Video - The 11th Hour

It can get fairly irritating seeing high end celebrities take up the humanity/environmental baton and running with it so that the world doesn't forget them. We've seen Bono at Live Aid Madonna with her adopted African kids, and the endless list of reformed drug and alcohol addicts with their ambassadorial roles for their resolved conditions. While there are tidal wave of examples some do manage to be quite genuine and I was fairly convinced that Leonardo Di Caprio is one of the few.

I'd be lying to say that the information he supplied was new to me but the facts are both shocking and destructive. The sheer volume of nature that we as just one spieces has eradicated is enough to make you feel uncomfortable in the planet we live in. Forests disappear, rubbish mounts up, biosystems are poisoned, another environment is killed. We don't just tear down our surrounds for population growth anymore, we do it to advance our technologies! We kill animals for mobile phones, we pollute the air to mass produce and then throw it out, back in the landfil. In an inexcusable act of vicious irony we digard 2 year old technologies and sentence the land we raped to hold our garbage. We displace nature that have been living for thousands and millions of years for our greed and in a relatively short time later we apply salt to wound and in return for its sacrifice we hand back our trash that will only destroy it further.

As the narration comments humans have mistaken their natural superiority to mean that the rest of nature is inferior to them whereas it should mean to take care of the nature that surrounds us particually since its supports our very existence. As Di Caprio explains our spieces came a lot later in earth's life, and if its life was 1 year we appeared a mere 60 seconds ago. Which means for all the time nature took to give us what it is today, we've permanently destroyed things here and there all over the globe in just a fraction of a second.

The truths are very real and very severe. The solutions can simple. He suggests natural gas cars, alternative energy resources, and building environmentally friendly buildings, but all this is just talk if no one does anything about it. As designers we can have a major impact on the earth's health if we design responsibly. 11th Hour shows how we are being lead down a dark path and it calls us to be brave and courageous against the ecomonic powers, and the greed of our race to help better it and lead us with nature back into the light and create a sustainable earth. But we have to be quick...the clocks ticking.