The 11th Hour - detailed qoutes

The Man of the Hour
Leonardo DiCaprio: actor, activist.
photograph by Annie Leibovitz May 2007

.

A longtime environmentalist—remember his interview in 2000 with then president Bill Clinton for an ABC Earth Day special? - DiCaprio is currently on the boards of both the Natural Resources Defense Council and Global Green USA and has been a tireless promoter of green causes and events.

.

The 11th Hour, is a feature documentary on environmental ills and possible cures, a kind of state-of-the-earth address with gorgeous pictures and eloquent experts, which DiCaprio is producing, co-writing, and narrating.

.

Below are excerpts from the film The 11th Hour:

.

Leonardo DiCaprio, actor, activist:
So, we find ourselves on the brink. It's clear humans have had a devastating impact on our planet's ecological web of life. Because we've waited, because we've turned our backs on nature's warning signs, and because our political and corporate leaders have consistently ignored the overwhelming scientific evidence, the challenges we face are that much more difficult.

We are in the environmental age whether we like it or not. So, what does the future look like? We know the United States, the greatest consumer and source of waste, needs to make a transition to a greener future, but will our pivotal generation create a sustainable world in time?

What will guide this massive change? And does nature hold the answers we need to help restore our planet's resources, protect our atmosphere, and therefore help all life survive?

.

Paul Hawken, environmentalist and entrepreneur:
The problem that confronts us is that every living system in the biosphere is in decline and the rate of decline is accelerating. There isn't one peer-reviewed scientific article that's been published in the last 20 years that contradicts that statement. Living systems are coral reefs. They're our climatic stability, forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers, water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity. They go on and on as they get more specific. But the fact is, there isn't one living system that is stable or is improving. And those living systems provide the basis for all life. —

.

Herman Daly, ecological economist:

I think the most basic thing to understand about our global economic system is that it's a subsystem. The larger system is the biosphere, and the subsystem is the economy. The problem, of course, is that our subsystem, the economy, is geared for growth; it's all set up to grow, to expand. Whereas the parent system doesn't grow; it remains the same size. So, as the economy grows, it displaces, it encroaches upon the biosphere, and this is the fundamental cost of economic growth. It's what you give up when you expand. You give up what used to be there.

.

Lester Brown, founder, Earth Policy Institute:
There's a more fundamental problem, and that is, as the world economy has expanded relative to the size of the earth itself, we have reached the point where economic activity often does a lot of damage. What we need to recognize is that, in many cases now, the indirect costs of the products, the goods, and the services we buy may be greater than the direct costs. —

.

David Suzuki, geneticist and broadcaster:

Economists don't include all of the things that nature does for us for nothing. Some technologies would never be able to do what nature does.

For example, pollinating all of the flowering plants. What would it cost us to take carbon dioxide out of the air and put oxygen back in, which all the green things do for us for nothing?

It's possible to do a crude estimate of what it would cost us to replace nature. Well, it turns out, [one researcher] estimated it would cost us $35 trillion a year to do what nature is doing for us for nothing.

.

Now to put that in perspective. If you had added up all of the annual economies of all the countries in the world at that time, it would come to $18 trillion.

So, nature is doing twice as much service for us as the economies of the world. And in the madness of conventional economics, this is not in the equation. —

.

Stephen Schneider, climatologist:

Somehow in the last few decades in business school, they were trained that the object of their business is growth, as if that were an end. It's not an end, it's a means. And if we flip the ends and means, then we can get the end back, quality of life. We have to look at the contradictions because the wrong kind of growth reduces our quality of life, and we have to take that back. —

.

Ray Anderson, industrial engineer and businessman:
I think the industrial system has to be re-invented. Today the throughput of the industrial system, from mine and wellhead to finished product, ends up in a landfill or incinerator. For every truckload of product with lasting value, 32 truckloads of waste are produced. That's mind-boggling, but it's true. So we have a system that is a waste-making system. And clearly we cannot continue to dig up the earth and turn it to waste. —

.

Stephen Hawking, cosmologist:

One can see from space how the human race has changed the earth. Nearly all of the available land has been cleared for agriculture or urban development. The polar ice caps are shrinking and the desert areas are increasing. At night the earth is no longer dark, but lit up. All this is evidence that human exploitation of the planet is reaching a critical limit, but human demands and expectations are ever increasing. —

.
Thom Hartmann, broadcaster, educator, businessman.

Some people suggest that in order to live sustainably we have to go out in the woods and put on animal skins and live on roots and berries. And the simple reality is that we do have technology. The question is, how can we use our understanding of science and our understanding of technology along with our understanding of culture, and how culture changes, to create a culture that will interact with science and with the world around us in a sustainable fashion? —

.
Paul Hawken:

The great thing about the dilemma we're in is that we get to reimagine every single thing we do. In other words, there isn't one single thing that we make that doesn't require a complete remake. And so there are two ways of looking at that. One is like: Oh my gosh, what a big burden. The other way to look at it, which is the way I prefer, is: What a great time to be born! What a great time to be alive! Because this generation gets to essentially completely change this world. —

.
William McDonough, architect and designer:

We're at a point in our history, with 6.4 billion of us, that we have to imagine what it would be like to redesign design itself, see design as the first signal of human intention, and realize that we need new intentions for our future where materials are seen as things that are highly valuable and need to go in closed cycles—what we call cradle to cradle, instead of cradle to grave. And we have to agree that energy needs to come from renewable sources, principally the sun, and that water needs to be clean and healthy as it comes in and out of the system, and that we should treat each other with justice and fairness. So, the design itself changes from mass production of things that are essentially destructive to mass utilization of things that are inherently assets instead of liabilities. —

.

Janine Benyus, co-founder, the Biomimicry Guild:

How we make things in our industrial process is a 180-degree difference from how life makes things. Look at how we make, for instance, Kevlar, which is our toughest material. We take petroleum, we heat it up to about 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, we boil it in sulfuric acid, and then we pull it out under enormous pressures.

.

Now, imagine us making our bones or our teeth, or imagine an abalone making a shell. Abalones can't afford to heat it up to really high temperatures or do pressures or do chemical baths, so they've found a different way.

.

Take the spider. This beautiful orb-weaver spider is basically taking flies and crickets and transforming them in water in the abdomen and what comes out is this material that's five times stronger ounce for ounce than steel. Silently, in water, at room temp. I mean, this is master chemistry, and this is manufacturing of the future, hopefully. And there are actually people who are now trying to mimic the recipes of these organisms. Beautiful architecture and incredible manufacturing and we're starting to learn how to mimic that. —

.
William McDonough:

If we think about the tree as a design, it's something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides a habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy, makes complex sugars and food, creates micro-climates, self-replicates. So, what would it be like to design a building like a tree? What would it be like to design a city like a forest? So what would a building be like if it were photosynthetic? What if it took solar energy and converted it to productive and delightful use? —

.
R. James Woolsey, former director of the C.I.A.:

This country can move awfully fast, if it wants to. Keep in mind that after December 7, 1941, Roosevelt went to Jimmy Byrnes and said, You're my deputy president for mobilizing the economy. Anybody crosses you, they cross me. Within six months, Detroit was completely retooled, not making cars anymore, making military trucks, tanks, fighter aircraft, and in three years and eight months from the beginning of that war, we had mobilized, we had defeated imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, together with the British and our other allies, and had begun demobilization. Three years and eight months. —