Kraig Eldridge
11/9/16
Prof. Stephenson
Documentary Production
Before the Flood
Narrated and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, Before the Flood sheds light on the manmade climate of crisis of our generation. First, he visits with world leaders, then meets with scientists who are tracking climate data, and finally by visiting the already affected areas. As Leonardo puts it early in the film: “I want to see exactly what is going on and how to solve it.”
The documentary opens with a “nightmarish” religious painting in which Leonardo explains: hung over his crib as a child. Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights as Leonardo explains it. “I would stare at it before I went to sleep,” he explains. He explains further with an intimate monologue noting the motifs of the painting: “over-population, debauchery, exodus”. The painting’s third-most image depicts a “twisted, decayed, burnt landscape” in which the middle image becomes a “paradise that's been degraded and destroyed.” The entire documentary is named after this middle image – Humankind before the Flood, while the third-most image depicts what will happen to the world after the flood. This painting is a metaphor for the entire film.
Leonardo DiCaprio begins his travels around the world as UN messenger of peace on climate change – appointed by Ban Ki-moon. Although Leonardo is appointed this title, he is still heavily pessimistic about our future. “I want to see for myself exactly what’s going on and what can be done – but it all kind of seems beyond our control.” He then adds: “If the UN really knew how pessimistic I am about our future. They might have picked the wrong guy.” The scene ends with a transition to Fox News clips of the right-wing media outlet critiquing Leonardo’s scientific credibility as an environmentalist.
While working on his Oscar-winning film, The Revenant, Dicaprio explains how “it's set in the western frontier of the United States, in the early 1800s, it's basically the dawn of the industrial revolution. It has a lot to do with men who are privileging the natural world, wiping species out, and destroying cultures in the process.” The scene then shows a frontiersmen standing next to a mound of animal skulls hundreds of times his size. Leonardo clarifies the relevance of this scene, explaining that his “escape” as a child was the Natural History Museum which displayed extinct species that frontiersmen killed off which becomes symbolic of the “large scale” pollution and degradation of ecosystems in modern society. Leonardo comes face-to-face with this reality when he visits the tar sands in Canada, which used to be lush, boreal forests, and is now a mine for crude synthetic oil. The land is so vast with blackness from the oil that Leonardo says it looks kind of like “Mordor, from lord of the rings.”
“The truth is, the more I've learned about this issue and everything that contributes to the problem, the more I realize how much I don't know.” After Leonardo narrates this, an introduction to the next scene begins.
DiCaprio travels to the Greenland Ice Sheet to meet with Prof. Jason Box, a professor at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS). “We keep finding things that aren’t in the climate models. That tells me that the projections for the future are really conservative. If the climate stays at the temperature that it’s been in in the last decade, Greenland is going away.” Prof. Box explains. The professor then shows Leonardo his ice measuring equipment, which is a 30-feet long hose that used to run straight under the ice sheet, but of course it is now exposed due to the amount of melting that has happened in the last 5 years. “hundreds of cubic kilometers of ice that's no longer stored on land. It's gone into the sea.
DiCaprio highlights the victims of climate change in the next scene; coastal communities. He meets with Miami Mayor, Philip Levine, who walks DiCaprio through a new $400 million development project that is underway to reverse “Sunny-day” flooding caused by sea level rise, in which ocean water is backflowing into Miami’s drains. The mayor also highlights that this is a short term fix, which will only “fix” the problem for 30-40 years. Unfortunately, as the mayor clarifies, not all politicians share his views on climate change. Specifically, right-wing politicians and their constituent news outlets.
Michael E Mann, the director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, knows these politician all too well. Prof. Mann published what is known as, The hockey stick graph, which documents a long long term cooling trend in global temperatures, but also shows a rapid increase in more recent years. Mann did not know he what would follow this publishing: “I set myself up for a completely different life…I was vilified…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.” Mann further illustrates who is attempting to silence him and others like him. “These folks know they don’t have to win a legitimate scientific debate. They just need to divide the public. All of that hatred and fear is organised and funded by just a few players. Fossil fuel interests…finance a very large echo chamber of climate change denialism. They find people with very impressive looking credentials who are willing to sell those credentials to fossil fuel interests. Front groups funded by corporate interests.”
The scene begins with a 1958 short film from Bell Laboratory, in which early climate scientists first present the argument. “We’ve know about this problem for decades and decades,” says Dicaprio.“Imagine the world right now if we’d taken the science of climate change seriously back then. Since then our population has grown by five billion people and counting. The problem has become more difficult to solve.”
This quote is a perfect transition to DiCaprio visiting China to talk with officials about the acidic air and smog caused by China’s urbanization. DiCaprio then meets with the Director of the Centre for Science and Environment, Sunita Narain, in India. They address the most difficult problem of man-made climate change; how can India raise the standard of living for their impoverished citizens without polluting high amounts of greenhouse gases? “We care about climate change. But the fact is, we are a country where energy access is as much a challenge as climate change, we need to make sure that every Indian has access to energy.” says Narain. Leonardo then mentions that 300 million Indians still don’t have access to energy which is roughly the size of the United States, which further highlights the bigger picture of energy consumption. The scene then cuts to footage of citizens using cow dung to cook their food, which 700 million households use to cook food, this helps Narain’s next argument: “Coal is cheap,” meaning that it is the only affordable means India has of getting energy to it’s people, If those 700 million households moved to coal then “the entire planet would be fried.”
Before the Flood, addresses many issues that many people in developed nations don’t think about. DiCaprio discusses ocean life dying with marine biologists and realizes that the delicate ecosystems are already affected by human consumption. DiCaprio also discusses the destructive nature of commercialism of palm tree oil when visiting Sumatran forests. The issues all correlate to one problem, which is damaging lifestyle choices. Gidon Eshel, a professor of environmental science and physics at Bard College says that by not consuming beef can dramatically decrease the amount of greenhouse gases you as an individual are responsible for.
Eshel outlines his argument clearly: “Of all the reasons for tropical deforestation, the foremost is beef. Beef is one of the most inefficient use of resources on the planet. In the US, 47% of land is used for food production and, of that, the lion’s share is just to grow feed for cattle. The things that we actually eat – fruit, vegetables, nuts – it’s a per cent. Most importantly, cows produce methane. And methane is a powerful greenhouse gas…About 10-12% of total US emissions is due to beef. It’s staggering…Maybe not everyone is ready to eat tofu 24/7. I get that. But even if you just have to have some flesh between your teeth, if you switch to chicken, you will have eliminated 80% of what you emit, depending on where you are coming from.”
DiCaprio drives his points home in the last half of the documentary when he meets with world leaders to discuss climate change, such as Barack Obama and the Pope. Although the most influential person he meets with is Elon Musk, President/CEO/Founder of Tesla. Elon Musk gives Leonardo a personal tour of his latest project, the “gigafactory.” Elon explains that only one-hundred of these factories would be needed to power the whole world. “If all the big companies do this then we can accelerate the transition and if governments can set the rules in favour of sustainable energy, then we can get there really quickly.”
The documentary as a whole was put together very well. Leonardo makes a strong case for manmade climate change by utilizing the Three Pillars of Speaking: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Leonardo demonstrates Ethos with his celebrity status, but also with scientists, and world leaders. He then underlines the importance of changing by showing the effects of carbon emissions by documenting the affected areas. Finally, he argues that the transition to clean electricity is not hard, in fact, it’s only 99 gigafactories away from have mostly clean energy for the entire world.