Keeping Hope by Kushal Vaghani is a silent short showing how powerful emotional connections within a family can be. Simone is crying on her father’s deathbed along with her mum. Holding her father’s palm, she recollects her childhood memories and the emotional connection with her family. Suddenly death approaches the father and Simone tries to convince death not to take the father. However, death is not perturbed by Simone’s insistence. Simone then holds the hands of her father and mother, as they(family) did during the childhood, and this emotional human connection humbles death.
The Movie Prometheus Meets Hurricane Sandy
The recent hurricane causing havoc in New Jersey, New York and the rest of the East Coast of the US generated significant media interest, and also ignited discussions about human responsibility, direct or indirect involvement in natural catastrophes and weather pattern changes. The relatively recently released film Prometheus also tries to find answers to questions on the relationship in between humanity and the natural environment. Is it possible to draw conclusions, parallels between the two?
The Movie: Prometheus
In the film Prometheus a group of scientists, bankrolled by a dying billionaire trying to find answers to eternity, trace the origins of prototype humanoids to a faraway planet, which was identified from thousands of years old cave wall paintings from many different cultures. The scientists suspect that these prototype humanoids “engineered” the present humanity, and are anxious to meet them to get answers to questions like “What is the purpose of life?” “How can we make life better?” and so on.
As they arrive to the suspected location they truly find a base where the prototype humanoids are stationed, but they find that almost all died with signs of a horrible and violent death. They also find huge quantities of a biological weapons, used to colonize planets by wiping them clean first and then terraforming on them later. But what comes to light is that the biological weapon as a result of accident was released on themselves causing their violent demise. There are also signs that before their unexpected end the prototype humanoids were ready to head for the Earth again, planning to wipe it clean and start again. Indeed as soon as the research team revived the last live humanoid in hibernation, he immediately activated his spaceship to start his flight towards Earth with his fateful mission, but the self sacrificing heroics of the research team stopped him before he could leave. The last remaining human researcher, with a partially damaged android, then started on an adventure of finding the original planet of the prototype humanoids in order to find the still missing answers…
One possible message from the movie is that the prototype humanoids, by their aggressive action of colonization, i.e. by clearing out past life-forms and then repopulating them with their own DNA, found their own violent demise as their own biological weapon of mass destruction exterminated them.
The Hurricane: Sandy
The recent devastating storm cutting a trail into the East Coast of the US is the latest presentation of an unusual and intensifying weather phenomenon, together with other natural catastrophes like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Of course whenever human responsibility is mentioned related to these natural changes, immediately there is counter-claim that much worse and more frequent such changes happened before, or that the changes are cyclical, and within the emotional debates the point is lost.
But looking at the way of life, and the general attitude humanity has been functioning with for most of its history, especially what happened in the last decades, and placing it in the context of the general living ecosystem, it is clear that humans are acting outside of the laws and principles of the vast system.
The general human attitude, the purpose and driving force of any research and exploration, is about how people can exploit the natural environment, how they can reshape it to suit their own needs. At the same time the “needs” of humanity have changed as a life of surplus and luxury has become a culturally valued norm.
Unlike other species on this planet, people are each other’s predators, exploiting, using each other for self gain, the behavior of which led to the extermination of entire cultures throughout human history… the behavior of which continues today.
The above two problems have led humanity to a crossroad: a peak point has been crossed. Today’s continued development according to past paradigms has become self destructive. This destructiveness presents itself as the increasing personal, social, economic and ecological problems taking place the world over. Today, humanity has reached the state where even without natural catastrophes, imbalances such as mass scale famine, water shortages, scarcity of natural and energy resources or even world-wide conflicts can threaten the survival of the human species.
Where Does Prometheus Meet Sandy?
The present humanity does not have the luxury of colonizing other planets as the movie Prometheus shows with regard to the prototype humanoids. But as the movie suggests, even colonizing other planets, exploiting more and more galaxies, would not save a humanity that leaves its attitudes, interrelationships and paradigms unchanged. A cancer kills the whole system and itself at the end, regardless of the size and strength of the body. In an ecosystem thriving for balance, a humanity thriving in overproduction and overconsumption is a guarantee for a violent ending.
