By Becky Hoag
Students file in from a rally taking place outside of the EMU, grab their popcorn and take their seats. They are a small, but passionate group of students. The logo for National Geographic lights up the projection screen in the front of the room. I join the audience and take my seat in the front of the crowd. I have been looking forward to this documentary, hoping that it will give me some advice on how to help our climate-changing world. The audience quiets down as Leonardo DiCaprio’s face appears on the screen.
Last week I attended a viewing of the new National Geographic documentary “Before the Flood,” organized by the Climate Justice League and OSPIRG. The film was released October 21, 2016.
Directed by Fisher Stevens, the documentary follows United Nations Messenger of Peace Leonardo DiCaprio around the world as he talks to scientists and politicians about the current state of our ever-deteriorating environment and what needs to be done to fix it.
In a way, this film is somewhat of an updated rendition of “The Inconvenient Truth,” one of the most famous environmental commentaries. The film follows Al Gore as he attempts to document the current state of climate change as well as its causes. “Before the Flood” follows a similar narrative by following around a celebrity activist to different parts of the world as he talks to scientists and other activists about global climate change. Since the Earth is changing so rapidly and new technology is constantly coming out, DiCaprio’s documentary updates the message and information so that people nowadays know the current state of our planet and what technology is at their disposal to help.
The title “Before the Flood” was inspired by a painting called The Garden of Earthly Delights. DiCaprio used to have this painting hanging on the wall of his bedroom growing up. It is a scene illustrated by Hieronymus Bosch and depicts three different-looking worlds.
The first panel is Garden-of-Eden-esque, showing a perfect world. The second panel, called “Before the Flood,” shows a corrupt world with the seven deadly sins. And the final panel is essentially Hell, a type of world that we do not want to get to, but are currently heading towards. The documentary was named after the second panel to exemplify where we stand as a society and a global ecosystem.
DiCaprio travels around the world, from China to the stretches of the Arctic, in order to find the truth about the cause of climate change and what is stopping us from fixing the problem.
Some of those he talked to included U.S. President Barack Obama, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Indian environmentalist and activist Dr. Sunita Narain.
DiCaprio did his best to remain humble throughout the movie, recognizing that as a celebrity, he himself has a larger carbon footprint than many.
This documentary hits on many causes of climate change, including fossil fuel burning, the beef industry and the palm oil industry. When addressing fossil fuels, DiCaprio specifically focused on a method called tar sands.
Tar sands consist of clay, sand, water and bitumen, which can be mined, extracted and refined into oil. This process requires the destruction of large areas of land. One of DiCaprio’s most quotable moments was when he was up in a helicopter with the CEO of a tar sands extraction company, looking down at a tar sands extraction site in Alberta, Canada. He bluntly told the CEO that he thought that the site kind of looks like Mordor from The Lord of the Rings, to which the CEO had no response.
In contrast, DiCaprio visited Elon Musk in Nevadan Tesla’s gigafactory, which will be up and running by 2020. This factory is projected to make 500,000 electric cars annually and batteries/cells equal to 85 GWh/yr. Musk predicts that it will only take 100 of these gigafactories to transition the whole world to sustainable energy. This statistic makes the problem of climate change seem manageable.
“Before the Flood” recommends many methods to reduce your personal carbon footprint, the United States’ carbon footprint and the world’s carbon footprint.
I would highly recommend this documentary. Climate change can seem like an overwhelming problem, but DiCaprio and his team do a good job at showing the effects of climate change while also giving us hope that something can be done to fix the problem. We just need to act now.
For more information on how to get involved, visit beforetheflood.com. The documentary film is viewable through Youtube, National Geographic, Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, Apple TV, Roku, Amazon, XBOX One, iTunes, and Google Play.