Well… this changes something

Is it really possible to be bored by the end of the world? This question, posed by narrator Naomi Klein, comes right at the beginning of This Changes Everything, an all-too-brief documentary on climate change and the environmentalists, scientists, politicians and everybody else who care enough to try to do something about it.

One of their propositions to confront the calamities caused by pollution is to create pollution. That thought alone – a kind of modest proposal – is enough to warrant a serious viewing by any concerned citizen. It’s not a tongue-in-cheek suggestion either. The Royal Society itself is shown debating whether to release particles into the outer atmosphere to partially block the sun’s radiation, effectively reducing the heat hitting the surface of the planet.

“One garden hose to the sky,” Nathan Myhrvold exhorted, “could eliminate global warming for the entire northern hemisphere!”

Well, that would change everything. My inner cynic still has its reservations but the husband-wife team of Klein and former CBC host director Avi Lewis do their best to make arguments while taking a whirlwind and worldwide look at how fixing climate change can fix everything, including a massive global economic downturn.

They say that the movie is “an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change.”

Together, they tour through several communities across all of the continents to examine the situation and offer their modest proposals where they can.

For everyone who ever wanted to take a helicopter spin over the tarsands and get a good, hard look at the monstrous machines taking huge bites of soil out of the ground, this is the film for you. The largest industrial project on the planet is shown with its processes to turn bitumen into oil, huge pipes spewing steaming effluent into 220 square kilometres of tailings ponds, one site of which is held back by one of the tallest dams in the world. There are sulphur deposits taller than three-storey apartment buildings.

We see some of the people who work in this environment, in one of the popular bars that keep them all entertained when they aren’t on the job. Two young men discuss with the camera how ridiculous is the amount of money that they’re making. One of them stops the interview to blow his nose with a $20 and toss it away.

From there, This Changes Everything goes to visit others who are fighting for their homelands. Crystal, a young leader with the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, strives to gain access to the restricted Cold Lake military base as an environmental disaster plays out. We visit a Montana goat ranch that has seen a broken pipeline that has coated literally everything in oil. The filmmakers visit Greece and India where similar stories are playing out too.

Klein gets a bit heavy-handed at times with her commentary, referring to the key of humankind’s progress as treating the environment as “the beast that we had to break and then forced to do our bidding.” Yes, we’re all mature adults and whether we all pay attention or turn our heads, we all know that nature has suffered in order for our population to stretch and thrive as it has. We don’t really need such sappy pandering to have the argument made.

Still, it’s tough to disagree with her. I might not like Klein’s voice but she does have her points.

The film’s credits even make recommendations to the viewers who are looking for more hands-on materials. There are study guides, solutions, and connections to local movements through its website at www.thischangeseverything.org.