|
| The 11th Hour | 
 enlarge | Directors: Nadia Conners, Leila Conners Petersen
Actors: Leonardo Dicaprio, Thom Hartmann, Kenny Ausubel, James Woolsey, Wangari Maathai
Studio: Warner Home Video
Category: DVD
List Price: $4.99
Buy New: $3.41
You Save: $1.58 (32%)
New (50) Used (12) Collectible (1) from $3.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  53 reviews
Sales Rank: 2767
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dvd-video, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled)
Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Number Of Items: 1
Running Time: 95
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 6.2 x 0.1
MPN: WARD026941D
UPC: 085391183518
EAN: 0085391183518
ASIN: B00005JPXA
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
Release Date: April 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Ships Next Business Day!
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Very Best Combination of Brains, Images, and Words April 20, 2008
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
Unlike National Geographic: Six Degrees Could Change the World and National Geographic: Human Footprint, both of which I recommend, this DVD is a very elegant narrative that blends top ecological activists including Stephen Hawking and Paul Hawkins, speaking for a minute or two each, with historical audio-visuals that have been selected with enormous intelligence and integrity.
If you buy only one film, this is the one, but the issue is so very important I would recommend that each of three families buy one of these, and then start passing them around the neighborhood.
The movie opens with a theme of the planet being sick--two complex systems, one human, one all else, are interacting in pathological ways. Man, in being able to think about the future, while also ignoring the limits to growth and maintaining the fiction of being separate from nature, is committing species suicide.
Mankind used to live on current sunlight, which can only sustain up to one billion people. It was the industrial and agricultural era that began to draw down on "stored sunlight" in the form of petroleum and natural gas that set off a race to grow that led to climate change and especially global warming. 20% of the polar ice is gone; catastrophic weather is 50% more often or 50% more powerful. The amplification effect of human misbehavior is creating more and more loss. See The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System; To Govern Evolution: Further Adventures of the Political Animal; and Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
I have a note to myself, this is stark elegant poetry.
The oceans are discussed in terms of our taking out too much (e.g. over-fishing) and putting in too much (toxins and non-biodegradable matter), and at the same time, toxins get concentrated in the food chain and come right back to us. See Blue Frontier : Saving America's Living Seas
Water that is poisoned ultimately poisons the human species. See
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink
Toward the end we get to the cruz of the matter, that corporate greed and control has gone global, and the legal systems, the political systems, are hostage to that greed. The Earth--nature--has been commoditized, as have humans (never mind the corruption that allows corporations to loot foreign commonwealths at the same time that Exxon externalizes $12 in "true costs" to future generations for each gallon of gas it sells).
One speaker is very capable in pointing out that this is neither a technology crisis nor even an ecological crisis, but rather a crisis of political policy and a process that has broken down completely. The government "bridge" between the commonwealth and the people, and the economy, has falled down. In the next sentence the problem is defined as our CULTURE, with everything else being a symptom. This was for me a defining moment within this DVD. It's not about evil--Exxon does what we let them--it's about what we choose to do or not do as a culture.
Probably citing E. O. Wilson, but without reference to him (he should have appeared in this movie, see his book The Future of Life, one speaker notes that the value of what nature does for us (e.g. bee pollination of crops) has been estimated at 35 trillion dollars a year--vastly more than the 18 trillion that comprises the global economy.
The DVD concludes with an excellent combination of individual statements on how this IS the ecological era, we can reimagine our lives, if we just retrofit all buildings to make them energy efficient it would create 3 million jobs in the US and free us from dependence on foreign oil. We can live with one tenth of the resources we consume now.
[Coincidentally, this was the week that TIME Magazine went green, and while I was watching the movie I was also finishing up Jesse Ventur's book Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! in which he recounts his realization that simply unplugging all the TVs in America when not in use would end US energy shortages.]
Di Caprio closes, and I write in my notes: eloquent, inspriing, statesmanlike, learned. He--and all those associated with this project--have it it out of the park. This is a deeply impressive contribution to the public dialog on our future as a species and as a planet.
See also my varied lists. There are a number of books in the cradle to cradle, sustainable design, green to gold, natural capitalism genre, the one that captures the spirit of this DVD and complements it is, in my view, Paul Hawkin's Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beau, which he describes as the Earth's immune system kicking in.
Excellent viewpoint on conservation and ecology. August 31, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
There are so many nasty comments about this before it even comes out, what kind of people want to attack ideas before they even know what they are?
I wanted to see this movie ever since I have seen the previews of it almost a year ago.
