Countdown to Extinction

Tell me not, friar, that thou hear'st of this, Unless thou tell me how I may prevent it: If, in thy wisdom, thou canst give no help, Do thou but call my resolution wise, And with this knife I'll help it presently.

"How is this one better than the other one?"

This is what I heard one critic mutter as the lights went down on a screening of the latest documentary of climate doom, The 11th Hour. I knew just what he meant. The last one featured Al Gore, won an Oscar, and miraculously shifted the tide of public opinion toward the climate change yea-sayers (that is, the broad range of scientists not paid by ExxonMobil to insist that even if Greenland is melting, it isn't because of us). It was a movie that enlightened legions, scared many and galvanized a few, but also left us limp and powerless in our seats, unsure of how to transport our bodies home afterward without ruining everything completely and forever. I mean, this guy was the vice president, for God's sake: If he couldn't do anything to stop climate change, how can we, in our puny little everyday lives, possibly compete?

It didn't help that An Inconvenient Truth wound down with titles against a black screen suggesting we all switch to hybrid cars and screw in compact fluorescents throughout our modest homes. In fact, it made things worse. It made it appear as if the film's producers, director, and even Gore himself were unaware that nothing short of a far-reaching political solution—like mandating that wind and solar replace fossil-based fuels—will reverse our lethal course. Think we can do it, folks? Uh, no.

Personally, I doubted I could take that again. With no disrespect to the former veep, I didn't need to be told once more of drowning polar bears, hypoxified oceans, or desertified forests. Nor did I need yet another reminder of how the sun's stored fossil energy, released in the form of petroleum and coal, has coated our planet with such a fog of carbon dioxide that heat can no longer escape. Or that our droughts have grown longer, our storms more violent, and floods more frequent as the Earth's climate responds to this creeping shift in temperature. And I don't happen to believe it will help much if we all set our AC to 78 degrees and drive our Mini Coopers 55 miles per hour unless our world leaders also agree to embrace and enforce huge, realistic solutions—solutions even a U.S. vice president could enact were he but in office.

On this, The 11th Hour doesn't start out well. Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio—a superb actor but oddly dispassionate as an authority figure—and directed by Leila Conners Petersen and her sister, Nadia Conners, The 11th Hour parades a dizzying crew of talking heads across the screen, intercut with horrifying shots of factory-farm animals and F4 tornadoes and gooey black effluent flowing into pristine oceans. It lines up scientists such as Stephen Hawking and NASA's James Hansen—a climate expert the Bush administration notoriously fought to silence—with more progressive visionaries such as author and radio host Thom Hartmann, who rightly warns that the buildup of carbon dioxide in our delicate earthly atmosphere is only the most conspicuous symptom of our biosphere's malignant disease. Indeed, the film stresses, we are not just warming the planet but also destroying habitats and poisoning soils, filling large pits in the ground with toxic waste and squandering supplies of fresh water. In the process, the species we most endanger may be our own. "The environment is going to survive," advises one expert, Kenny Ausubel. "It's us that's not going to survive."