Humanity even today possesses all the necessary information necessary for the awareness of its problem: the self centered, subjective, greedy inherent human nature driving humanity into a near dead-end. If people are wise, the present, relatively moderate crisis and natural catastrophes will be enough to initiate a self examination and a resulting self adjustment necessary for the adaptation to the natural system. If not, then Prometheus’ tale about the prototype humanoids exterminating themselves might be a prophecy that humans will realize.
Image: “Prometheus” by Lyon & Pan from Flickr
Alan Watts – A Conversation With Myself [Video]
- There seems to be a complete difference of style between the things that human beings do and the things that nature does, even though human beings are themselves part of nature
- There is an interdependence of flowers and bees. Where there are no flowers there are no bees, and where there are no bees there are no flowers. They’re really one organism. And so in the same way, everything in nature depends on everything else. So it’s interconnected! And so the many many patterns of interconnections lock it in together into a unity, which is, however, much too complicated for us to think about
- Each one of us, not only human beings but every leaf, every weed, exists in the way it does only because everything around it does
- Everything we’re doing to try to improve the world was a success in the short run, made amazing initial improvements, but in the long run we seem to be destroying the planet by our very efforts to control it and improve it
- When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way. In other words there’s something wrong with the way we think. And while that is there, everything we do will be a mess
Waking Up – An Open Source Film
Woman: There are a lot of things I haven’t told you about our world, but we don’t use money anymore in this culture, on this planet.
Man: You don’t use money?
Woman: No
Man: So you could have anything you want?
Woman: Well, yes, but we don’t want more than we need. It works pretty much the same way as your old libraries used to work, except that we can keep whatever we want or need as long as we need it. Don’t worry. You’re going to love the future. We’re one big family on this planet now!
The above script is taken from the video below, which acts as a short film that may or may not appear in the final version of the movie Waking Up.
Watch Waking Up Forest Scene
Waking Up forest scene from Harald Sandø on Vimeo.
About Waking Up
Waking Up is a open source film about a positive future for humanity, for a change. The film is in the making by several people, and you can contribute to the writing of it on wakingupmovie.com. Visit the site for more info on this film.
3 Ways The Environment Shapes Human Behavior
Many scientific researches have shown an obvious fact, that the behavior of a human being is created by the environment. If genes predispose a certain behavior but the environment doesn’t support it, then that behavior won’t manifest, so in this case, genes aren’t important.”
– TROM Narrator
The section ENVIRONMENT in the documentary TROM (The Reality Of Me) shows how the environment shapes human beings’ behaviors via:
- Scientists’ explanations of their research,
- Scenes of how certain behaviors become accepted as norms in different cultures and situations.
Watch ENVIRONMENT From TROM
How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 1:
Your Experiences Can Change Your Neural Connections
Dr. Gregory Forbes, recorded at TEDGlobal 2010:
We live in a remarkable time the age of genomics. Your genome is the entire sequence of your DNA. Your sequence and mine are slightly different. That’s why we look different. I’ve got brown eyes you might have blue, or gray; but it’s not just skin-deep.
The headlines tell us that genes can give us scary diseases, maybe even shape our personality, or give us mental disorders. Our genes seem to have awesome power over our destinies, and yet, I would like to think that I am more than my genes.
Likewise, every connectome changes over time.
What kind of changes happen?
- Neurons, like trees, can grow new branches, and then can lose old ones.
- Synapses can be created, and then can be eliminated; And synapses can grow larger, and they can grow smaller.
2nd question: What causes these changes?
It’s true; to some extent, they are programmed by your genes. But that’s not the whole story, because there are signals: electrical signals, that travel along the branches of neurons, and chemical signals, that jump across from branch to branch. These signals are called neural activity. And there’s a lot of evidence that neural activity is encoding our thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, our mental experiences. And there’s a lot of evidence that neural activity can cause your connections to change.
If you put those two facts together, it means that your experiences can change your connectome. And that’s why every connectome is unique, even those of genetically identical twins. The connectome is where nature meets nurture. And it might be true that just the mere act of thinking can change your connectome; an idea that you may find empowering.
Think about the way you act, your facial expression, the values accepted by you, the way you talk, everything, and remember that they are a result of your environment.”
– TROM Narrator
How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 2:
Male & Female Behaviors That Result From Environmental Conditioning
Louann Brizendine, neuropsychiatrist and author of The Female Brain (2006) and The Male Brain (2010), recorded at Dominican University of California, March 31, 2010
The nature nurture debate … is dead … for the following reason: the brain is very, very malleable.
