The Age of Stupid

A "green" movie advertised strictly by word-of-mouth (thanks for the heads-up Rep. Dennis Kucinich!) that tackles the issue of global warning. Documentary meets dramatization. Entered the Guinness Book of World Records for a film premiere: 400+ American cities and 60+ countries. To cut down on environmental carbon "build-up", instead of cans and cans of celluloid shipped across the country, it was a satellite link-up simulcast from New York City. Kinda cool to see live pre-screening footage on the big screen. Raleigh, Charlotte, Asheville, and Concord were the NC towns screening it. Concord it was.

Anyhoo, the trailer:



"Why didn't we save ourselves when we had the chance?"

The director was inspired by Steven Soderbergh's film Traffic, with its multiple characters and their intertwined stories concerning the drug trade. For this, there are multiple characters and their own particular stories (the wind turbine engineer, the African woman dreaming of the medical field, the entrepreneur in India and his airline startup, the Hurricane Katrina survivor, etc.) and how they relate to global warming.

Fascinating. Think Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth with added drama. Rising tall in the watery Arctic in the year 2055 is a "storeroom" of the world's antiquities and preserved animals, and one sole human prepares his computer transmission to the stars trying to fathom why we did what we did to ourselves in hopes someone out there could understand why we sentenced our entire world to extinction.

The film ended with a rather dark pallor, but luckily afterward the live feed occurred again with comments and interviews with global figures. This lightened the mood. The focus was Copenhagen in December 2009 and the update of the Kyoto Treaty. 77 days until Copenhagen. 77 days to work out a truly worldwide deal to combat this issue.

Less than 1% of scientists do not believe in human behavior affecting global warming. 2015 is the common year targeted as the pinnacle of the bell curve where the world's "healing" can begin to sweep down the curve. Afterward it may be too late to reverse the upward global temperature rise. 2 degrees yields catastrophe, 6 degrees yields extinction.

A wonderfully introspective film that causes much discussion, and hopefully changed behavior. We are seemingly living within an age of stupid. Luckily, this stupidity can be reversed.

Will we?