As we inch toward a new term of presidency, there are a lot of different issues that will be hot topics for political discourse all over the country, from social matters to economic perspectives. If history repeats itself, there is one topic that media continuously pushes under the rug: the environment.
However, environmental issues may not be left in the dark this year. Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary “Before the Flood” hit theaters late October. The documentary tackles the impending problem of climate change. “Before the Flood” is setting records for being one of the most-watched documentaries of all time, spreading awareness to over 60 million (and counting) people. DiCaprio, one of the film’s executive producers, narrates the movie by traveling worldwide to examine the effects of climate change. If you haven’t had the chance to watch the film (that National Geographic released online for free), here are the most important things “Before the Flood” teaches us about climate change.
1. Yes, we really are melting.
In one of the early scenes of the film, DiCaprio travels to the Greenland ice sheets, accompanied by Professor Jason Box, who studies Glaciology. His studies include examining the Greenland ice sheets, and how fossil fuels affect the reflectivity of the ice. He has established that there has been a long trend of ice melting. DiCaprio is confused by a long hose on the ice, and Box explains that it’s a piece of equipment used for measuring melt: “The hose went down 30 feet, but [the ice] has now melted out. Five years of melt. Hundreds of cubic kilometres of ice stored on land that has now gone into the sea.”
2. Corporations are silencing science.
While no one would gasp at claims that mainstream media is unreliable, it may come as a shock that they have managed to cover up pure scientific fact. Corporate America is full of deniers of climate change, from right-wing journalism to various politicians. Corporations control this country, and they don’t want their businesses to be compromised by changes that may come if the majority realizes the effects of climate change. So, they will do anything possible to silence our most knowledgable sources. Michael E. Mann is a clear example of this, a scientist who serves as the director of the Penn State Earth System Center. His research includes a famous graph that shows the current rise of worldwide temperatures.
Mann’s graph was a huge stride for the science community, so of course he was a threat to corporate interest. They had to attack him personally to lessen his influence on the public. He shares his experience with DiCaprio: “I was called a fraud. I was being attacked by congressmen. I had death threats, which were actionable enough that the FBI had to come to my office to look at an envelope that had white powder [in it]. I’ve had threats made against my family. These folks know they don’t have to win a legitimate scientific debate. They just need to divide the public.”
3. Our personal choices matter.
We are far past the time when saving the planet simply meant turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth and making sure the lights are shut off when you leave the house: there are so many aspects of our consumption that play huge roles. DiCaprio meets with Dr. Sunita Narain, the director of the Centre of Science and Environment in India. They discuss the difference in energy consumption worldwide, and how America has a huge ecological footprint compared to the rest of the world. Narain establishes the conversation that needs to be had is about American consumption. If they address what they are doing wrong and change it, it will also serve as an influence for developing nations to not make the same mistakes.
Now, a complete lifestyle change definitely seems overwhelming, even DiCaprio admits to Narain that he doesn’t have the smallest ecological footprint. But being environmentally responsible isn’t limited to quitting your lifestyle cold turkey and adapting to a life of veganism and cancelling your electricity. There are smaller ways you can make a change. For example, cutting beef out of your diet can make a drastic change, since beef production is a substantial emitter of the greenhouse gas, methane. In DiCaprio’s meeting with Professor Gidon Eshel, whose studies on beef consumption have gained worldwide recognition, he states, “Even if you just have to have some flesh between your teeth, if you switch to chicken, you will have eliminated 80 percent of what you emit, depending on where you are coming from.”
4. The damage is reversible
After learning all this, you may be thinking: we’re all doomed. Well actually, we’re not. In one of the most important scenes of the film, DiCaprio meets with Dr. Piers Sellers, an astronaut who has done vast research on the climate through NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. His personal time on earth is running out due to terminal cancer, but he remains hopeful for the future generations’ time on earth.
He fills DiCaprio in on the predictions that have proven true from the research of satellites tracking the climate, but he wants to clarify that we are not helpless toward what could come. He tells DiCaprio that we have all the information that we need (“the ice is melting, the Earth is warming, the sea level is rising—those are facts”), and what we need to do now is spread awareness through eduction to make the changes needed to reverse what we’ve done. The call to action to stop burning fossil fuels will lead to the earth’s eventual cooling, and increasing Arctic ice. Sellers has a positive attitude: according to him, we can do this, and the biggest setback is that science community hasn’t managed to convince the public of the drastic environmental threats we face. He is optimistic when DiCaprio asks if there is a chance to repair our damage: “I really do have faith in people. And I think once people come out of the fog of confusion on this issue and the uncertainty on this issue and realistically appreciate it on some level as a threat, and are informed on some level on what the best action is to do to deal with it, they’ll get on and do it and what seemed almost impossible to deal with becomes possible.”
While we are slammed with the phrase “Make American Great Again,” there are tons of arguments on whether it was ever great. That is still up for debate, but we know for sure there was a time of environmental contentment of the earth, and over time humankind has contributed to destroying it. The film emphasizes that we shouldn’t sit around feeling sorry for doing that when we have the ability to turn it around. We have the knowledge now, so it is up to the efforts of the public combined with the support of various world leaderships to fix this. It is our personal responsibility to make the environment great again.