We’re all born with male or female predispositions, and then we’ll have hormones that increase that circuitry for behavior, which is what a hormone is supposed to do. A hormone’s job is to make us predisposed to certain behaviors.
However, the way we’re raised, for example, little boys: Studies have shown that little boys who were told they’re not supposed to touch something, they often will grab it and touch it, whereas a little girl can be given a verbal demand not to touch it.
Little boys worldwide are punished more frequently for transgressions. Little boys are told not to cry, that they’re supposed to “man-up,” right? Even at a young age, dads sometimes are very, very scared if their little boy is showing any version of effeminate behaviors.
For example, I remember flying coast to coast with a guy who sat next to me. He said his 18 month old son, when he saw his 4 year old sister open a present earlier that week, which was a purse, he said, ‘Oh, can I have a purse too?’ And he said he found himself, like someone had kicked him in the stomach, and he just yelled at his eighteen month old son, ‘No, boys don’t have purses!’ He was reporting to me this event, and he felt so ashamed and embarrassed afterwards, because he realized that his little boy wasn’t expressing anything about being effeminate or not.
So the way we raise little boys, and we raise little girls, our brain circuits are so malleable. For example, we weren’t born learning to play the piano, right? You do practice, practice, practice.
You can retrain brain circuits, to do a variety of things. All of our life, we are trained, gender trained, to be more one way or the other.
Males: facial expressions for example, when they measure them and put electrodes on them, and show them a grizzly photograph that is supposed to make you cringe and emotional, their facial expressions, versus females, actually showed more emotional response in the time before it becomes conscious. Then right after the one second level when it becomes conscious, their facial muscles start to freeze down for frowning or smiling. In females, facial muscles actually amplify, and the males’ go down. Scientists believe, the hypothesis is, that the males have been trained to suppress an emotional feeling.
There is no such thing as: bad, criminal, lazy, brilliant people, thieves or racists. Only people predisposed to such behavior. But if the environment doesn’t trigger them, the behavior never manifests.”
– TROM Narrator
How The Environment Shapes Human Behavior. Example 3:
Children Who Lived Isolated From Human Contact From A Very Young Age
The most extreme case is represented by feral children. A feral child is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no (or little) experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language.
Feral children lack the basic social skills which are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright and display a complete lack of interest in human activity around them.
Oxana Malaya began her life living with dogs, rejected by her mother and father. She somehow survived for six years, living wild, before being taken into care. There are few cases of feral children who’ve been able to fully compensate for the neglect they’ve suffered.
Oxana is now 22, but her future still hangs in the balance. Have scientists learned enough from previous cases to rehabilitate?
For six years, Oxana Malaya spent her life, living in a kennel, with dogs. Totally abandoned by her mother and father, she was discovered, behaving more like an animal, than a human child.
For two centuries, wild children have been the object of fascinating study. Raised without love, or social interaction, wild (or feral) children pose the question: What is it that makes us human?”
Douglas Rushkoff On Today’s Culture Of Disconnection & The Need To Reevaluate Society’s Values
This isn’t just a crisis, it’s actually an opportunity, this is probably the first moment in the last couple of hundred years that we’ve had, to rebuild our society and our economy on principles that serve humanity, instead of killing life.”
We Have Become Disconnected From One Another
Douglas Rushkoff, an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, documentarian and graphic novelist, in the short film Life Inc., tells a story about what inspired him to research the American culture of disconnection:
I got mugged on Christmas eve, and I went up to my apartment and immediately posted on our local parents list the street I had gotten mugged on and when it happened, and I got two e-mails back within the hour, not from people concerned about me asking ‘Oh are you okay after you got mugged?’ but complaining that I had posted the exact spot where the mugging had taken place, because what I had done might adversely affect their property values.
It was enough of a shock that it made me want to look at the different ways we as modern Americans have become disconnected from one another, disconnected from the places we live, disconnected from the value we create, and even disconnected from our own sense of self worth.”
We’re Still Playing By The Rules Of The Past
People are accepting the ground rules of our society as given circumstances and walking around utterly unaware of the fact that these rules were written by people at a very specific moment in history with a very specific agenda in mind.”
