Original subtitles

(slow, quiet drumbeat)

(wind whistling softly)

(wind whistling)

(amplified heartbeat)

(wind roars)

(heartbeat continues)

(tornado roaring) (garbled radio transmission)

(transmission fades)

(heartbeat continues) (creatures chittering)

(loud crashing)

(wind rushing) (garbled radio transmission)

(clamoring)

(amplified heartbeat continues)

(amplified breathing)

(electronic squeak)

(garbled radio transmissions) (flames roaring)

(electrical crackling)

(woman singing plaintively)

(static crackling)

(plaintive singing continues)

(thunder crashes)

(artillery booms)

* *

(electronic tone shrieks)

(wild, pulsating electronic music plays)

(plaintive singing continues over wild electronic music)

(tree trunk cracking)

(plaintive melody continues) (rumbling)

(melody echoes, fades away)

(gentle orchestral music plays)

(music grows louder)

You know, when you look at the history of humanity,

it's basically this great relationship

between the two most complicated systems on Earth:

human society and...nature,

and whether people have, in fact,

lived in a good balance in that regard,

and when they don't, they're gone.

And, you know, at the end of the day,

when we all talk about saving the environment,

in a way, it's misstated, because the environment

is going to survive--we're the ones who may not survive,

or we may survive in a world

that we don't particularly want to live in.

Our biosphere is sick.

We have a...a planet

that's behaving like an infected organism.

If you look at it from outer space,

you see all these lights, and it's the lights of...

of planet Earth, it's the lights of the people,

but it's also almost like looking at an organism

that has an infection on it,

that is forming a crust of some kind.

Well, I don't only think that the biosphere is in trouble,

I know it is.

I just have to look around in the environment

in which I live.

What I hear in my dreams

is generations in the future screaming back to us in time,

saying, "What are you doing? Don't you see?"

We are at this critical point in time, and we've evolved

to be the leaders of our biological community,

and we are misleading.

We are...we are causing the devastation

to our very foundation of our life system

that has given us birth.

And we are ultimately committing suicide.

So as we destroy nature,

we will be destroyed in the process.

There's no escaping that, uh, that conclusion.

(distant sirens blaring) (steady percussive beat)

LEONARDO DiCAPRIO: Earth's life-support system's damaged,

the human species at risk.

Could this be true?

In this film, we've reached out to independent experts

on the front lines

of what could be the greatest challenge of our time--

the collapse of our planet's ecosystems,

and our search for solutions to create a sustainable future.

So...if we look for the cause of this planetary destruction,

what would we find?

We would find a global civilization

created by the human mind--

a mind that has evolved to have the ability

to reflect back on ourselves,

to take stock of our own existence,

a mind able to discover quantum physics,

explore outer space, and peer into our own DNA.

But beyond our stunning intellectual

and technological advances, we would also see

our large-scale impact on our home,

planet Earth.

Now, ecological disasters are rarely covered,

but when they are, they're depicted as isolated incidents

by the media.

But if we connect these events,

will we find a larger story that needs to be told--

a human story?

And more so than that, a global understanding

that takes into account who we are

and the state of our relationship to this planet,

our only home.

STEPHEN HAWKING: Life on Earth is possible

only because a number of parameters

lie in certain very narrow ranges.

Some of these

are clearly environmental,

like the Earth has the right temperature and pressure

to have liquid water.

OREN LYONS: Creation is the universe.

Creation is everything that we can see

and probably a whole lot that we can't;

probably more that we can't see.

But it's what's about us,

and it's the...relationship,

this amazing, uh, web of life that we have here.

ANDY REVKIN: Well, Earth, um, is a planet that's...

just far enough from the sun

and has just enough of an atmosphere

of a certain composition that, um,

more heat stays here than radiates out to space,

and the sun warms the planet, and that heat radiates out,

and there's gasses in the atmosphere

that have always trapped some of that heat.

And that's why, uh, we're not an ice ball.

And there have been scientists who compared this whole business

of the different planets going away from the sun

as being, like, the Goldilocks Effect--

there's one that's too cold, one that's too warm

and one that's just right,

and we just happen to be there.

PAUL HAWKEN: 40 million centuries ago,

a cell formed, and that cell had a gene,

and that gene is a password

to every single other form of life there is.

And the amazing thing about the human body

is it has 100 trillion cells, and 90% of them

are not human cells-- they're fungi and bacteria,

microorganisms--and the thing that makes us human

is not human.

So within us is, basically, the backstory of life on Earth,

right to that first original cell 40 million centuries ago.

and if you could, for a moment, stop and feel

what is happening in your body,

there are six septillion things going on at the same time.

That's a six with 24 zeros after it, okay?

Going on right now, right this instant,

as you sit in your chair, and then in the next instant,

within ten seconds, a hundred more things have happened

than in all the stars and planets and asteroids

in the known universe in your body,

and that is called life.

JANINE BENYUS: Homo sapiens sapiens

is an incredibly young species.

We don't think of that, but we are.

We're...You know, we... we came very late

in the calendar year of the Earth, you know?

If the Earth, uh, calendar,

you know, where it started in January 1,

and now we're December 31.

We got here 15 minutes before midnight on December 31,

and all of recorded history

has blinked by in the last 60 seconds.

Perhaps the best description of what we are

is, as Jared Diamond puts it, "the third chimpanzee."

There are two kinds of chimpanzees, and there are us.

But in some ways,

we are extraordinarily special, and the most obvious one is

our extraordinary ability to make tools,

our extraordinary ability to communicate, to have...

very detailed discussions with each other.

So we are fundamentally

groups of, uh, animals,

randomly scattered throughout the planet,

slowly...coalescing in, uh, groups

that are more, uh, powerful, larger,

and very much conditioned

by two essential characters.

One is, um, opportunism,

and the other one is greed.

All the animals

and vegetables are opportunistic creatures.

They do what's necessary

for them to do in order to survive.

I think it was the human mind, basically,

that threw us out of balance with the rest of nature.

The tragedy is that it was the human mind

that was the key

to our very survival.

Now, when you think that we evolved in Africa

about 150,000 years ago,

and compared to the other animals that must have been

on the plains at that time, we weren't very impressive.

We weren't very many,

we weren't very big, we weren't gifted with special senses.

Um, the one thing, the key to our survival

and our-our, uh...

taking over the planet was the human brain.

But because the human mind invented

the concept of a future,

we're the only animal on the planet

that actually was able to recognize

we could affect the future by what we do today.

We look ahead,

recognize where the opportunities are,

where the dangers lay and choose, accordingly, to survive.

That was a great survival strategy of our species.

DiCAPRIO: If the human mind threw us out of balance

thousands of years ago, what changed in recent history?

In the last century, we have dramatically increased

our impact on planet Earth.

One element has emerged

that has made us even more destructive,

accelerating our disconnection

and causing extensive damage to our climate

and all other natural systems.

There's a fundamental, um, illusion in the world

that somehow people are separate from nature,

when the reality is that we are part of nature;

in fact, we are nature.

And that's probably the most fundamental,

uh, misunderstanding in the world

that's causing all this-this havoc.

