The Age of Stupid: New Film Gives Us a Painfully Realistic Look at Life in 2055

[marmar]

via AlterNet:



The Age of Stupid: New Film Gives Us a Painfully Realistic Look at Life in 2055

By Sean Pool, Climate Progress. Posted March 19, 2009.

The central premise: We would be the first life form to knowingly wipe itself out. What does that say about us?



London is underwater, New Orleans won’t be rebuilt a third time, the arctic is ice free, and agriculture is failing, which leads to global food riots and ultimately the collapse of civilization…. This is the premise of the new crowd-funded British independent film The Age of Stupid.

Set in 2055, the film portrays a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by the worst impacts of climate change, and looks back at the critical period between 2005 and 2015 to examine why we didn’t save ourselves when we still had the chance.

In an opening sequence, the narrator (played by Oscar nominee Pete Postlethwaite) takes us through a montage of news reports describing visible impacts of climate change: A 101 degree day in London, 700 dead after record flooding in India, record breaking drought in Melbourne, desertification in China progressing at the rate of 3 miles per year, dozens of Antarctic ice shelves collapsing faster than anyone predicted, 18 million affected by flooding in parts of Africa, and a glacier in France having shrunk 150 meters since 1945.

The fact that the clips in this montage are all real-life news reports from 2007 and 2008 is chilling.

Indeed, although framed by a post-apocalyptic narrative set in the future, the bulk of the film is actually a documentary about the impacts of climate change that we are already seeing in 2009 — and its not pretty. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/132317/the_age_of_stupid%3A_new_film_gives_us_a_painfully_realistic_look_at_life_in_2055/

[Systematic Chaos]

1. Don't worry - renewables will save us!

eom

[tom_paine]

2. Oh, this is the Age of Stupid, all right. And the Age of Inverted Totalitarianism.

We are all to blame. Each and every one of us. We all had our part to play in the hell that is soon coming.

[GliderGuider]

3. Wisdom is a personal, individual thing, not a species trait.

What we are seeing is not the result of a lack of species cleverness, but the lack of species wisdom.

As far as I can tell, it is not likely our species will be able to become wise -- at least not within the current global psycho-cultural setting. We may be able to develop some degree of species-wide wisdom after things have changed sufficiently to force a transition, but there is no guarantee of that.

Fortunately there is a guarantee that individuals within our species can become wise, and in so doing can seed islands of sanity around themselves. Within those islands a recognition of the value of wisdom can ripple out through many people, each of whom has the potential of becoming a "wisdom seed" in their turn. The more such islands spring into being, the greater is the chance that our species will be able to make the transition once the conditions have changed enough to undermine our current cultural story.

[phantom power]

4. People go mad in large groups. They regain their sanity one at a time.

Somebody once said that on DU, somewhere.

[ConcernedCanuk]

5. Water World and Mad Max come to mind - remember Star trek was fiction, now we have the ISS

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The shuttle, cell phones, tasers, and so on



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Is this where we are headed?

With all the nukes spread around the World since the USA did Hiroshima and Nagasaki


I don't really see a good ending to all our human aggression

What we NEED is a benevolent powerful dictatorship

BUT - that ain't gonna happen

We got troubles

(sigh)