The Age of Stupid: a movie to launch change
Can a movie help make a difference to tackle climate change? Well, if “The Day After Tomorrow” impressed the public with a special effects scenario of a sudden new glacial era and if “An Inconvenient Truth” effectively communicated worrying scientific findings and their implications, “The Age of Stupid” depicts intelligent and emotional paintings of human and natural changing realities driving further reflection on consequences of our actions and choices.
The film is directed by the independent Franny Armstrong and interpreted by real people with the narration of Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in the devastated future world of 2055. The documentary tells us about several people’s experiences in Jordan and Iraq, New Orleans, India, The Alps, UK and Nigeria connecting climate change to its causes and effects. From the old French alpine guide describing long distance transportation of goods as completely fool to the wind farm designer unable to convince local communities in UK to install turbines in their territory, we see how difficult to overcome are economic, social and psychological inertias. Then the Indian businessman opening a low cost air company and the ex-employee in the oil sector personally hit by the hurricane Katrina make us think further about our choices and their effects on ourselves, on other people and on the planet we all live on.
Isn’t it true that every time we use the car or we buy a certain product we, in most cases, are not making our decision based on what's best for the environment? The same can be applied at a higher level, where political decissions are made based solely on the economic cost, rather than environmental impact and social implications for the future generations. The former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone said that “every single person in the country should be forcibly made to watch this movie”; actually, every citizen in the world with the means to watch it should do that and then have a think about the most recent human history. “The Age of Stupid”* is not only a movie: it is an event raising people’s awareness on the subject of climate change in a very effective and timely way because it has been broadcasted before and during the G20 in London. Many observers define the outcomes of this summit as a political success to face the global economic crisis, but further steps will be definitely needed to meet future environmental challenges together with economic problems. The same multilateralism used to give the first answers to the economic crisis will hopefully stimulate deep solutions to dramatically reduce greenhouse gases emissions in the next years.
Will the economy in the next decades become low-carbon or is it too early to tell? While the evident human inertia shows us that we are not ready for this change, the reactions of the Earth to our uncontrolled CO2 emissions suggest instead it could already be too late!
Written by Luca Marazzi for Responding to Climate Change
*http://www.ageofstupid.net/
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