THOM HARTMANN: I think one of the reasons

why it's so difficult for people to get it,

that we're connected with nature, and to even understand

the fundamentals of eco-literacy

is because, in many ways, it flies in the face

of the assumptions of our culture.

Our culture is built on the assumption

that we are the superior life-form on Earth,

that we are separate from all other life-forms,

that we have been given dominion

over all other life-forms.

But even to think that we're separated from nature

is somehow a thinking disorder.

You can't be separated from nature.

Why we think that way is the interesting thing.

What happens in the mind that likes to think

that it's separated from nature?

Does that mean that the mind or the human being

thinks he's now more free?

We're totally living

in disharmony with the planet,

and, um, not just the planet-- beyond the planet.

I mean, we're far beyond the planet now.

We're zooming around Mars and all of that exploration,

which is...which is marvelous.

But...it's not really affecting our attitudes.

I think our attitudes are...

based on selfishness, based on...

the economic situation we have...

based on the politics which we have.

I mean...how many governments

in the world have really taken the environmental crisis

for what it is?

Very few; certainly not the United States.

We live in a human-created environment,

where it's very easy to think

we're different from other creatures; we're smart;

we create our own habitat; we don't need nature;

it's the economy that's the most important thing.

And in focusing on the economy, I think we've forgotten

these ancient truths,

these ancient wisdoms that kept us

plugged in to nature, and understanding that, gee,

if we do something to offend the natural world,

we're gonna pay a price for that.

We have to treat nature much more gently.

That's the lesson, I think, that, uh, that we've forgotten

and that we're paying a price for today.

The big rupture came

in the 1800s, in the 19th century,

with the steam engine, the fossil fuel age,

the Industrial Revolution.

This was a great rupture from earlier forms

and rhythms of life, which were generally regenerative.

What happened after the Industrial Revolution

was that nature was converted to a resource,

and that resource was seen as essentially eternally abundant.

This led to the idea

and the conception behind progress,

which is limitless growth, limitless expansion.

HARTMANN: For all of human history...

the vast majority of human history,

humans lived on current sunlight.

Sun fell on the fields,

the fields grew plants, the plants made cellulose,

plant matter, animals ate the cellulose,

we ate the plants, we ate the animals,

we wore clothing made out of the plants and animals,

we were living off of current sunlight.

It was our food supply, it was our clothing,

we heated with wood, it was our heat supply,

it was our light supply; it was all current sunlight.

So the sunlight that fell on the Earth

in a year was the maximum amount

of sunlight that we could use, it was the maximum amount

of energy that we could use.

And from the earliest evidence of human civilization--

150,000, more or less, years ago

up until a few thousand years ago--

pretty much, that's how we lived,

and our population never surpassed a billion people.

And then we began discovering that there were

these little pockets of ancient sunlight, finding coal here

and a little bit of oil there, and slowly,

between that and the agricultural revolution,

slowly, our population crept up until we hit

our first one billion people, and so it didn't take us

100,000 years to go from one billion to two billion.

Our second billion only took us 130 years.

We hit two billion people in 1930.

Our third billion took only 30 years--1960.

It's amazing when you think about it.

When John Kennedy was inaugurated, there were

half as many people on the planet as there are today.

And the reason that we've been able to have

this exponential growth of population

is because we're creating food

and clothing and everything else--

transportation-- we're doing it all with this

ancient sunlight that was stored in the Earth

300 and 400 million years ago.

And if we were to have to go back to simply living

off current sunlight, lacking technology,

the planet couldn't sustain more than a half a billion

to, at the most, a billion people.

So we live in the most unusual period

in the history of the planet,

in terms of a species getting access to energy-rich carbon.

What we have done is become good alchemists--

the ability to take fossil carbon

and turn it into human biomass--

and we have used the supermarket,

the transportation system, to make that happen.

So the cornerstones of this system that we have

are all resting upon nonrenewable,

energy-rich carbon we call fossil fuels.

The real problem is that there are too many of us

using too many resources too fast.

Now, oil has enabled us to do that.

We use oil to increase the rate

at which we extract all other resources--

everything from topsoil to fresh water to...

from aluminum to zinc.

Oil is really the basis

with which we sustain complexity

and with which we solve our problems.

In a sense, all of our lives are subsidized.

We are subsidized by oil.

Because we're subsidized by oil,

when we shop for anything at a store,

we don't pay the full price.

We don't pay the full cost

of what it took to produce that.

We borrow about $800 billion a year

from the world to finance the excess of our consumption

over what we produce,

and about a third of that, about $250 billion a year,

is for oil imports.

So we borrow from the world--

we issue IOUs, treasury bills, whatever--

uh, to the tune of about a billion dollars a day--

every working day, anyway--

to, uh, finance our oil imports.

There's a lot of harm that oil does.

The economists would call them externalities,

because they're external to the price that you pay at the pump.

For example, um, you know, the asthma rates among children,

which are growing in many parts of the U.S.;

the acid rain problem that's caused by burning coal;

if you look at some of the global warming contributions

from burning fossil fuels; and at least part of the cost

of keeping our troops in the Middle East

to safeguard oil assets--

maybe not all of that cost, but at least some of it

is clearly a subsidy that goes to oil.

And when you started feeding

off of the fossil fuel cycle,

we began living with a death-based cycle,

and that death cycle of dependency

on extraction of those resources

set in motion a sequence of events

that has led us to our modern crisis

of global disturbance

known as "climate change" or "global warming," if you will.

We don't know the future; we know the past.

We know the past, in part, through Greek mythology.

The, kind of, the "revenge of the gods,"

or the "revenge of nature."

I think we're seeing that now already,

after 200 years of Industrial Revolution.

We didn't know what we were creating.

We didn't know the damage that was being created.

We're sensing that.

So, as we go forward with technology

that's even more powerful than before,

we have magnified...

the presence of the human race inside the ecology.

Therefore, we can do vastly more damage

with our technological prowess than we could before.

We have to be even more cautious.

(wind whistling)

* *

DiCAPRIO: While we weren't looking,

we've created one of the biggest problems facing all of humanity:

climate change.

What does it look like when we don't pay attention

to the massive amounts of CO2 we dump into the air and water?

What does it look like when our actions shift

the natural chemical balance of our atmosphere

into a state several degrees warmer,

a state that hasn't existed for millennia?

We have witnessed, in recent years,

the highest average temperatures in recorded history.

Now, a couple degrees difference in today's temperatures

may not sound like much, but it only took a few degrees

to shift us out of the last ice age;

and a few degrees may be all that separates us

from catastrophic change.

Heading into another weekend, the weather and the climate

are making news in more than one region.

A terrible drought has already...

We do not know how much our climate could

or will change in the future...

BOB SCHIEFFER: More than a week of severe flooding has killed

at least 72 people in Central and Eastern Europe,

and Western Russia...

ANCHORMAN: The heaviest recorded rainfall

in Indian history has unleashed the worst flooding

in living memory...

We do not know how fast change will occur,

or even how some of our actions could impact it...

ANCHORMAN: In Chicago, the heat is a plague.

This morning, they were collecting bodies...

Thousands of firefighters in Southern California

are battling a newly formed super wildfire...

The heat is on, coast-to-coast, even Arizona is having a heat...

