The Age of Stupid

I've just come home after going out to see the global premiere screening of "The Age of Stupid". And I was pretty speechless afterwards.

Here's the synopsis:
'The Age of Stupid' is the new cinema documentary from the Director of 'McLibel' and the Producer of the Oscar-winning 'One Day in September'. This enormously ambitious drama-documentary-animation hybrid stars Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite as an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching 'archive' footage from 2008 and asking: why didn't we stop climate change while we had the chance?



It was the kind of film that you instantly feel like making all your family and friends sit down and watch. Urgently. It also made me feel somewhat smug & relieved about my choices to be vegetarian, ride a bike, live in a tiny compact apartment close to everything, buy from thrift stores, and not own a car...Ah, my smugometer levels rising.

But it also made me feel really really crapola about all the dozens and dozens of flights I've taken over the years, the abundance of electronic gadgetry that we own and have come to rely on (should I have not felt a twinge of guilt for checking the length of the film on my iphone before the film started?), and the fact we chose to have an international wedding earlier this year and spewed forth huge carbon emissions by asking people to fly great distances to be there..

{Now I want to go out and plant a forest full of trees to make a new carbon sink somewhere. Yes I should...and I will. Remind me to join Big Al's next Land Care planting session. And ensure that the 80 native trees that Ben and I earmarked for Wairakei Terraces actually get planted some day soon.}

But seriously, it just served to remind me -- in a VERY compelling way, the kind that slaps you in the face and stings with bleeding obviousness -- that we can't afford to be stupid about climate change. It's goddamn scary stuff.

The film also had the effect of pinching me on the arm as if to say - hey you, don't spend all your time focusing on narrow academic stuff like debating theories of civilian protection, working on edited volumes on human rights violations that take 2 years to produce, and writing policy briefs about democratic consolidation or refugee resettlement that will probably have hardly any impact on anyone....because the Real Story of our times is that Peace and Security desperately needs to be more closely linked to Environment and Climate Change issues. And there are not enough people out there proactively making those links, and bringing those specialists, thinkers and policy-makers together.

Peace AND Sustainability. Now I've just got to figure out how exactly I can make a difference...

I don't suppose the fact that I practically growled at the woman behind the shop register tonight for wrapping my 4 pieces of fruit in 2 plastic bags and then binning them when I told her I didn't need a bag is a particularly good way of starting. No points for peacebuilding there.

For the time being, here's how we can be NOT STUPID.
http://www.notstupid.org