The Issues

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

The film posits that in many ways, humanity has detached itself from nature, and grown accustomed to using without thinking to manage the earth's resources. "The big rupture came in the 1800s, with the steam engine, the fossil fuel age, the industrial revolution," says Nathan Gardels, author, editor and Media Fellow of the World Economic Forum. "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."
"Finding coal here, and little bit of oil there, and between that and the agricultural revolution, slowly our population crept up until we hit our fist one billion people," says Thom Hartmann, a best-selling author and progressive radio talk show host. "It didn't take us a hundred thousand years to go from one billion to two billion. Our second billion only took us a hundred and thirty 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."

"As we go forward, with technology 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," says Nathan Gardels. "And we have to be even more cautious."

After 200 years of industrial revolution, the atmosphere has undergone a pronounced shift. "The earth has a natural greenhouse effect," explains Stephen H. Schneider, Professor and Senior Fellow at the Center for Environment Science and Policy of the Institute for International Studies. "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 tail pipes and our smoke stacks to put our waste into the atmosphere as if it's some kind of unpriced sewer, we're adding – to that amount of greenhouse gases that is natural – unnatural stuff, mostly more carbon dioxide, methane, chemicals that nobody's ever seen before, chlorofluorocarbons which also effect ozone. And when they build up, they trap extra heat."

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