Tennessee was battered by killer tornadoes...

ANCHORMAN: New Orleans is no longer safe to live in.

It is that simple and that stark.

Hell and high water-- one and the same again today

in a city overwhelmed, under siege,

in the grip of unmitigated, unprecedented catastrophe...

ANCHORMAN: Nowhere is that more apparent, of course, than New Orleans,

now a city of displaced people, refugees...

ANCHORWOMAN: ...20 feet of water from Lake Pontchartrain.

Add to that violence, deprivation, desperation,

the rising threat of disease...

Could it be that man-made global warming

is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated

on the American people?

(wind roaring)

* *

STEPHEN HAWKING: One of the most serious consequences

of our actions is global warming,

brought about by rising levels

of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

The danger is that the temperature increase

might become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already.

Drought and deforestation are reducing

the amount of carbon dioxide recycled into the atmosphere,

and the warming of the seas may trigger the release

of large quantities of CO2 trapped on the ocean floor.

In addition, the melting of the Arctic

and Antarctic ice sheets will reduce the amount

of solar energy reflected back into space

and so increase the temperature further.

We don't know where the global warming will stop,

but the worst-case scenario

is that Earth would become like its sister planet Venus,

with a temperature of 250 centigrade,

and raining sulfuric acid.

The human race could not survive in those conditions.

(slow, mournful theme plays)

While the Earth has a natural greenhouse effect--

in fact, we're about 60 degrees Fahrenheit warmer--

thanks to those good guys--

water vapor and carbon dioxide and methane,

what we call greenhouse gases-- trapping heat;

that's the good part of the story.

The problem is that humans are competing with nature

in that when we use our tailpipes and our smokestacks

to put our wastes into the atmosphere,

as if it is some kind of unpriced sewer,

we're adding to that amount of greenhouse gases that's natural

unnatural stuff--

mostly carbon dioxide, methane,

chemicals that nobody has ever seen before--

chlorofluorocarbons,

which also affect ozone--

and when they build up, they trap extra heat.

And that's not controversial; that's well understood.

We know we've increased

carbon dioxide by about 30-35%,

methane, 150%; added gases that never existed before,

and the Earth is warmer.

All of that goes together and makes global warming

not only a reality but a concern for the future

because we're continuing doing what we're doing

at an accelerating rate.

The record shows that greenhouse gases,

carbon dioxide in particular,

did not go above 280 parts per million

over the last 650,000 years.

We're now over 400 parts per million,

coming close to what many scientists are now referring to

as a tipping point... a tipping point

where we lose control of climate.

And once we've lost control of climate,

then things like Katrina,

Katrina-scale events, will become simply the norm.

BILL McKIBBEN: Unless we're able

to quickly reduce, very quickly and very dramatically reduce

our use of fossil fuel,

the computer modeling is pretty clear.

Having increased the temperature one degree so far,

will increase it about another five degrees;

that will make the Earth warmer than it's been

for tens of millions of years.

Some scientists are amazed that in the media debate

and in front of Congress, we hear about people who

"I believe in" or "I don't believe in global warming,"

as if this were somehow some object of religion

as opposed to based in evidence...

and scientists look at evidence.

The scientists have, um...

a tremendous amount of agreement

over some of the basic principles of global warming.

Is the Earth warming? Absolutely.

Is some portion of the warming

due to human activity? Absolutely.

These are things that there's a consensus

in the international scientific community.

JIM HANSEN: There's no doubt about that.

The natural changes, the speed of the natural changes is

now dwarfed by the changes that humans are making

to the atmosphere and to the surface.

Jim Hansen, who's the director

of the NASA Institute for Space Studies,

recently gave a best estimate,

and that was based on research done last year,

and the current estimate is that the Earth has warmed up

by about seven-tenths of a degree centigrade,

and even if we were to cap CO2, carbon dioxide emissions,

to the level that they are now,

the Earth should still warm by an additional...

about a half a degree centigrade.

McKIBBEN: It's been enough to melt

20% of the sea ice in the Arctic.

It's been enough to speed up

the spin and duration of hurricanes about 50%.

It's been enough to start the permafrost

beneath the tundra, across the north melting.

Even at the low range, a couple of degrees in the average

can really change things profoundly

in some parts of the world,

where you have more of an amplifying effect,

like in the Arctic.

(loud rumbling)

You can feel this, the chunk that we're on

actually starting to fail a bit more,

probably hairline cracks up the, um, towards the helos there.

The human impacts,

and particularly of what's happening with global warming,

climate changes in the Arctic,

it is happening first and fastest in the Arctic.

We're starting to see that things are happening

even faster than what scientists have indicated.

By the end of the century,

perhaps even in a few decades, the Arctic will be

quite ice-free.

The climate change is going to have

a very strong and fundamental impact

on the global water cycle.

It's going to change rainfall patterns.

It's going to very likely increase our experience

with floods and droughts.

It's almost certainly going to change

the pattern of river flows throughout the year.

And these are all very, very fundamental aspects

of how we manage and use water.

What global warming does--

or what the climate changes linked to global warming--

what those changes do is

they add another dimension of uncertainty.

It threatens your food security, for example.

It threatens your water security.

It threatens your sea level security.

It threatens your security against storms and hurricanes

and all these things that are in the news that we've seen.

It's a national security problem

in the sense that Florida might be the first affected

as well as other coastal parts of the United States.

But more importantly than that,

it's an international security problem.

The U.N. estimates that by the middle of the century,

there may be 150 million environmental refugees

at any given time from climate change.

RAY ANDERSON: What we saw with Katrina,

to me, is just prologue.

I just think that the worst is yet to come on that front.

Global warming is real and it's destructive,

and its impacts defy the imagination.

So we've got bad things happening on a lot of fronts,

and Earth is hurting, and humans

have not figured out how to change their ways,

and we're the culprit.

(somber theme playing)

Global warming has taken much of our attention,

as it should,

but as carbon has been accumulating in the atmosphere,

it has also been accumulating in the ocean.

And as time has passed, deforestation, soil erosion,

vanishing wetlands, and a whole host of other problems

have continued unabated.

We face a convergence of crises,

all of which are a concern for life.

(screeching)

PAUL HAWKEN: The problem that confronts us is

that every living system in the biosphere is in decline,

and the rate of decline is accelerating.

There isn't one peer-reviewed scientific article

in the past 20 years, that's been published,

that contradicts that statement.

Living systems

are coral reefs,

there are climatic stability, forest cover,

the oceans themselves, aquifers, water,

the conditions of the soil, biodiversity,

they go on an on as they get more specific.

But the fact is, there isn't one living system

that is stable or is improving;

and those living systems provide the basis for all life.

(whales vocalizing)

I sat on a United Nations group

called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment--

a four-year study, the biggest study ever done

of ecosystems around the world.

It involved over 1,300 scientists

from 71 countries in the world.

At the end of that, in March of 2005,

the final reports came in;

and they documented the staggering destruction

of ecosystems and the services they perform for us

around the world.

We better, first of all, acknowledge

that the planet is seamless.

For instance, the fertilizer and the pesticides

that are applied in the fields of the upper Midwest

go down the Mississippi

and 1,100 miles away, there's a dead zone.

