The 11th Hour

I have a long list of environmental documentaries in my Netflix queue, but I very rarely watch them (even though many of them are instant!). I think the reason is that they annoy me far too much. I imagine many of them are intended for people who don’t know that the environment is in trouble, but for me, I tend to tune out half of what they say (because I’ve heard it a thousand times before) and then become aggressively angry at the other half because I don’t agree with the type of solutions they suggest.

The 11th Hour was a perfect example. Leonardo DiCaprio managed to annoy me so badly I nearly turned the movie off half way through. If you are new to the environmental movement, or looking to be told what you already know for the umpteenth time, than by all means, watch this movie. This is a perfect film for those who are just getting their introduction to the concept that humans have royally screwed themselves over by destroying so much of our environment (read: our surroundings, the place that we live). It will also make the many people who believe that environmental destruction is bad but don’t want to change their lifestyles feel very good about themselves, because it promotes, unsurprisingly, the same “vote with your dollars” nonsense that ended An Inconvenient Truth.

Let’s start with the same old, it’s us and nature, and we have to save nature nonsense. I was glad that he (Leo) at least acknowledged that part of the problem is our society’s tendency to view the two as separate entities: we are part of nature, whether we like to believe it or not. But, after pointing this out, he went on to ask if nature holds the answers to our environmental crisis. I suppose he is referring specifically to the non-human part of the world, which yes, Mr. Smarty-Pants, probably holds some answers. You will notice that the non-human part of the world would be getting along very well if it weren’t for us. They must be doing something right, don’t you think?

Leo clearly thinks so, too. At least, he featured plenty of fairly uninteresting speakers who seemed to think so. But then he went on to ask what a city would look like if it was designed like a forest, and my brain nearly exploded. This particular bit boggled me so much that I will ignore his assertion that we need a “new industrial economy,” which means more regulation from the federal government and a revised tax structure, to more heavily tax those persons who pollute. It is naïve and somewhat delusional to think the government will ever tax industry more than a pittance for pollution, and will never charge them with cleaning up the mess they’ve created. Government and big industry go hand and hand, and you can be sure that no politician is going to cut off their own funding by angering big business.

But to get back to this city designed like a forest thing. If a city were designed like a forest, it wouldn’t be a city at all. This is one of those paradoxical questions. A city, apparently, according to the dictionary, is a large town or an incorporated municipality (which would technically make Chestertown a city). A forest is, well, a forest. It’s got trees, diversity, healthy soil structures… it’s self-contained… and a city requires thousands of people to be living in the same place. Usually all on top of each other, in one big building. That’s the definition. In order for a city to exist, massive amounts of resources must come from other places, to the city. Even if they invent some fabulous way of creating food in quantities large enough to feed all the people in cities, I can almost guarantee it will require some kind of technology (because we’re big fans of technological fixes), which will require some kind of metal, which will require mining, which will probably require petroleum, which is a non-renewable resource- are you seeing how this is unrelated to a forest? People in those kinds of numbers always require outside inputs, which are inherently unsustainable, which forests are not.

Not to mention the fact that forests, every few decades or sometimes hundreds of years, deteriorate and decay and burn down or fall down and go back to shrubs or prairie or what have you before growing back up into big forests again. It’s part of the cycle of life. Death, growth, change. Forests evolve. Species come and go. There are cycles.

Can you imagine a city like that? Would it still be a city? Cause I think the answer is no.

And oh, please, shut up about the voting with consumer dollars thing. It’s getting old. There are ways to create change without going out and buying more THINGS.

Besides, where’s YOUR shirt from, Leo?