Rushkoff tracks it all back to the Renaissance, during which monarchs decided they were going to monopolize all the value people were creating, throughout Western Europe. So instead of letting people make and create, they created charted corporations. It was a centralization of power that continued right to our own time, says Rushkoff.
He continues to the industrial age which was
really about perpetuating this dehumanizing trend … disconnecting human beings from their own labor, from their own consumption and from their own pleasure. The society that we built for the industrial age was built to mythologize the mass produced object, because we needed to create a society of consumers who thought that buying all of this stuff would somehow make them happier.”
Can You Be Happy Isolated From Others?
Rushkoff describes the process of individualization he and his family had gone through, in which the fun and spirit of community was taken away.
In America in particular we promoted the cult of the individual as the path to real happiness- that I’m going to be happy by making myself happy, when really is this whole notion of a self that’s going to be happy somehow in isolation from other selves real?
Most of us spend so much time working and consuming, that we have very little time and energy left to do anything that has to do with other people … and the more we behave as individual actors in competition with one another, the harder it is to encounter one another in a friendly way.”
Rushkoff’s Suggestion For Dealing With Disconnection: Invest In One Another
Rushkoff’s suggestion is for people to start to invest in one another and see the return in their investment in the place they actually live.
I made friends with a guy John who has a restaurant named ‘Comfort,’ and he started an expansion but couldn’t get money from the bank to finish it. So we came up with the idea for him to develop something called ‘comfort dollars,’ where for $100 you could get 120 ‘comfort dollars’ to spend at his restaurant. You get a 20% return on your investment, and he gets the money he needs to expand his restaurant cheaper than he can get it from the bank.
This is the kind of thing that people can do anywhere – to start investing in one another, with one another, and make their talents better, actually earn returns that you’re not going to get from your Smith Barney broker, I promise you that, and see the return on your investment in the place you actually live. That’s not hard to do.”
Watch The Film Life Inc. With Douglas Rushkoff
2 New Films: Occupy Love And Surviving Progress
Occupy Love: A Film That Captures The Global (R)evolution Of Compassion In Action
Occupy Love will be a moving, transformative feature documentary that asks the question: how are the economic and ecological crises we are facing today a great love story?
A profound shift is taking place all over the world. Humanity is waking up to the fact that the current system that dominates the planet is failing to provide us with health, happiness or meaning. The dominant paradigm is based on separation, as exemplified by the financial system, and the corporate emphasis of profits before people.”
This crisis has become the catalyst for a profound transformation: millions of people are deciding that enough is enough – the time has come to create a new world, a world that works for all life. We have experienced an extraordinary year of change, from the Arab Spring, to the European Summer, and now, erupting into North America: the Occupy Movement.
This is a revolution rooted in compassion, direct democracy, and shared power, as opposed to the ‘power over’ model of the corporate world view. The new story is one of Inter-dependence. Love is the movement.”
- Images and text taken from the film’s crowdfunding page on IndieGoGo
- For more information, updates and videos such as the one below, visit occupylove.org
Surviving Progress
Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, A Short History Of Progress inspired Surviving Progress, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps” – alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behavior, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.”
source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1462014/plotsummary
Watch the 2 min. trailer for Surviving Progress:
Quotes from Some of the Speakers
Ronald Wright, Author of A Short History of Progress, the book which inspired this film
“If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.”
Jane Goodall, primatologist
“Arguably, we are the most intellectual creature that’s ever walked on planet Earth. So how come, then, that this so intellectual being is destroying its only home ?”
Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist
“We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. But I’m an optimist.”
Simon Johnson, former chief economist International Monetary Fund
The bankers can’t stop themselves. It’s in their DNA, in the DNA of their organizations, to take massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries and to collapse…”
Marina Silva, senator & former Minister of the Environment, Brazil
It is impossible to defend models that cannot be universally applied because we would have to start from a premise that some people have rights and some don’t. Thus there is no technological problem, but an ethical one.”
David Suzuki, geneticist / activist
Money doesn’t stand for anything and money now grows faster than the real world. Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.”
Surviving Progress official site: survivingprogress.com
Surviving Progress Facebook page: facebook.com/survivingprogress
6 Must Watch Movies On The Global Crisis
If you haven’t been in a coma the last couple of years, then you might have noticed that the economy is crashing, food and gas prices are on the rise, and if people weren’t protesting in your city square, then they were protesting in one close by. However, as shown by the following 6 films, these instances and many others are tightly interconnected, and there are people looking into what’s causing them, where they’re leading humanity, and what can be done about them.