The reality with air pollution is there's no "away."

Impacts can range from headaches, drowsiness, lethargy

to much more serious impacts.

Not only aggravating asthma but actually causing asthma.

People didn't talk about asthma a few decades ago.

Now I can walk into a classroom in a public elementary school

and ask the kids, "How many of you have asthma?"

and you'll see 30% of the kids in the room

will have their hands raised-- at least 30%.

You know, in some classrooms, it'll be 60%.

There's an ocean crisis that is occurring right now,

and the upshot is

that we've taken too much out of the ocean;

we've put too much into the ocean--too much pollution--

and we're wrecking the edge of the ocean.

We've lost 90% of most of the big fish in the sea

in half a century, so we're turning

to deeper areas, further areas offshore.

NICHOLS: So between over-fishing and bycatch,

we're really removing

millions...billions of animals from the ocean every year.

Uh, many of them don't even become, um,

food for humans; they just are wasted.

What we put into the ocean--

millions of tons of things that aren't natural to the sea

that come back to us in perverse ways.

Some fish concentrate

these substances-- things like mercury,

heavy metals of various sorts,

the pesticides, the herbicides.

DIANE WILSON: Corporations,

they dump an equivalent...

you know, at the... at the smallest,

they do five million gallons per day of toxins into the bay.

It's everything from benzene

to acrylnitril to mercury to copper to...

you name it, they've got it.

A lot of the chemicals that have become

very common in our world today-- things in plastics,

uh, artificial colors, pesticides--

are really high on the list of suspect agents

that promote cancer,

that promote premature aging, that increase risks

of chronic degenerative diseases.

THEO COLBORN: Why don't we

think about some of these disorders,

such as autism,

ADHD, childhood cancers,

childhood diabetes,

childhood behavioral problems,

Parkinson's disorders.

This has now even been linked with Alzheimer's disorders.

And then, of course, we've got

the early onsets of testicular cancers in males,

the epidemic of, uh, prostate cancer

and breast cancers.

The list just keeps growing,

and exposure to chemicals while in the womb,

prior to birth, could be contributing

to these disturbing findings.

The communities that are most impacted by pollution,

in fact, have the most toxic sources of pollution,

are often low-income communities of color.

They're the dumping grounds for power plants,

they're the dumping grounds for bus depots,

for oil refineries, for any number

of waste facilities, and everything

that no one else wants,

whether it's the South Bronx,

whether it's Louisiana, in Cancer Alley.

Our food is becoming poisoned

to the point that we should worry about it.

There's less and less of it.

Uh, the water, it's becoming more and more unhealthy

to just swim in the ocean.

And all of these are...

are simple to understand--

um, canaries in the coal mine

of much more subtle and scary disasters on the horizon.

TZEPORAH BERMAN: 70 countries in the world

no longer have any intact

or original forests.

And here in the United States, 95% of our old-growth forests

are already gone.

GLORIA FLORA: In many cases, the forests will not grow back,

and that land is then converted to grassland.

But in the case of rain forests,

we have seen firsthand that when those trees are removed,

no, they do not come back, the land becomes

extremely dry, and the nutrient cycling

that those trees used to do is no longer functioning.

What that leads to next: deserts.

We've seen them, and we've watched them grow

around the world.

As we have removed trees

from along the edges of very dry areas,

that desertification

has spread where there used to be forests.

In my own part of the world,

I keep telling people, let us not cut trees irresponsibly.

Let us not destroy, especially, the forested mountains.

Because if you destroy the forests

on these mountains, the rivers will stop flowing,

and the rains will become irregular,

and the crops will fail, and you will die

of hunger and starvation.

Now, the problem is, people don't make those linkages.

Well over 30% of the soils of the planet

have been put into the category

of...I think,

serious degradation.

And the practices of agriculture

is eroding that ecological capital

that is as much, for all practical purposes,

a nonrenewable resource as oil.

One of the things we don't see or think about

when we look at a tree is: what's the volume?

How much water could be contained there?

It turns out to be 57,000 gallons

of water in a ten- to 12-inch flash flood.

It can grab that much water, prevent it from running off.

Captures it in that sponge, cleans it,

puts it back in the aquifer.

Take that one tree away,

and you've got a flood,

you've got soil erosion,

you've lost those 57,000 gallons

from the local water supply, and then, that water is rushing

on downstream, hurting people, hurting communities,

ultimately polluting the ocean.

We really could tip the ocean into a different state.

The health of the ocean as we know it depends on the...

the water turning over, of the surface water

sinking to the bottom,

and the bottom water coming up to the top.

It's conceivable that we could turn that conveyor belt off

by warming of the surface of the ocean a little bit too much,

and if we do that, we... with all of our dead zones,

we could make the surface,

the whole damn surface ocean stagnant,

and that's a... that's a terrifying thought.

The last time that happened, uh,

was the end-Permian mass extinction,

and more than 95%

of all the species on the Earth went extinct.

(slow, somber theme plays)

* *

(man singing slow, mournful ballad)

* *

* *

* *

* *

(song ends)

DiCAPRIO: The simple fact is,

ecosystems that sustain life are unraveling--

systems that have evolved for hundreds of millions of years.

The evidence is now clear.

Industrial civilization has caused irreparable damage,

and our impact is only accelerating.

We have lost the last 30 years

in the war against global warming.

The questions then arise:

Why aren't we responding?

But more important, what are the forces that are blocking change?

AUSUBEL: Probably the greatest weapon of mass destruction

is corporate economic globalization,

and there's always been, um, a greed factor

in human civilization,

and, uh, what has happened with the creation of corporations,

which are the dominant institution of our age, is that

they have perfected that as a system.

And, um, what we literally face today is that this

is going to kill off our host, the planet.

Today, ecosystems--

forests, streams, lakes, rivers--

they have no rights, they're property,

which means they can be bought, sold, destroyed,

traded, carved up.

Under this structure of law,

you're either property or you're a person,

and it's very clear that nature is property.

And so, the reason why we have these reams of documents

in the libraries about solutions, about solar,

about how to produce food in a sustainable way,

about transportation,

about changing the production methods

and putting in place

a sustainable economy that respects the planet

is that we've lacked the authority

to drive those things into law.

Because, in reality, we have a constitution

that empowers the corporate few to make decisions

that trump the majority,

and it has been our failure to drive real law into place

because we don't have the authority.

The reality is,

we have very responsive political leaders,

they're just responsive to wealth and to money,

uh, and to corporate power.

Um, ExxonMobil, one oil company,

is worth more than the sum

of the value of all the auto companies

in the whole wide world.

That is a big company.

People say, gee, why aren't politicians responding

to the global climate crisis? Why aren't they...

Because they're responsive to some...

to a higher power, unfortunately.

And right now, that higher power is the fossil fuel industry.

MAN: You're responsible for editing "Our Changing Planet,"

and you send a review draft to the White House.

What happens?

Uh, it comes back, uh,

with a large number of edits,

hand-written on the hard copy

by the chief of staff

of the Counsel on Environmental Quality.

And the chief of staff is whom?

Phil Cooney.

He is a scientist?

No, he's a lawyer

who was a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute

before going into the White House.

