Why 2009’s “The Age of Stupid” should be on everyone’s Netflix list

One can laugh at reviews of the climate change “documentary,” “The Age of Stupid,” because most critics take issue with it on bizarre levels, some comparing it to “An Inconvenient Truth” (not a movie, just a nonsense Al Gore Power Point/lecture) as if ‘Inconvenient’ is the litmus test for all climate change flicks. Critiques are based largely on the 2009 movie creating too much doom and gloom, which is a starting point to illustrate parallel axioms to the actual term “age of stupid,” coined by a scientist in the film who lauds Shell for its great environmental work but laments our consumer-drenched society. These coined axioms are apropos for movie shills and our population: age of fear age of messaging age of posturing age of blogging age of self-importance age of rationalization age of cynicism age of infantilism age of self-aggrandizement age of I-can-think-of-better-things than you can write, do, film, make, exhibit, create Some reviewers say Franny Armstrong’s film wields too much stick and not enough carrot. Armstrong created a sci-fi multilevel documentary, with five strong narratives allowing for the common climate change delayer or denier to be waylaid by the reality of human-disrupted weather and rising oceans. Less than 1 percent of scientists polled do not believe the earth is currently in a climate (warming) change model, whereas 60 percent of the American public denies climate change is even happening. From that point of view, this movie is a must-see. Prescient actions have been precipitated from this movie. One example is the President of the Maldives, Mohammed Nasheed, announcing at the film’s UK premiere that his country would be the first to go carbon neutral by 2019. If you search for ‘Nasheed’ or “Maldives carbon neutral,” you’ll learn about Nasheed’s efforts to save his nation from global warming-precipitated ocean rising. The former jailed journalist and activist against previous dictatorial governments in his country, Nasheed has written about his nation’s plight in the Huffington Post, and the New York Times has spotlighted his political force and environmental urgency. The film, set in 2055, features an archivist in an enormous vault in the middle of an ocean 60 feet higher than today. The archive is the repository of the world’s “great” art and library works. Narrator-archivist Pete Postlethwaite revisits the years 2005-2008 through his library computer. Real stories emerge as he laments how we failed to act to stop fossil fuel burning and rampant consumption. The solutions were at our fingertips, 50 years before the film’s narrative takes place. We meet an oil worker/scientist in New Orleans defending “big oil” but lamenting Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed one of his homes. He defends Shell and contends how green and great the company is. We see a family whose father-husband is a wind turbine developer in the UK facing homeowners fighting the turbines’ negative effects on their aesthetics. Next is a young Nigerian woman who wants to be a doctor to do good for her community, and have the American dream of a good life and fame. She washes fish caught in rivers with soap to “clean” them of muck Shell spreads in waterways as a byproduct of drilling. Then there’s an octogenarian mountaineer in the French Alps who takes the wind farm developer and his family on a hike, demonstrating the dramatic glacier melt he’s seen over 65 years. He’s fighting endless truck traffic in his community and a proposal to double the highway’s tunnel capacity. Then, a brother and sister, climate refugees, are shown in Jordan wanting to return to their native Iraq. The 12-year-old boy vows to kill Americans for killing his father over a war for oil. We see one of India’s finest capitalists, a 30-something multimillionaire starting an airline he hopes will fly every Indian anywhere. This film shows how fragile our culture is with leaders and community groups whose thinking is far from systems oriented/holistic, necessary traits to get through the climate change mess. There’s humor, but the stick remains larger than the carrot, so blogs like Treehugger get pissed when confronted with this generally urgent (negative) and scientifically real message. Jeh Wadia, the Mumbai capitalist depicted in the film, believes he is helping the Indian economy with a low-cost airline. He hates trains, understands the carbon footprint of one private jet trip, and knows one trip could pay for a school or water treatment plant in a small Indian village. But he also believes the airline can lift 1 billion people out of poverty, and is making a go of it. The film then juxtaposes the wind farm developer and his family calculating their carbon footprint, and realize that one airline trip with four kids will blow their carbon footprint reserve for the entire year. We see him facing down an irate community activist group in Bedfordshire opposed to eight (downsized from 19) wind turbines on an abandoned airfield near a drag racing strip. Potential lower property values become the rationale for opposing clean energy. Franny’s climate advisor, Mark Lynas, is also depicted in the film. He wrote “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet,” and in the film warns of a tipping point around 2015 if the world doesn’t act now to reduce carbon emissions. Once global temperatures warm more than 2 degrees, he and thousands of other scientists say all will be lost. Is “The Age of Stupid” too negative? It isn’t, and it should be a wake up call. “An Inconvenient Truth” remains a slick “lite” polemic. “The Age of Stupid” is scrappy, with a clear message: we as a species weren’t important enough to save. “The Age of Stupid” shows not only under-developed countries are failing to provide education and social service safety nets for citizens, but fellow inhabitants of the most powerful military-dominated country are turning into a “Third World” country, education-wise. We have technologies to get us off carbon burning, plus planners, designers, activists and armies ready to reshape the world into one of social grace and justice. The film speaks to many unfolding-as-you-read-this issues tied to America’s – and Earth’s – increasingly unjust broadening of the gap between the few, the haves, and the greater have nots. Every step toward a green world, an economically just one, or one that provides for the majority, is being derailed by billionaires and their minions in politics. Students wonder what they should major in during college or if there will be jobs when they graduate with $100,000 debts. They’re wondering how stupid they’ve become, since we have books like “The Dumbest Generation” by Mark Bauerlein, then “Distracted: The Erosion of Attention” and “The Coming Dark Age” by Maggie Jackson and “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains” by Nicholas Carr. What do we tell students about how to mitigate the coming climate disruption when students don’t know how to question authority, ask questions, and participate in debate and civics? “The Age of Stupid” is a great place to begin that conversation. There are dozens of films and hundreds of books, but for now this film and Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff” are great beginning points.