Tag Archive: Climate change


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

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

WINTER TURKEY

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

“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

REDNECK ROCK RANT

Call me a dumb bitch fucking commie liberal democrat hippie politically correct tree-hugging faggot but I think Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘That Ain’t My America’ sucks.

These are the kind of charming epithets that pepper message boards in response to any who dares to make perfectly accurate comments like “this is a song about a stupid redneck who can’t understand, much less adjust to, the changes that are going on all around him”.

The You Tube comments are brimming over with vitriol for those who diss this tune.
Here’s a particularly rabid one (typos left intact):
“die scum with yyour stinking comments i bet u r not here legally i wud like to get my hands on u and pour gas down your throat and light u up !!!!!! go suck on your fellow moslem non citizens dick scum lots of christian americians r waking up and it will result in all moslems thrown out or killed just like ferdinand and isabella did in spain !!!!!!!!!YOU AND YOUR FELLOW TRAVELLERS WILL GET YOURS SOONER THAN U THINk die die die!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Hard as it is to argue such well-reasoned , persuasive arguments, I would like to take a few moments to reflect on what this song is saying. Continue reading