Our people have a growing suspicion

that the oil companies are taking unfair advantage

of the current market conditions

to line their coffers with excess profits.

ORR: On the issues

of climate change and environment,

the political system has failed us.

It's not first and foremost a crisis of technology.

It isn't even a crisis of public opinion.

If you ask the public, uh, do you want solar energy,

do you want efficient appliances,

do you want efficient cars,

the answers come back overwhelmingly: Yes, we do.

It's the bridge across this chasm of public opinion

to public policy, that's called government--

that's where the failure has been.

That bridge has fallen into disrepair.

There was a time in the 1960s and 1970s

when Republicans and Democrats in the United States

joined to pass the major environmental laws of the time--

the National Environmental Policy Act,

the Clean Air Act,

the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act.

Those were done by Republicans and Democrats coming together,

and that system is now broken.

And part of the crisis is, uh, as everybody knows,

it's that there is money-- too much money--

in the political system.

TOM LINZEY: We need to understand that

even folks like Jefferson said,

we have to remake and rewrite the Constitution

every generation to meet our need.

Do we think that the Founding Fathers understood anything

about global warming or deforestation or, uh,

the massive amounts of toxic chemicals

that are pumped into our atmosphere and into our air

and water, land and soil every day.

What we need to do is find a harmony

between people and nature.

And one of the only ways to do that

is to drive and recognize that nature has rights, too.

(explosion thunders)

HERMAN DALY: I think the most, uh,

basic thing to understand about our global economic system

is that it's a subsystem,

and it's a subsystem of a larger system.

The larger system is the biosphere,

and the subsystem is the economy.

The problem, of course,

is that our subsystem, the economy, is geared

for growth--it's all set up to grow, to expand--

whereas the parent system doesn't grow,

it remains the same size.

So as the economy grows, it displaces,

it encroaches upon

the biosphere, and this is a fundamental cost,

this is the fundamental opportunity cost

of economic growth.

That's what you give up when you expand.

You give up what used to be there.

So economists don't include

all of the things that nature does for us for nothing.

Some technologies

would never be able to do what nature does.

For example, pollinating all of the flowering plants.

What would it cost us

to take carbon dioxide out of the air

and put oxygen back in it,

which all the green things do for us for nothing?

It's possible to do a crude estimate

of what it would cost us to replace nature.

Well, it turns out, Constanza--

this is several years ago-- estimated it would cost us

$35 trillion a year

to do what nature is doing for us for nothing.

Now, to put that in perspective, if you added up

all of the annual economies

of all the countries in the world at that time,

it came to $18 trillion.

So nature was doing twice as much service for us

as the economies of the world,

and in the madness of conventional economics,

this isn't in the equation.

Somehow, in the last few decades in business school,

and the MBAs that these CEOs have,

they were trained that the object of their business

is growth, as if that were an end.

It's not an end; it's a means.

And we've flipped the ends and the means,

and if we can get the end back-- quality of life--

then we have to look at the contradictions,

because the wrong kind of growth reduces our quality of life,

and we have to retake that back.

I think the industrial system has to be reinvented.

Today,

the throughput of the industrial system,

from mine and wellhead

through to finished product that ends up

in a landfill or an incinerator,

for every truckload of product with lasting value,

32 truckloads of waste are produced.

And that, you know, it's mind-boggling, but it's true.

So we have a system that is a waste-making system.

Clearly, we cannot continue to dig up the Earth

and turn it to waste.

DiCAPRIO: In our modern, globalized world,

growth continues to be the focus

of many corporations and governments

who deplete our environment for economic gain.

But what about us-- as individuals, as consumers?

To what extent are we participants

in the destruction of our biosphere?

The problem is not a problem of technology;

the problem is not a problem of...of, uh,

too much carbon dioxide;

the problem is not a problem of global warming;

the problem is not a problem of waste.

All of those things are symptoms of the problem.

The problem is the way that we are thinking.

The problem is fundamentally a cultural problem.

It's at the level of our culture

that this illness is happening.

ORR: We're now products

of $500 billion of advertising, uh, each year.

By the time a child comes to college or grows up through,

uh...school

and is a first-year student in college,

they'll have seen thousands of hours of television--

on average, four hours and some minutes per day.

And as a result, as one study showed,

they could identify a thousand corporate logos

but fewer than ten plants and animals

native to their own place.

And so we become not only consumers

but hugely ignorant of the terms by which we live on the Earth.

Well, Americans are spending their time working and spending.

That's where most of our time is going.

BETSY TAYLOR: An average American goes shopping,

in one way or another, five times a week.

During the day, we spend most of our time working

to make the money so that we can shop.

And there's a growing weariness

of having to hold up the global economy,

having to sort of keep up with the Joneses.

So while everything's getting bigger--

our bathtubs, our houses, our vehicles, our waistlines--

we're running out of time.

We have less of the things we really care about.

In America, people are so insulated

by our astonishing concentration of wealth.

I mean, Americans spend more money

maintaining our lawns

than India collects in federal tax revenue.

Our defense budget, which is a trivial percentage of GDP,

is larger than the entire economy of Australia.

So, kind of anesthetized by our own wealth,

we forget how the majority of the world lives

and, indeed, how the majority of the world looks.

NATHAN GARDELS: So where we are now

as a civilization is... I wouldn't...I would call...

consumerism is the leading ideology,

even consumer democracy.

Consumer democracy in the sense that...any regime,

whether it's the Chinese regime, the U.S. regime,

has to give people what they want and when they want it,

which is now,

and people want consumer goods.

Once commodities become

cultural symbols,

whether it's a cell phone in rural China

or a Lamborghini in, uh, Malibu,

there's no stopping that.

You have to change the object of desire

in order to get to the root of the problem.

People believe in choice,

and choice means consumerism for most people.

There is no mileage, uh, in trying

to save the planet by telling people

they're making the wrong choice.

It's not gonna work.

SHOPPERS: Four, three, two, one!

You have to change the idea behind limitless expansion,

uh, in a phrase, from well-having to well-being.

It's a cultural transformation.

BETSY TAYLOR: We've always, as humans,

had material desires.

Material things are part of how we do define who we are.

So it's not that consumption is bad,

it's that it's gotten totally out of balance.

JERRY MANDER: Media really is the instrument

by which knowledge is passed in our society.

We no longer get knowledge directly from the Earth,

we're no longer in touch with the sources of our survival,

we no longer, for the most part, in Western industrial society,

we're no longer growing our food

or taking care of our own sustenance

or learning directly from our own experience

or having our family be the root of our choices.

Basically, we're like the astronaut in space, you know?

We're floating around

in a metallic, re-created universe,

disconnected, really, from sources on the Earth

and...and we depend completely upon the information

that is sent to us from very, very far away.

We're psychically numbed.

I mean, we numb our senses from morning till night,

whether it's with noise or loud music

or light at night.

So nobody sees the beauty.

And if we've lost the feeling

of the beauty of the world,

then we are looking for substitutes.

Eric Hofer said,

"You can never get enough of what you don't really want."

Meaning we rush around,

permanently needy, but the loss, the feeling of loss

is that we don't know what it is we've lost.

What we've lost is the beauty of the world,

and we make up for it

with attempting to conquer the world,

or own the world, possess the world.

