There has to be a breaking point for pro-environment, government-fleecing, anti-war documentaries. It feels like for every documentary about a subject not related to our abuses of the planet, the terrible atrocities and corruption caused by our war-mongering and governmental amorality, there’s twenty that bludgeon the theaters with, I’ll say it frankly, liberal propaganda. Not to say I’m complaining. A wave of films exposing the sordid activities of the Republican Party and the soon to be overheated, barren wasteland we’ve allowed our planet to become are educational, informational, and occasionally excellent in their execution. It just seems that with so many clogging the drainpipes of documentary theatrical experiences, that the films are teetering on the edge of over-saturation. Carbon Nation, a sleek new film by Peter Byck, joins the ranks of the environmental propaganda click, and suffers from the overabundance. This is a good film that opines a great idea with a certain amount of aplomb, yet struggles to distinguish itself from the mass of similarity it arrives in.
Our
environment, because of our inability to take care of it,
is, frankly, fucked. Cars, coal, cows - they have created a
percentage of terrible gasses that are not only threatening,
but actively warming our climate to a point where our way of
living is going to drastically, and for the worse change.
Unless we do something. Peter Byck is pretty up front with
his ideas in Carbon Nation - we’ve screwed the
country up, here’s a bunch of ways even you, the lowly film
viewer can do to help make a difference. The documentary is
filmed with a certain eye for visual aesthetics and rings
with an aura of humor unseen in a lot of these
we-have-screwed-the-Earth’s-pooch films. Byck does well in
highlighting not only the ideas and solutions to our current
climate change problem, but the characters behind them. His
brief portrayals of people like the one-armed wind-farmer
Cliff Etheridge and determined low-income solar panel man
Van Jones bring an air of humanity to our failing
environment that draws us as a viewer in. If these folks,
good-natured salt of the Earth people just like you and I,
can do it, why can’t we? And that’s just the beginning.
Byck’s film isn’t about how bad we are as a society because
our environment is careening towards failure, it is about
the way people are doing anything to try and bring it back
from the brink. He hits all the major points in the film -
geothermal, algae, wind, etc. - but brings them down to a
reasonable and recognizable point. We can do something, we
just have to start doing it.
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