I've mentioned before that Lexie is a graphic designer and works for one of the coolest ad agencies in Downtown Chicago. One of the perks of Lex's job (that we both enjoy, as it turns out) is that she/we get free tickets to movie premieres because her agency is responsible for designing and printing them, and doing all the promotions work for the new movies coming out.
Last night we went to the premiere of the new documentary feature film, An Inconvenient Truth. The star of the production is none other than the man-who-should-have-been President of the United States, Al Gore, and I thought he was wonderful. Never having paid any attention to American politics, other than what I read about in Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, I don't know whether Al Gore is anything to sing about politically. But as a plain-speaking environmental activist, he was great. He spoke personally, and with passion.
In my previous job back home, I worked on speaker programs for a number of international environmental leaders, most of whom I'd never heard of. But what I enjoyed about each of them was their ability to talk to me about the problems facing our environment in a way that I could appreciate without having to know a thing about the complicated science behind it.
And that's what this documentary did. It distilled the evolution of the earth into a 2-hour movie, and clearly demonstrated that notwithstanding some 65 million years of environmental history, the true environmental problems facing our planet have been ramping up in the lifetime of the baby-boomers. Now that's not to lay blame, it's just stating an inconvenient truth. And helping audiences to understand that we are the cause of the problem, so we should fix it.
Some of the stats and graphs were really quite scary, and I hadn't previously realised just how dangerous the environmental situation is in Antarctica and Greenland. If the ice keeps melting in either of those two regions at the rate it currently is, sea levels around the entire globe will rise by 20 feet. And that's a lot of extra water (understatement of the century). Complicating all this is the movie's revelation, and clear evidence and testimony, that the White House and NASA have been changing environmental scientific data to suit the policies of the current Administration, leading global warming to be considered a myth, not a fact. Scary stuff indeed.
An Inconvenient Truth is hard viewing, because of its relevance to each and every person in the movie theatre. The onus is quite clearly on everyone to identify his/her role in fixing our world, because it's ultimately the only one we've got. The movie doesn't coat the threat of environmental harm in fuzzy language or soft-hearted mush. It's a hard-hitting, crystal-clear look at what we're up against, and I really liked that. I also liked the fact that Gore makes it very clear that politicians are obliged to listen to their constituents for the sake of career longevity, and so Gore presses upon us all that his motivation for speaking to audiences around the globe (and through the film) is to put the environment squarely on the political agenda, and hold politicans accountable for making the policy decisions that will make the long-term changes, not just the day-to-day ones, that we so clearly need. Hurrah.
Check out the movie's website if you want to know more. You really should see this film.
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