Tag Archive: Climate change


NAOMI KLEIN’S PEOPLE SHOCK

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February 1, 2015

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING by Naomi Klein (Allen Lane, 2013)

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding” – Upton Sinclair.

Alternative titles to this brave and important book could have been ‘Everything Must Change’, ‘Everything is Fucked’ or even more despairingly, The End Is Nigh.

Whatever way you look at the situation that Naomi Klein presents, it is clear that humanity is well and truly up shit creek climate-wise.

It would nice to report that this book also provides us with some metaphorical paddles but, sadly, this is not the case.

Klein presents the scale of the problem but in terms of solutions ultimately offers only a faith in the essential resilience of the human spirit. Continue reading →

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INTERSTELLAR: DON’T LEAVE US THIS WAY

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November 13, 2014

INTERSTELLAR directed by Christopher Nolan (USA, 2014)

interstellerShould we stay or should we go?

Brion Gysin , the English-born painter and poet who introduced William S Burroughs to cut-ups believed that leaving the planet was the only thing that gave any purpose to life on earth; “we are here to go”, he said.

This perverse notion is one that Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan transform into the interstellar overdrive of their extraordinary cinematic vision – a space odyssey of epic proportions.

Reasons to go are indeed pressing since Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable with crops literally turning into dust. We are not privy to the precise reason for this state of affairs but Professor Brand (Michael Caine) alludes to humankind’s selfish tendencies as being a primary cause. This is also something Naomi Klein, in her book This Changes Everything, has rightly identified as a key factor in climate change.

If, as seems probable, the future of humankind is due to the largely man-made catastrophe of global warming, it begs the question as to how we are going to prevent fucking up another planet too. The mysterious Eureka solution that saves the world suggests that a last-minute reprieve is possible; a central message that is as delusional as it is dangerous. Continue reading →

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ICE ON THE RUN

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August 2, 2013

CHASING ICE directed by Jeff Orlowski (USA, 2012)

Scientists can show us charts, produce statistics and even talk about the real possibility of a ‘mass extinction event’  but it is hard visual evidence that real makes you see that global warming is real.

The astonishing work of nature photographer  James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey shows what Balog calls the  “miraculous horror” of what is happening.

By documenting the collapse of glaciers in Greenland, Iceland and Alaska with time-lapse pictures we can see with our eyes what no-one has ever witnessed before.  The images are beautiful but terrifying. Continue reading →

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WINTER TURKEY

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May 3, 2012

THE LAST WINTER directed by Larry Fassenden (US, 2006)

He died with his boots on. Ed, about to meet his comeuppance.

The Last Winter is a  dumb climate change horror/disaster movie with malevolent nature getting its revenge against mankind.

North Industries are out drilling oil  in a remote  Alaska base  and Ed Pollack is head of the team.  Having him as the leader is a disaster in itself even before all manner of crazy shit starts happening.

This is a quite preposterous performance from the cartoonesque Ron (Hellboy) Perlman as Pollack. He’s a macho maverick  who is not interested in following rules or any of that “global warming bullshit” . He spends the whole movie barking orders and telling everyone they need “an attitude adjustment”. Continue reading →

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SOLAR ECLIPSED BY FAT MAN

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June 23, 2011

“How do we engage with global issues like climate change, AIDs and poverty when we’re so inept at managing ourselves?”  This is a question Ryan Roberts posed to Ian McEwan during an interview in London on 12th June 2008 , conducted for the book ‘Conversations with Ian McEwan’.

McEwan responded by saying that he sees cause for hope despite the huge challenges facing the planet but this means we have to think outside the box and modify our inclination for selfishness and short-termism. We have to start “doing favors for unborn people” he said.

This question was prompted with reference to McEwan’s essay about his experiences on an expedition to the Artic with Cape Farewell in February 2005. That trip to Spitsbergen was, as he confirms in the acknowledgements, the starting point to the novel, Solar.

The novel’s central character Michael Beard, is a Nobel Prize winning scientist who wants to do something about climate change but is constantly thrown off track by his own weaknesses and faults.

At the start of the novel (in 2000), he is in the middle of the wreckage of his fifth marriage. Beard, we soon learn, has an insatiable appetite for fattening food, good wine and fine women.

His obsessive womanizing borders on sex addiction. However fulfilling a relationship is, he finds it impossible to remain faithful and cannot resist the temptations of the flesh.

In the opening lines of the novel he is described as “a man of narrowed mental condition, anhedonic, monothematic , mathematic, stricken”. I confess that I had to look up the adjective ‘anhedonic’ , and found that it derives from the word ‘anhedonia’, meaning “an inability to experience pleasure”. This actually directly contradicts a later description of Beard as man who takes his pleasures seriously. Continue reading →

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