Earth Equity News

New Post-Apocalypse Climate Film to Open. By Jerome Cartillier, AFP, September 20, 2009. "Could we, the human race, really miss an ever-narrowing chance to save the planet from the ravages of global warming? Age of Stupid, which will be screened in hundreds of venues around the world next week, contemplates this grim scenario with the open aim of galvanizing a collective effort to prevent it... The story is told in the voice of an ageing archivist -- played by A-list British actor Pete Postlethwaite -- looking back from the year 2055 on a world devastated by climate catastrophe... 'We could have saved ourselves, but we didn't. It's amazing. What state of mind were we in, to face extinction and simply shrug it off?' Postlethwaite's character says with a flash of anger. Gazing back to our time, he details the lives of six people whose stories intersect with global warming in different ways: a dirt-poor, aspiring medical student from Nigeria's oil rich Niger Delta; a young business scion starting up India's third 'low cost' airline; a pair of child refugees from the war in Iraq. We meet 37-year-old Piers Guy, struggling vainly against the opposition of his neighbors in the English countryside of Cornwall to a wind farm that could power several thousand households. And then there is 82-year old Fernand Parau, a French mountain guide who has watched Alpine glaciers retreat dozens of meters over his long career. The movie's title comes from a retired oil company scientist in New Orleans, thinking out loud as to how future generations might look back our era if we fail to reign in global warming. 'The Age of Stupid' will be broadcast on Monday in more than 400 US theaters."