Is it really possible to be bored by the end of the world?

Come to a FREE screening of the new film This Changes Everything, on Friday, October 23rd, 6 pm - 9 pm, at the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, 43355 Route 28, Arkville, NY - (next to the firehouse). 

The film was inspired by Naomi Klein’s best-selling book of the same name, and Klein is the film’s narrator. 

To know more about Klein’s book, you can do no better than read the New York Times book review.

We humans have important work ahead of us. See you at the screening.

"Can I be honest with you? I've always kind of hated films about climate change."

What is it about those vanishing glaciers and desperate polar bears that makes me want to click away? Is it really possible to be bored by the end of the world? It’s not that I don’t care what happens to polar bears. It’s just that we’re told that the cause isn’t out there, that it’s in us, it’s human nature. We’re innately greedy and short-sighted. And if that’s true, there is no hope. But when I finally stopped looking away, traveled into the heart of the crisis, met people on the front lines, I discovered so much of what I thought I knew was wrong. And I began to wonder: what if human nature isn’t the problem? What if even greenhouse gases aren’t the problem? What if the real problem is a story, one we’ve been telling ourselves for 400 years.

I was in a stately home in the English countryside that looked an awful lot like Downton Abbey. It was an invitation-only meeting hosted by the world’s oldest scientific organization, the Royal Society. Instead of ordering around the servants, the people here were trying to order around the sun. I mean the sun, in the sky. They were discussing a plan to spray chemicals into the stratosphere to turn down the temperature for planet earth.

Here’s the thing. This idea may be crazy but it’s also totally logical within the story that the Royal Society pioneered in the 17th century. Here’s how it goes. The earth is not, as most people thought back then, a mother, to be feared and revered. No. Science had granted men god-like powers. The earth is a machine and we are its engineers, its masters. We can sculpt it like a country garden. We can extract from it whatever we want. These scientists helped turn the mother into the motherlode. This story is where the long road to global warming began. When I realized that, I stopped tuning out those sad polar bears because unlike human nature, stories are something we can change.”

-Naomi Klein, From This Changes Everything

 

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