(slow, somber theme plays)

HAWKING: One can see from space

how the human race has changed the Earth.

Nearly all of the available land has been cleared of forest

and is now used for agriculture or urban development.

The polar ice caps are shrinking,

and the desert areas are increasing.

At night, the Earth is no longer dark,

but large areas are lit up.

All of this is evidence

that human exploitation of the planet

is reaching a critical limit,

but human demands and expectations

are ever increasing.

We cannot continue to pollute the atmosphere,

poison the ocean and exhaust the land.

There isn't any more available.

STUART PIMM: We are living

in an enormously challenging time.

If we don't change what we're doing,

we are facing

losing perhaps a third, maybe a half,

of all the variety of life on Earth.

PAUL STAMETS: What we don't know is

at one point that, when we lose biodiversity,

that the system will start to fall apart.

Now, I believe in the resilience of nature,

so I think that once the human species becomes extinct--

and many species have become extinct before us,

many species will become extinct after us--

that the Earth may well spin on its axis

happily without humans, and the microbes

and the insects will inherit the world,

unless we cause such a dramatic climate shift

that we become an arid, cold planet like Mars.

I don't believe for a minute that life will be extinguished.

Even though we've radically altered the air,

the water and the soil of the Earth, life has been

incredibly tenacious and adaptable.

But as a species

at the very top of the food chain,

I know that we're the most vulnerable.

Life has existed on Earth for 3.8 to four billion years.

Over that time, there have been a lot of species.

But you know what?

99.9999--four decimal points-- percent of all species

that have ever existed are extinct.

So extinction is a natural part of life.

Extinction is what has enabled life

to flourish and evolve and change

with the conditions of the changing planet.

The planet hasn't been stuck

in one condition over four billion years.

The tragedy of our existence is that we're an infant species.

Not only are we hastening the conditions

for our own demise, we're taking down--

according to the United Nations Environment Program--

50,000 to 55,000 species a year

are going extinct because of us.

The tragedy is not the imminent

or potential extinction of humankind

but the enormous extinction crisis

that we're causing right now.

JOSEPH TAINTER: And I think there is potential for a dark age.

One of the problems that I see is that so many people

who have to individually accept the cost of the transition

are unaware that it's coming.

Most of our citizens wake up in the morning and...

worry about the morning commute

and getting the kids to school and paying the mortgage

and thinking about a new car or a vacation or whatever,

and this is simply too narrow a scale of thinking

to address the problems that we have.

We need people to be aware

of the global forces that affect their lives

and that will increasingly affect their lives

in the future.

If this awareness doesn't develop,

then I'm afraid the transition will probably be wrenching.

What we risk is the destruction of civilization,

everything we fought for;

this fragile little craft

that's navigated the centuries and the millennia

to come to this particular point.

It will have been undone in a flash of consumption

and bad judgment and violence and injustice.

Is the caring capacity for a human population

that's happy and healthy in a future going away?

Absolutely.

And it's not about saving the planet,

it's about saving a caring capacity,

a system upon which humans can live

in the pursuit of happiness.

That's what's at stake.

PETER WARSHALL: So if you step back

and you take an Earth perspective,

rather than a human perspective,

it can't be an 11th hour for the Earth.

It can be...

an extinction crisis for the Earth,

and it can be a harmony crisis for the Earth,

because we now see that one species

is taking over so much of the resources

of the Earth that it's leaving

very little for other creatures to live with it.

(somber theme playing)

So, we find ourselves on the brink.

It is clear humans have had a devastating impact

on our planet's ecological web of life.

Because we have waited,

because we've turned our backs on nature's warning signs,

and because our political and corporate leaders

have consistently ignored

the overwhelming scientific evidence,

the challenges we face are that much more difficult.

We are in the environmental age whether we like it or not.

So what does the future look like?

We know the United States,

the world's greatest consumer and source of waste

needs to make a transition to a greener future,

but will our pivotal generation

create a sustainable world in time?

What will guide this massive change?

And does nature hold the answers we need

to help restore our planet's resources,

protect our atmosphere,

and therefore, help all life survive?

DAVIS: All of these forces sweeping over the planet

are the forces created by human beings,

and if human beings are the source of the problem,

we can be the foundation of the solution.

Some people suggest that in order to live sustainably

we have to, uh, go out in the woods

and put on animal skins and live on roots and berries.

And the simple reality is that we do have technology.

The question is, how can we use our understanding of science

and our understanding of technology,

along with our understanding of culture

and how culture changes, to create a culture

that will interact with science

and with the world around us

in a sustainable fashion?

The great thing about the dilemma we're in is that...

we get to...re-imagine every single thing we do.

In other words, there isn't... uh, one single thing

that we make or systems that we have

that doesn't require a complete remake.

And so there's two ways of looking at that.

One is, like, oh, my gosh, you know, what a big burden.

The other way to look at it, which is the way I prefer, is:

what a great time to be born,

what a great time to be alive, because this generation

gets to, essentially, completely change this world.

We're at a point in our history, with 6.4 billion of us,

that we have to imagine what it would be like

to redesign design itself,

and see design as the first signal

of human intention,

and realize that we need new intentions for our future

where materials are seen as things

that are highly valuable and need to go

in closed cycles-- what we call cradle-to-cradle

instead of cradle to grave--

and that energy needs to come from renewable sources,

principally the sun,

and that water needs to be clean and healthy

as it comes in and out of a system,

and that we have to treat each other

with justice and fairness.

So, uh, the design itself changes,

from mass production of things

that are essentially destructive to, uh,

mass utilization of things

that are inherently assets instead of liabilities.

Our project today,

for a new generation of designers,

is the welfare of all of life as a practical objective.

It goes beyond ourselves

to include the entire ecological realm,

that all of life is actually

a design project today; that we have to...

we have to design the capacity

to sustain it in the long run.

Whether we're talking about the design of a factory

or a building or a road or even a town,

it's much easier to design in isolation

and superimpose a design on what exists.

But if we were to follow nature's

operating instructions,

it designs in exactly the opposite way.

It brings onto the palette, so to speak,

all of the kingdoms of life

and then works symphonically to create an end result,

which might be a coral reef or might be a forest.

Well, you know, the interesting thing

about, uh, sustainable design

is that I don't think it has to look in any particular way.

One of the things that we really discovered

in the last few years,

is that the new design is actually invisible.

The new design is not about a visual boundary.

The form, in fact, could...

you know, the form could be anything.

It's the structure and internal logic

and intelligence and the performance

that has to be designed.

How we make things...

uh, in, you know, in our industrial processes, um,

is...it's 180-degree different from how life makes things.

Look at the way we make, for instance, Kevlar,

which is our toughest material.

We take petroleum, we heat it up to about

1,400 degrees Fahrenheit,

and we bubble it in sulfuric acid,

and then we pull it out

under enormous pressures.

Now, imagine an organism--us-- making our bones or our teeth.

Imagine a, um, an abalone making a shell.

They can't afford to heat it up to really high temperatures,

or do pressures or chemical baths,

so they found a different way.

Now, take the spider.

