"Home"

That was the title of the free film that Transition Towns put on at the Globe last night.
The turn out was pretty low, but I did see some people I knew, and there was an interested couple from Glasbury.
The film was beautifully photographed, almost like watching the Earth being made into abstract art, and every shot was from above, so you really got a sense of the scale of things, as the tiny ship ploughed through the Arctic ice, or the combine harvesters moved across a vast American wheat field.
The point of it was to say that human beings have changed the Earth dramatically in the last fifty years, with the help of oil for transport, fertiliser and pesticides, and that the present state of affairs can't go on for much longer - with dramatic shots of the green desert in Saudi Arabia, irrigated with fossil water which cannot be replaced, drying up again.
This was where showing the planet from the air really came into its own, with shots of mile after mile of plastic covering land in Spain where vegetables are produced for supermarkets all over Europe, and vast plantations of eucalyptus trees (for paper) and date palms (for oil) replacing the diverse eco-systems of natural forests.
The film showed Qatar as the apex of the present economic system: Qatar has no water, but it has expensive de-salination plants to make salt water drinkable. It has no agriculture, but it can import food - and with all that sunshine beating down, there isn't a solar panel to be seen, while they spend their oil energy building artificial islands in the shape of palm trees for millionaires.
Of course, recent events have made this miracle in the desert seem rather hollow, as Qatar went bust just the other week.
To balance all the doom and gloom, though, the last part of the film had the refrain "It's too late to be a pessimist", and showed examples of what can be done with renewable energy around the world.
The film is available on the net, free, from www.goodplanet.org

There was a lively discussion afterwards, touching on such issues as over population, which the film mentioned but didn't really go into, and whether or not to go vegetarian - and a general invitation to go to the Swan on Thursday 10th December for a social evening with Transition Towns, from about 7.30pm.