Collapse
The present & future forecast of the world’s problems, & how they’re forcing humanity into a new era, through the lens of Michael C. Ruppert
Meltdown: The Secret History Of The Global Financial Collapse
The 2008 financial crash and the events that followed revealed humanity’s tight global interconnectedness & interdependence
Blind Spot
Peak oil’s complex multi-crisis & its challenge upon a society rooted in generations of self-interest values
Inside Job
How the commonly held value of “maximize your profit” led to the 2008 financial crisis
Earth 2100
Crises unfold integrally, not individually, exceeding national & disciplinary borders, & forcing humanity to adopt a global approach to solving them
Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
The realization of the negative influence of a society that prominently values individual self-interest upon human development & the need to build a new kind of social influence that promotes people’s well-being
Collapse [Film]
I’m talking about a revolution that’s probably the hardest kind, the kind that takes place in the human soul, in the human mind. To be able to tear everything down, throw everything out, and start with a completely fresh paper and say… ‘okay, how do we solve this problem?’”
— Michael C. Ruppert
Collapse depicts the present and future forecast of the world’s problems through the lens of Michael C. Ruppert, investigative journalist and author of Confronting Collapse: The Crisis of Energy and Money in a Post Peak Oil World, who discusses the myriad crises humanity faces and how they are forcing humanity into a new era.
Collapse – Theatrical Movie Trailer
What Will You Do When Oil Runs Out?
Starting with peak oil, Ruppert clarifies how oil is literally everywhere in a person’s life…
All plastic is oil. Most paints, all pesticides are made from oil. Everything from toothpaste, to toothbrushes, is made from oil. There are seven gallons of oil in every tire. There is nothing anywhere, in any combination, which will replace the edifice built by fossil fuels. Nothing. Peak oil is probably now very easy to explain. Much easier than it was a long time ago. People have felt what $147 a barrel of oil feels like.”
…and how the running out of oil in the world will force humanity to make very big changes:
The end of oil is like end of the way of life. We’re hitting a new era.”
What Will You Do When Money Runs Out?
Ruppert continues by painting a bleak fade-to-black picture of the world as it heads into the future, stating the complications or even impossibility of replacing oil with the alternative energies usually proposed – ethanol, electricity, coal, nuclear, tidal and solar power – and explaining how food and monetary systems throughout the 20th century were setup in a way that would lead to a collapse of humanity’s systems, and which is being felt globally today.
The whole global economy cannot be sustained, it requires infinite growth. But infinite growth collides with finite energy. … So you have finite energy and you have a financial paradigm which demands infinite growth and we’re at the point of human history where the infinite growth paradigm collides with something that is more powerful than money is.
By 2006, I knew that the collapse was very imminent, that there would be a major implosion of the US economy. … And now, collapse is happening, these pieces are falling exactly as everything else had written, said, done. All the peak oil activists, all the sustainability advocates. Our map was proving deadly accurate. Things don’t break up, they break down.
When a government collapses, what happens? The mail stops getting delivered. Air traffic controllers don’t get paid, so they don’t go to work, which means planes don’t fly. Bridges and highway inspections don’t get made. Food and drug administration inspections don’t get made. Maintenance is going to be defrayed. Law enforcement stops working. I mean, it’s no secret now. You see the headlines every day. California’s bankrupt, Michigan’s bankrupt, Ohio… They’re shutting down services left and right. There are tent cities springing up all over the country, there are homeless, displaced people. The great many billionaires, who we would call the elites, the many very, very wealthy people are getting crashed, burned and eaten alive.
What you don’t hear is the fact that all over the world economies are collapsing much faster than the US economy. Britain is an absolute basket case. There is a curtain of despair descending across Eastern Europe. There’s a revolution underway in Greece: it’s not riots, it’s not civil unrest… it’s a revolution. Drug violence right across the border in Mexico. This is all part of the collapse. Pakistan, Afghanistan, there’s lots of violence. The people who have run the planet to this point and who are running the planet now are losing control.”
Will You Be Concerned About Humanity’s Basic Survival? Will You Try To Find Balance Among People & Nature? Will You Change The Way You Think?
