An Inconvenient Truth | Al Bore

I don't love this film.

 I think it's important and I'm glad that it got a lot of attention because I think global warming is a serious threat to our planet. My father is an environmentalist with a PhD in marine biology from UCSB. He currently lives in the Hamptons and is the Natural Resources Director for East Hampton. A little eccentric, he's currently in the process of building a swamp (wetlands) on some land that was bequeathed to the county in Montauk.

I also grew up in San Francisco so environmental issues have always been a big focus in my life since nursery school. We watched a lot of documentaries when I was in grade school about science and history. I remember watching films about overpopulation and garbage that in many ways made me feel the planet wasn't going to last as long as it has.

I think this film focuses too much on Gore himself. His loss in the controversial election, his own educational experiences, the death of his son. There are a lot of pictures of him sitting in planes and in limos and looking into his laptop. I don't understand why he spends so much time talking about pictures of the planet, unless he's trying to prove that it's round. I think its hard to relate to the graphs which he spends so much time on. A graph is a graph, it's hard to emotionally connect.

And most of it is him acting like a science teacher with A/V tools available to us 20 years ago.  I think that technology provides the opportunity to use video, animation, and other techniques that are more gripping.  I think he could make his cases on how the environment is changing more directly.  "Show don't tell."

Personally, I think that resistance to the idea of global warming comes from Christian fundementalists and right wing conservatives. Because it is "An Inconvenient Truth" -- it's not what we want to hear. We want to use our cars and have our disposable consumerist society and not worry about what's going to happen afterward. It's especially inconvenient for the owners of the industries which profit from oil drilling and other dangerous practices.

I feel like Gore has a stronger understanding and relationship with this audience than I do so maybe the way he conveys information makes sense to them. I hope so. I do believe that new media can help to change the world, but it needs to work with education, traditional media, and even religion since that's where people get a lot of the information that they trust.

I also don't like scary predictions (like that the south of New York City) will be under water without some way to offset this.  It seems so horrible and makes me feel so powerless that it makes it desirable to live on the river denial.

I like online games, and if I was a kid I would really like learning through them.

A few that I found are:

1. These put out by the EPA for kids along with a study guide (which I found a quick way to monitor my knowledge and remind me that I should know some things that are pretty basic and I don't)
2. This game from Ben & Jerry's looked kind of fun, but I couldn't get it to work.
3. This game looks interesting CO2FX, I like the details and the expressed opportunity to make decisions for different countries which would make them sustainable or not, but again, I can't figure out how to play.
4. And at the risk of sounding like a total idiot, I found this game on Facebook, but I can't even figure this one out.  Maybe kids are more intuitive about this type of thing than I am.