About the Film

About The 11th Hour | Making the Film | The Issues | 
Humanity's Future | The Solutions | The Experts | Discuss

This passionate and polemical documentary, narrated and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, brings together leading scientists, environmentalists, politicians and activists to argue that the Earth is in a perilous state, and asks what can be done to save the planet and mankind before it is too late.

The experts - including Professor Stephen Hawking, Mikhail Gorbachev and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai - highlight key issues they believe face the planet's life systems: global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction and depletion of the oceans' habitats. And they claim that Man is a key contributor to the problem.

But the film, which gained acclaim as well as provoking debate on it's cinematic release, also offers hope and potential solutions to these problems by calling for restorative action to reshape and rethink global human activity through technology, social responsibility and conservation.

Catastrophes dominate the headlines: drought, famine, flooding, record rainfall, hurricanes, acid rain and the highest average temperatures in recorded history. But in the film DiCaprio asks whether these are tragic isolated incidents, or pieces of a larger global jigsaw that could threaten humanity's very future.

The experts argue that in humanity's short time on earth we have had a profound impact; our drive to ensure our survival and quality of life has revolutionised industry, science, nutrition and medicine, but it has also effected changes to the delicate balance that makes life on earth possible.

The film looks at the forces that govern our climate - the oceans and rainforests that generate oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, govern climate, weather and temperature - and argues that Man's activities are having an unprecedented effect.

The experts lay the responsibility for the warming of the planet mostly on the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, much of which are produced by human activity, and link the huge quantities of waste generated by industrial society with the pollution of the land, ocean and air, resulting in disappearing forests, widening deserts and melting arctic sea ice. And they claim that not since a meteor hit the planet 55 million years ago have so many forms of life become extinct.

But the film also asks if these changes to the earth have to be permanent, or whether our society can mobilise to save the planet.