The Age of Stupid

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.nature.com/climate/2009/0903/full/climate.2009.14.html

Books and Arts

Nature Reports Climate Change
Published online: 5 February 2009 | doi:10.1038/climate.2009.14

Film: Time capsule

Anna Barnett

Will future generations condemn our sluggish response to climate change?

The Age of Stupid

Spanner Films: 2009

Hindsight is 20/20, and looking back from a global catastrophe ought to make it sharper still. Small comfort for survivors, like The Age of Stupid's narrator. On a ruined Earth in 2055, holed up in the fortress-like Global Archive, the film's fictional guide — played with gravitas by Pete Postlethwaite — trolls back through actual news clips and documentary footage captured 50 years earlier, trying to find out what went wrong.

Back here in the 2000s, the more talk there is about curbing greenhouse gas emissions, the more they continue to grow. In a poll by the Washington DC-based Pew Research Center last month, Americans ranked climate change as the lowest priority on a list of 20 problems. There's no knowing yet whether society will change its course in time to avoid the worst impacts of global warming. But for Postlethwaite's archivist, the only remaining question is why we failed to save ourselves. The Age of Stupid taps into this retrospection to explore how today's world is facing up to its uncertain future.

The film's most direct answers about what's delaying the response to climate change come in brisk, spunky animations fingering Big Oil, consumerism and global inequity. But its documentary strands are focused at much closer range, on several more or less ordinary people. There's a Nigerian would-be doctor in a Shell Oil-dominated village; an American paleontologist working for Shell who lost everything in Hurricane Katrina; an Indian tycoon starting the country's first low-cost airline; refugee Iraqi children who mend and resell Westerners' discarded shoes; a wind-farm planner battling the recalcitrant local council in Britain; and the oldest mountain guide who still climbs the deglaciating French Alps.

This is not a climate science documentary. Director Franny Armstrong has credited Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth with bringing filmgoers up to speed on the problem of climate change. Indeed, the archivist's mournful shuffling through TV news fragments suggests how many times the audience has probably heard that human-caused emissions are warming the planet.

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The Age of Stupid opens in the UK on 20 March 2009 and internationally in May 2009 (http://www.ageofstupid.net).

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