The 11th Hour -- Required Viewing for Every Tenant of the Earth

When I first saw this film I left a review on Netflix saying that every person on this planet should see this film – at least twice.

I stand by that. This is a truly important film that will open your eyes as no other film can to the effect of human life on our poor patient, long-suffering, deeply abused Mother Earth.

It paints with crystal clarity the pain that we have inflicted on our dear planet, fouling and harming our nest until every single biological system on earth is hurt and some are deeply and irreparably damaged.

This film is richer, deeper, fuller, more challenging, more frightening, more hopeful, and more impacting than Al Gore's film. It goes further than An Inconvenient Truth in every way.

It features many mini-interviews with leading experts on the environment and the planet. They have such stimulating facts and inspiring ideas to relate that I actually got more out of seeing the film the second and third time.

The 11th Hour opened my eyes to startling facts about our world that I was completely unaware of.

The film points out that human population was almost stable for thousands of years because agriculture was the dominant technology. We were tied to the energy from the sun and could only produce as much food as the sun's energy would permit.

Then came the discovery of fossil fuels and the Industrial Revolution. The population exploded, faster and faster.

Since the time of the Kennedy Administration, the population of the earth has doubled. It is completely shocking to me that this has happened within my lifetime (which seems short to me).

We see the effects of this human explosion all around us, as the commute and pollution becomes worse every day, and the malls and freeways multiply and proliferate.

But we are not aware that the oceans are increasingly polluted, the forests of the world are rapidly shrinking, the fish in the ocean are literally in danger of being used up completely, there are only a few tigers in the world, many large fish are totally extinct...  Our poor dear world – our home, our nest.

The 11^th Hour will wake you and shake you.

But it does not leave you without hope.

The last part of the film is devoted to visionaries and their far-reaching solutions. As I saw these dedicated men and women speak, I thought that if we have the creativity to destroy our planet we also have the creativity and commitment to save it.