Ruppert continues by discussing a paradigm shift for humanity, involving:
- The need to shift to a concern about humanity’s basic survival
- The need to find balance between people and nature in order to survive
- The need to change the way people think, which Ruppert considers as being “humanity’s greatest challenge ever”
The human race now is only going to be concerned, not with an ideology, but what allows them to survive. Capitalism, socialism and communism are all terms that need to be tossed in the trash can immediately, because all of them were created on the assumption of infinite resources. Not one of those ideologies – which are now dead dinosaurs, archaic fossils – is relevant to our way of life. Not one of them recognizes that there must be a balance between growth, the resources, and the planet.
Forget the idea that you can have as much as you want, because until mankind surrenders to the fact that it lives on a finite planet, and it must have balance with that planet, with the planet’s resources, with the animal life and all the other life, there can be no happiness for anything. Anything. It’s all about getting balance back.”
Maybe You Will If Everybody Does…
After confronting the viewer with a situation that seems impossible to solve, Ruppert’s final words in Collapse shed a thin beam of optimistic light, hinting that when 10% of the human population realize a change of thinking, then that thinking will spread to the entire human population.
There is a legend, or a fable about the 100th monkey. A long time ago, in the late ’40s, early ’50s, when atom bombs and H-bombs were invoked with above ground testing, we set off an atom bomb on an atol in the Pacific. And then we waited a number of years, because we wanted to answer questions like how soon after we nuked something, would it be possible to get any kind of life started again? So they went back to this island and they decided to repopulate it with monkeys. And the monkeys ate coconuts. Everything was pretty healthy, except for the fact that the husks of the coconut were slightly radioactive. So the scientists took 10 monkeys or so, and taught them to wash the coconuts in the fresh water stream on the island before they cracked them open, and turned the whole thing loose to see what would happen. Well, you know, pretty soon maybe 12 monkeys out of a population of 10,000 were washing their coconuts. And then 20, and then 47. But a funny thing happened. As soon as the 100th monkey started washing his coconut husk, all 10,000 started washing simultaneously. I guess one way that I have always looked at my life, especially since I clearly understood what this issue was in late 2001, is – this is my quest for the 100th monkey.”
Collapse – Watch It & More
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Earth 2100 [Film]
Based on current scientific research and expert views about the accumulating crises humanity is expected to face over the coming century, Earth 2100 is a predictive portrayal of the century through the life of Lucy, a fictional woman born in the U.S. in 2008.
No Crisis Exists On Its Own
Earth 2100 paints a picture of the global crisis’ tight interconnectedness, how no one crisis exists on its own and cannot be dealt with in a pin-point manner. What the film shows is that:
- an oil crisis becomes a food crisis,
- they both connect to increase climate change and global warming,
- which increases drought and affects a water crisis,
- bringing about famine and thus, mass immigration of people seeking food and water,
- as well as deforestation and mass animal and plant extinction,
- rising sea levels and thus, floods,
- which then bring about outbreaks of infectious diseases,
- and this all becomes intensified by rapidly increasing human population, increasing worldwide consumption demand and natural disasters.
The Need To See Things At A Global Level
In presenting this complicated global crisis tangle humanity is expected to face, i.e. many individual crises as one global, integral crisis, Earth 2100 fundamentally proposes the need for a change in people’s approach to the world, from approaching problems locally and nationally to approaching them globally. As mentioned toward the film’s close:
[By 2100] we’re going to have joint management of water resources, of energy resources, of disaster management. We’re going to be living on a planet where we don’t see things at a national level, but we see things at a global level.”
–Peter Gleick, Ph.D., world renowned water scientist, President and co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security
By the time we get to 2100, the challenge of building a global, green economy where we’re sharing technologies and where we’re not fighting wars over water and oil… That’s going to bring out the best in the human family.”
–Van Jones, senior fellow at the Center For American Progress and a senior policy advisor at Green For All
That’s if we move in a positive direction. However, Earth 2100 also points out a major threat if the change toward a global, integral approach to the world is not met in time. This would result in much suffering, verging on the brink of civilizational collapse.
If we continue on the business as usual trajectory, there will be a tipping point that we cannot avert. We will indeed drive the car over the cliff.”
–John Holdren, advisor to President Barack Obama for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Watch Earth 2100 (in 9 parts)
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