This beautiful orb weaver spider

is basically taking flies and crickets

into the web and transforming them, in water--

chemistry in water in the abdomen--

and out comes this...

material that's five times stronger,

ounce for ounce, than steel.

Silently, in water, at room temp.

You know? I mean, this...

this is... this is master chemistry.

This is the manufacturing of the future, hopefully.

And there's actually people who are now

trying to mimic the recipes of these organisms.

Fungi are the grand molecular disassemblers in nature--

the interface organisms between life and death.

They generate soil.

The entire food web of nature

is based on these fungal filaments.

The mycelial network

that infuses all land masses in the world

is a supportive membrane upon which life proliferates

and...and further diversifies.

Mushrooms also have a very bizarre property

of hyper-accumulating heavy metals.

Forests are thousands of acres, and so fungi,

that produce mushrooms,

grow to thousands of acres in size.

This gives us a ready ability to tap in

to this powerful inherent resource

that mushroom mycelium has

to remediate environments,

prevent downstream pollution from microbes, from viruses,

you know, including bacteria and protozoa, and also

for breaking down a wide assortment of pollutants.

And this is one of the pedestals of micro-restoration--

using mushroom mycelium in order to heal environments,

because these are truly healing membranes.

There's the model.

In nature there is no waste.

One organism's waste is another's food.

That's the model for the industrial system

that must eventually evolve: a waste-free industrial system.

MCDONOUGH: If we think about a tree as a design--

it's something that makes oxygen,

sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water,

provides habitat for hundreds of species,

accrues solar energy, makes complex sugars and food,

creates micro-climates, uh, it self-replicates.

So what would it be like

to design a building like a tree?

What would it be like to design a city like a forest?

So what would a building be like if it were photosynthetic?

What if it took solar energy and then put it,

converted it to productive and delightful use?

For example, if we combine our housing

and our waste treatment

and our food production and our energy generation,

all integrated, single, whole systems,

we can live beautifully on the planet

with one-tenth or less

the resources that our current civilization uses.

Rebuilding is essentially

the design and construction of buildings

that are energy- and resource-efficient.

They produce healthy places to live and work.

If you take, for example,

the fact that buildings account for a third

of all energy use,

it's really the single largest segment

of not only energy use but greenhouse gas production.

What we can do with buildings

in just the simplest, off-the-shelf technologies

is really stunning.

KENNY AUSUBEL: So, with existing technologies

that we basically already have on the shelf,

or things that we know we can develop

in a very rapid period of time,

we could literally reduce the human footprint

on planet Earth by 90%, right?

Which would be a huge shift in what we're doing right now.

SCHNEIDER: The direction to go is to start becoming decoupled

from our dependence on oil

through efficient transportation,

better insulated houses

and the development of renewable alternatives,

like solar and wind and biomass,

and getting those to become the major part of the market

using efficiency as the transition.

It's not gonna happen overnight,

but it should've started 30 years ago.

And we have, right now,

in the White House and in many members of Congress,

people trying to delay it further,

which, to me, is ultimately irrational,

both for our national security

and our environmental protection.

This country can move awfully fast, if it wants to.

Keep in mind that, just after December 7, 1941,

Roosevelt went to Jimmy Burns and said,

you're my deputy president for mobilizing the economy.

If anybody crosses you, they cross me; get to it.

Within six months,

Detroit was completely retooled,

not making cars anymore,

making, uh, military trucks, tanks,

fighter aircraft,

and in three years and eight months,

from the beginning of that war, we had mobilized,

we had defeated imperial Japan, fascist Italy,

uh, Nazi Germany,

together with the British and our other allies,

and begun demobilization.

Three years and eight months.

These are not technical issues

nearly as much as they are leadership issues.

How much time do we have?

Well, not much.

By my reckoning, we ought to be about the business

as rapidly as possible.

And this means everybody-- every citizen,

uh, every government level,

every organization, every corporation.

This is all-hands-on-deck time.

So that, in the future, 500 years out, let's say,

that people look back, uh, at this time,

that this was our finest hour,

that humans at that time and that generation,

all across the planet, began to come together

in a very different vision.

There are on Earth today

over one million environmental social justice

and indigenous organizations present.

It is the fastest-growing movement on Earth.

And you're starting to see them pull together

and close the loops and plug the leaks

of energy and water and food and finance

and those things,

to reimagine what it means to be, as I say,

a human being in the 21st century,

when every living system is in decline,

and learning how to reverse that.

It's almost as if we had distributed an ambition

without ever having written it down,

you know, so that people all over the world

knew what they ought to be working on

and were working on it in their own way,

knowing that they only had one...

one sort of pixel, in this incredible mosaic

of a...of a... of an image of the future,

and that they could contribute that pixel to that mosaic

knowing that in the end that incredibly beautiful image

was a sustainable future.

LESTER BROWN: The exciting thing is that we can see now

what the new economy would look like.

Instead of being powered by fossil fuels,

it's powered largely by renewable energy.

Instead of having an automobile-centered

transportation system, it will have

a much more diversified transport system.

Instead of a throwaway economy

it will be a reused economy, where everything is reused.

Indeed, we see glimpses of it beginning to emerge

here and there around the world.

So we have the technologies to build a new economy

that will sustain economic progress.

And we can see that new economy beginning to emerge.

The challenge for our generation

is to build that economy in the time that's available,

and I don't think we have a lot of time left.

Virtually all of our major infrastructure changes

in this country have been encouraged in one way or another

by the Federal government.

So I would think the way to deal

with this transition away from oil is, first of all,

not to pretend that energy operates today

in an unregulated free-enterprise market--

it does not--

uh, but to go ahead and, as affordably as possible,

give incentives to move toward these other fuels

and these minimal changes in infrastructure

that make them possible.

Energy is the key to everything else that we do.

With abundant and affordable and clean energy,

we can solve a lot of other problems.

Without it, we're not gonna be able

to solve very many problems at all.

And the sun is the most plentiful,

bountiful substitute there is out there.

There's more than enough energy

coming from the sun every day

to run every factory, every home,

every automobile on Earth

13,000 times, I think, is the number.

We're also finding that, on the larger scale--

I would call the utility scale--

wind energy, in particular, has evolved to the point

where it can compete price-wise

with our traditional fossil fuels--

that is, coal and oil and natural gas--

and produce large amounts of energy that can be distributed

through the grid, which is the conventional way

that we receive energy.

GELOBTER: It's important to see,

and it's important, sort of, as we make...

as we make progress in the world,

to have an economy that's flexible and fluid

and ready to make changes.

How do we protect the atmosphere

that belongs to all of us?

Well, one of the ways we do it

is we make people who are polluting it

start paying for that pollution

through a polluter pay system on climate change.

So we lower income taxes

and raise taxes on gasoline, for example,

taxes on burning coal.

We can probably do it all with a carbon tax.

We're not changing the level of taxes.

We're reducing income taxes and offsetting it

with an increase in energy taxes,

in fact, a tax on fossil fuels.

So when we break our addiction to fossil fuels,

you see a lot of money flowing to industries that,

in fact, represent the vitality of the American economy--

media, high-tech services-- taking action

on climate change is good for jobs

and good for the economy.

