The Age of Stupid
Last night I went to see the film 'The Age of Stupid' - the new Climate Change movie being shown around the world. I urge everyone to go and see it. Using documentary footage it looks back to the present day from a point in a future in which civilisation has all been wiped out by global warming. It shows the extreme weather events of the last few years, the melting glaciers, the floods, the resistance to sustainable energy solutions, the exploitation of the poor.

A lot of attention is focused on an Indian businessman starting a new airline whose ambition is to take the 15 million Indians, who now travel across their vast country by train, and put them in the sky with fares as low as I rupee. The film also focuses on our resistance to sustainable energy solutions. The film asks why we did not act when we had the chance and concludes that until now at least we have been living in 'The Age of Stupid' a phrase that comes from the lips of a victim of hurricane Katrina.

You can watch a trailer for the film on You Tube by clicking this link.

Carbon Cycles
Of course it is hard to do everything in a short film. Of the three great elements necessary to save the planet - that is cutting carbon emissions, bringing on stream sufficient sustainable energy to allow less developed countries to increase their standard of living to a point where their populations stabilise, and arresting (and reversing) our wanton destruction of the CO2 absorbing biosphere - the film only dealt really with the first two.

Indeed, whenever interested people come together to talk about climate they talk frequently about emissions and renewables; but rarely about the role of the territorial and marine biospheres. Without any help from us the environment absorbs about 200 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year. Of course, the natural environment, through the respiration of all life forms and through other natural processes, puts back about the same amount - 200 gigatonnes, or thereabouts.

(The UN Environment Programme graphics website contains most informative charts of the world's natural and anthropogenic carbon cycles).

At about 8 gigatonnes annually our man-made emissions are tiny beside these great natural flows. Which makes one want to ask why if the environment can cope with 200 gigatonnes (actually a bit more) why can't it cope with the little bit of extra load we have been putting upon it. Could it be that our continual trashing of the seas, the forests, our slashing and burning, our pollution, our chemicals have so impaired the environment that its effectiveness as a carbon absorber is steadily being compromised?

Plant a Tree
I only ask. I hope some scientist will advise. But I found the same thing on our wonderful visit to Copenhagen, courtesy of THINKABOUTIT - the European blogging even being run by the European Journalism Centre at Maastricht. Some 90 bloggers, from all over the world, listened to presentations and toured an eco-village. If there was a single message to take away it was how much communities can profit financially from investment in sustainable energy when governments are prepared to guarantee future electricity prices.

But while we learned a lot about emissions and about sustainable energy, very little was said about the role of the wider environment in combating climate change. We can all plant trees and demand our councils plant more of them. You can sign up here to the UN's 'Plant a Billion Trees campaign - which has been so successful, incidentally, that over 9 billion trees have now been pledged.

We can try to ensure the fish we eat is caught sustainably. We can refuse to eat animals that have been fattened on fishmeal or krill. You don't have to eat that hamburger, do you? Which has come from a ranch cut out of the rainforest only a few months ago. Or the palm oil or the soya now grown on land slashed from the primary forest. We can and should demand to know the provenance of every bit of timber used in our homes and workplaces. Did it come from the wild forest?

And the forest is still being cut - and not only in Africa and South America. The Obama administration approved the logging of 381 acres of primary forest in Alaska as recently as July this year.

It is essential to cut carbon emissions; it is wise to develop renewable energy - but please, please don't forget the environment on which we depend. Remember the oxygen in every breath you take has come from a plant.