This movie follows in the format of the documentary "The Corporation" in that is has brief interview excerpts from lots of very bright people all talking about what humanity is doing to the Earth.
One focus in on temperature. Global Warming, Climate Change call it what you will, the concensus is explained to people in a way non-scientists can understand by scientists. One example is how the polar ice caps function to reflect some of the heat radiation from the Sun away from Earth out into space. As we warm the planet the polar ice caps melt and we lose this balance so that not only do we not reflect heat to space, we actually absorb more heat causing a positive feedback look. This system can push us past a tipping point from our nice comfortable zone of termperate stability into an unknown weather system that could conceivably take up to the extreme of our other to solar neighbors, Mars or Venus.
Another focus of this movie is human population which we all know is a problem. The problem is explored in terms of the net energy use by our species and the need to "mine" stored solar energy in the form of oil/coal since we surpassed the number of humans the Earth can comfortably support living on current solar energy the way we used to live in non-technological times.
Then some solutions are explored, and new terminology is explained. I have been familiar with these ideas and terms for a long time, but I was glad to see a well done popular explanation of them in documentary form that was not a political diatribe and in fact almost had a spiritual twist to it. Because that is what is going to be needed because as most scientists agree not only are we in the 11th hour, we are at the 59th minute of that hour and counting.
Humanity has to move fast, and it has to do something it has never done before and may not be capable of doing, and that is to change our nature and act like the intelligent creatures we purport to be rather than the unthining animals who foul their nests and destroy their habitat.
Someone is paying attention......Thank you..... December 7, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Thank you Leonardo diCaprio and all those involved in making this film and bringing it to the people's attention. I live in Alaska, the effects of our warming planet is before my eyes every day. The sink-holes here (created by melting perma frost) are getting bigger, big enough to swallow trees and small sheds. I pass two glaciers on my way to Anchorage every month; For the past 15 years the glaciers that use to be very close to the road have receded back about mile. There is black mineral where glacial ice once stood; and for the past 10 years our politicians in Juneau have been telling people in Washington "there is no scientific evidence of global warming" (our Juneau politicians are in bed with the oil barrons) I ask you, does one need "scientific evidence" when the effects grow before our eyes daily? My fear has been that people outside (lower 48) would believe the politicians from Alaska. One of our city mayors is smarter than our politicians in Juneau; he invited some people from "outside" to come and see for themselves, the bare ground that has never been seen before. There are many more signs of too much warming. My Great Grandmother used to say "when there is no more land for them to take, they will take it away from their children." This film tells the truth about how the land is being stolen from the children. I was paying so much attention to the message that I did not notice the technical aspects of dialogue, staging, lighting, or any of that other stuff.
Still have five minutes February 25, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The movie is a powerful outcry to the passive behavior and disbelief that each of us can make a difference in saving our home, our planet, our children, and even maybe ourselves. We made changes to the climate almost to the point of no return. Only drastic change in our attitude, government policies, and actions can soften or slowly reverse these changes. The movie is a very vivid presentation of the above ideas. It has passion. It has life.
 Naive and simpleminded effort. No mention of human overpopulation. And endorcing biofuels? Seriously? May 2, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful
There was no mention of the human race trying to control its spiraling population. Human overpopulation has now become the Problem more than anything else. They made a mention of there being twice as many people today as there were when Kennedy was president. Their hopes for the future of technology are just too hopeful. They put me vaguely in the mind of old science fiction novels that assumed by the year 2000 humans would have colonized Mars and all of us would me moving around via individual jet packs. Even if eventually possible, the technology they mention can only raise our carrying capacity for a very short while. (For more information about this, google Albert Bartlett. He has some amazingly entertaining video lectures that are sure to please you.) Consider that when the deer population in American woodlands increases to a certain level, hunting is encouraged by the government to reduce the deer population. The argument against animal rights groups is thus: the deer that will survive hunting season will have more food and will therefore be healthier. Since the makers of this documentary consider us part of nature, they need to realize that the planet cannot sustain more human population growth.
We NEED negative human population growth NOW.
If the human population continues to grow, there will be dire consequences. In the words of the famous Isaac Asimov, "Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters."
Moreover, I begin to question the whole intelligence of this documentary because of their (granted very brief) endorsement of biofuels. Everyone knows that biofuels are very bad for the environment, considering how much deforestation will have to be accomplished in order to grow corn and soybean to turn into fuel. Not to mention that biofuels are driving up food prices, causing more and more people to starve.
UPDATE
I just finished watching Anderson Cooper's Planet in Peril (2 DVD set). It is fantastic and you should watch it instead of this documentary.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
