!!! NOW TO PUT THAT IN PERSPERCTIVE IF YOU ADDED UP ALL OF THE ANNUAL ECONOMIES IN THE WORLD AT THAT TIME IT CAME TO $18 TIRILLION. SO NATURE WAS DOING TWICE AS MUCH SERVING FOR US AS THE ECONOMIES OF THE WORLD!!! AND IN THE MADENESS OF CONVENTIONAL ECONOMICS, THIS ISN’T IN THE EQUATION.
The wrong kind of growth reduces our quality of life. The industrial system has to be reinvented.
The problem is not a problem of too much carbon dioxide; it’s not a problem of global warming, nor a problem of waste. These are symptoms of the problem. The problem is the way we are thinking, it’s fundamentally a cultural problem. It’s at the level of our culture that the illness is happening. Unfortunately, we are hugely ignorant of the terms by which we live on the earth.
Media is really the instrument by which knowledge is passed in our society. We no longer get knowledge directly from the earth; we no longer in touch with the sources of our survival; we’re no longer growing our food or taking care of our own sustenance or learning directly from our own experience or having our family be the root of our choices. Basically, we are like astronauts in space, disconnected from the sources of the earth and we’re depending completely upon the information that is sent to us from very, very far away. We numb our senses from morning till night, whether it’s with noise or loud music or lights at night, so nobody sees the beauty; and if we’ve lost the feeling of the beauty of the world then we are looking for substitutes. YOU NEVER GET ENOUGH OF WHAT YOU DON’T REALLY WANT. We want to possess the world but we’ve lost the beauty of it already!
Human demands and expectations are ever-increasing. We can not contribute to pollute the atmosphere, poison the ocean and exhaust the land because there isn’t anymore available. We are living in a challenging time. If we don’t change what we’re doing, we are facing losing perhaps third, maybe a half of all variety of life on Earth. Many species have become extinct before us and many species will after us. Unless we cause such dramatic climate shift that will make our planet become an arid, cold planet like Mars!!! Life has existed on earth for 3.8 to 4 billion years and over that time there had been a lot of species, but you know what? 99.9999% of all species have become that have ever existed are extinct. And today we are taking down 50 to 55,000 species a year are going extinct because of us. That’s an enormous extinction crisis that we’re causing right now!!!
Today, we have a too narrow scale of thinking to address the problem that we have. We need people to be aware of the global forces that affect their lives, and that will increasingly affect their lives in the future. If this awareness doesn’t develop, we’re afraid the transition will be wrenching. What we risk is the destruction of civilization, and all that we fought for! Is the caring capacity for a happy and healthy human population in a future going away? Absolutely!!
So we find ourselves in the blink. It's clear humans have had a devastating impact on our planet’s ecological web of life. Because we have waited, because we’ve turned our backs on nature warning signs, and because our political and corporate leaders have consistently ignored the overwhelming scientific evidence. The simple reality is that we do have technology. The question is how can we use our understanding of science and technology along with our understanding of culture and how culture changes to create a culture that will interact with science and with the world around us in a sustainable fashion? Personal action is important. This problem of global warming is huge and tremendous and it may seem inconsequential to take your personal action. But actually, it is important for many reasons:
- Everybody making a change, adds up to something meaningful
- Shifting the way we act and live is a part of the solution in the long-term.
- When we act in that way, we will demonstrate to leaders that we do care
That’s what we need to do as individuals. And as the next step beyond that, is to build a political will for taking action. We need to be slower and we need to be smarter! Slower movement means disengaging from consumerism as the main avenue of experience. It doesn’t reject any consumption, but it means: we’re not gonna live our lives mediated by the marketplace or what’s being sold. We won’t make our identities and meaning based on that. Instead of the long commute, the bigger car, the bigger house, let’s enjoy the local produce, have time to ourselves, understand that things are thieves of time. Because the more things you have, the more time you have to spend working, the more your life is chained to a rhythm to get those things. The other element is the smart element. And there I think we have to reintroduce an old term before the industrial revolution, ‘’Frugality’’. Frugality doesn’t mean poverty. Frugality means the wise use of resources, because these recourses are not endlessly abundant. The United States is the world’s greatest consumer and source of waste and I think Winston Churchill had it right about the Americans when he said: the Americans always do the right thing, but unfortunately, it’s only after they’re exhausted all other possibilities. And indeed Americans have been exhausting some fairly possibilities for a long time, and I think may be they’re finally ready to get it right. Our response as individuals depends on the conscious evolution of our species and this response could very well save this unique blue planet for future generation.
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From the feature film documentary: THE 11th HOUR, on the state of the natural environment
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