The Age of Stupid

Off to Booths last night to see the Transition Towns screening of The Age of Stupid, starring Pete Postlethwaite.
They hold the screenings upstairs at the moment (the custom built cinema is still in the process of being built), and they had coffee and tea and flapjacks on offer at the back.
Pete Postlethwaite holds the whole thing together, as the man in 2050 piecing together what went wrong with the world. All the news footage was real, a lot of it from the BBC, together with several shorter films interspersed with each other. There was an 'American Hero', who saved a hundred people after Hurricane Katrina, and lost everything himself - and who turned out to work for an oil company. He was a nice man, and proud of his job; it wasn't his fault that the oil that he helped to find is wasted in such profligate quantities.
There was an Alpine guide, a sweet old man of 82, who took an English family to see the local glacier. When he started as a guide, you could just step out from the path onto the glacier. Now you have to climb down 150 metres of ladders to get to it.
The English family was headed by Piers, who builds wind turbines, and he was followed through the protests about a wind farm he wanted to build - the protests being led by a frankly scary woman - and the project was eventually turned down because it would spoil the view.
Then there was the cheery Indian businessman who has started a cheap airline in India, so that anyone can afford to fly. He was positively evangelistic about it, and said something about it being his 'higher purpose in life'.
There were the Iraqi children, refugees in Jordan, who sell shoes that they have mended - shoes which come from America and the UK in containers. "Americans throw their shoes out if there's only one little thing wrong with them," the boy said. American soldiers had killed the family donkey, and "the best dad in the whole world".
There was the Nigerian woman who wanted to be a doctor (we saw her at the end being accepted into college), who talked about the impact of the oil companies on her home. She took the camera crew to a nearby village which had been wiped out by soldiers after a dispute with the oil company over a piece of land they wanted to drill on. The woman there showed the remains of the compound where her grandfather had died when it was burned down, and talked about the children who had died from drinking polluted water.
The problem - one of the problems - seems to be the disconnect between what we do in our everyday lives and how it affects the planet. One person interviewed said that the effects of what we do now won't show up for 30 or 40 years - what we are seeing in the climate now is the result of what happened 30 or 40 years ago.
At the very end of the film, there was a little note on the screen expressing the hope that the Copenhagen talks would be successful - and we all know how that fell apart in disarray.

After that, to cheer us up a bit, there was a short Welsh film where an environmentalist takes his old pal round local projects to try to encourage him to change his unsustainable lifestyle. At one place, where local schoolchildren were planting seeds, the organiser said something about them growing the food themselves and then cooking it for Sunday lunch, as if this was a new and amazing concept.

And then there was a discussion at the end, with talk of solar panels and government incentives - and somehow the subject of the giant dairy farm in Lincolnshire came up. A couple in the audience said "We live in Lincolnshire," and told us how they didn't know where the milk from this enormous farm was going to be processed, because the dairy in Lincolnshire had shut down just a few weeks before. Local dairy farmers were spraying milk onto their fields because they were unable to sell it, while cheap milk was being shipped in through Hull.

I think a lot of people who saw the film went away frustrated, and angry, and wondering how little people like us can change such a huge, mad system.
But doing nothing is also a choice, which puts that person on the side of the madness.