GERARD: As an example,

if we retrofitted

all government buildings built pre-1950,

and we created tax environments

to help cities and municipalities

and states and Federal government

to retrofit those buildings,

we could create three million industrial jobs,

plus we could import much less oil

from the Middle East.

But more importantly,

we'd be having a much cleaner environment.

If we move from the rigged game that we have now in energy

to a genuine level playing field,

open competition between dirty fuels and clean fuels,

I have no doubt that the clean fuels will win.

Once we send the right signal from the marketplace,

or to the marketplace, that the two guys in the garage

who created Hewlitt-Packard,

well, those two guys today,

I want them to be working on clean energy,

and I want them to know that we've fixed our public policies

so that they're gonna get rewarded

when they come up with the killer app to defeat big oil.

That's what we need to do.

Once we do, we'll see a relatively quick transition,

I think, to cleaner energy.

(slow, somber theme playing)

People need to realize

there are things they can do in their everyday lives,

whether it's making simple things

like keeping their tire pressure at the right level,

putting in compact fluorescent light bulbs.

And it-- personal action is important.

This problem with global warmingis huge and tremendous

and it may seem inconsequential to take your personal action,

but it is important for all sorts of reasons:

because everybody making a change adds up

to something meaningful;

because shifting the way we act and live

is part of the solution long-term;

because if we act in that way,

we will demonstrate to our leaders that we do care.

And that's what we need

from individuals as the next step beyond that

is to build the political will for taking action.

You can also vote

and I don't mean voting at a voting booth.

Anybody of any age can vote

because you vote every day that you pay for something.

Every time you lay money down on a counter to buy something,

you are saying that I approve of this object.

I approve of how it was made, the materials that are in it,

and what's going to happen to it

when I no longer need it and throw it away.

Life creates the conditions that are conducive to life,

so our technology, our cities, our schools,

what we make, what we wear, what we eat, all of that--

if it is oriented

around that one principle, that one life principle,

then we will be here for a long, long time

in an extraordinary world.

(gentle orchestral theme plays)

ANDERSON: The question is:

what does it take for humankind to change its ways?

And I am really encouraged

by Deepak Chopra's statement that people are really doing

the best they can, given their level of awareness.

So, to me, winning this battle

that we're in to change people's minds and hearts

is a matter of lifting levels of awareness, always raising--

and there's always a higher level of awareness

for any of us.

GARDELS: We need to be slower and we need to be smarter.

Slow movement means disengaging from consumerism

as the main avenue of experience.

It doesn't reject any consumption, but it says

we're not going to live our lives mediated

by the marketplace or what's being sold.

We're not going to make our identities

and our meaning based on that.

Instead of the long commute, the bigger car,

the bigger house, let's enjoy the local produce;

have time to ourselves;

understand that things are thieves of time

because the more things you have,

the more time you have to spend working,

the more your life is chained to a rhythm

to get those things.

The other element is the smart element,

and there, I think, we have to reintroduce a term,

an old term before the Industrial Revolution:

frugality.

Frugality does not mean poverty.

Frugality means the wise use of resources.

As I said earlier on,

the meaning of the Industrial Revolution was

that nature was turned into a resource

that was considered endlessly abundant.

It's not true.

(insects chirping)

LINZEY: Not only is it the 11th hour,

it's 11:59 and 59 seconds,

and although prior people's movements

have taken 30 to 40 years

to actually build to a point

where they had the power to drive changes

into the fundamental structure of governance,

we don't have 30 to 40 years.

And so it's not just going to be a matter of, you know,

tweaking a policy here and there.

It's going to take a very, very broad societal mobilization.

It's going to take involvement at all levels,

from the government through industry and on down

to our communities and a welling up

of involvement of citizens.

Winston Churchill had it right about us.

He said, "The Americans always do the right thing,

"but unfortunately it's only after they've exhausted

all other possibilities."

And we've been exhausting some fairly bad possibilities

for a long time.

I think maybe we're finally ready to get it right.

You know, people often ask me, "What can I do, what can I do?

I want to do something."

Well, the first choice--

you've already made the first choice if you're saying that

because the first choice is you know you have to do something,

and for the rest, it's a matter of looking deep

into your own heart and your soul

to understand what your own gifts are,

where your passions lie, to do some research

and educate yourself to find the people

that you are comfortable with, and then get involved.

There are two things that can perhaps save the world.

One would be the mastery of one's kindness to oneself

and a big heart,

and the other would be understanding

your passion for place, for where you live,

and really loving the place that you live in.

Environmentalism was once the project of a passionate few.

Now millions of people have responded

to ecological destruction and have created the groundwork

for a sustainable and just world.

With the onset of global warming and other catastrophic events,

environmentalism has become, today,

a broader, unifying human issue.

We as citizens, leaders, consumers, and voters

have the opportunity to help integrate ecology

into governmental policy and everyday living standards.

During this critical period of human history,

healing the damage of industrial civilization

is the task of our generation.

Our response depends on the conscious evolution

of our species and this response could very well save

this unique blue planet for future generations.

SUZUKI: So I see a world in the future

in which we understand that all life is related to us

and we treat that life with great humility and respect.

I see us, as well, as social creatures,

and when I began to look back and say

"What is the fundamental bottom line

for us as social creatures?"

I couldn't believe it because it seemed so hippie-dippy,

but it was love.

Love is the force that makes us fully human.

Now, to me the value is...

the healing power that comes from getting

that it's not just global warming,

it's not just fossil fuel dependency,

it's not just soil erosion,

it's not just chemical contamination

of our land and water,

it's not just the population problem,

and it's not just all of those.

The deterioration of the environment of our planet

is an outward mirror of an inner condition.

Like inside, like outside.

And that's a part of the great work.

So even if we choose to eradicate ourselves

from this Earth by whatever means,

the Earth goes nowhere

and in time it will regenerate

and all the lakes will be pristine;

the rivers, the waters, the mountains,

everything will be green again.

It'll be peaceful.

There may not be people, but the Earth will regenerate.

And you know why?

Because the Earth has all the time in the world.

And we don't.

So I think that's where we're at right now.

(somber, ominous theme playing)

* *

* *

* *

("Politik" by Coldplay begins)

* *

* Look at Earth from outer space *

* Everyone must find their place *

* Give me time and give me space *

* Give me real, don't give me fake *

* Give me strength, reserve, control *

* Give me heart and give me soul... *

* Give me time, give us a kiss *

* Tell me your own politic *

* And open up your eyes *

* Open up your eyes *

* Open up your eyes *

* Open up your eyes *

* Give me one 'cause one is best *

* In confusion, confidence *

* Give me peace of mind and trust *

* Don't forget the rest of us *

* Give me strength, reserve, control *

* Give me heart and give me soul *

* Wounds that heal and cracks that fix *

* Tell me your own politic *

* And open up your eyes *

* Open up your eyes *

* Open up your eyes *

* Open up your eyes *

* Just open up your eyes *

* *

* *

* But give me love over *

* Love over *

* Love over this... *

* And... *

* And give me love over *

* Love over *

* Love over this... *

* And... *

* *

* *

* *

* *

(song fades, ends)

(acoustic guitar playing soulful, medium-tempo melody)

* *

* *

* *

* *

* *

* *

* *

* *

* *

(music ends)