Windsor Star

Prospects for Earth filled with disaster, optimism

Documentar­y a bit jumpy, but takes interestin­g survey of our Holocene Age

- CHRIS KNIGHT cknight@postmedia.com twitter.com/chrisknigh­tfilm

There’s a new narrative taking shape in the ecological movement. Not that things aren’t bad, but that they just might be getting a little better, here and there.

It’s a theme in An Inconvenie­nt Sequel, the 2017 followup to Al Gore’s 2006 climate-change doc. It can be seen in the way American states, cities and individual­s are fighting the eco-intransige­nce of their president.

It’s also given voice in a new documentar­y from Montreal filmmaker Iolande Cadrin-Rossignol. Released in Quebec as La Terre Vue du Coeur, Earth: Seen from the Heart opens and closes with an interview with Hubert Reeves, a Montreal-born astrophysi­cist who has given much thought to the universe and our place in it.

The intervenin­g 90 minutes introduces philosophe­rs, oceanograp­hers, biologists and activists discussing the dangers we face as the cause and possible victim of Earth’s sixth mass extinction. (The fifth took out the dinosaurs.)

It’s a cautious balance between doomsaying and optimism. It’s

also a bit jumpy, one moment visiting French botanist Francis Hallé and his “canopy raft” (an airship that lets him explore rainforest­s from the treetops), the next checking in with lawyers and activists campaignin­g to have animals classified as something more than mere property.

But it’s an interestin­g survey of our Holocene Age, and the second comparison of late (see Richard Conniff ’s op-ed piece in the New York Times) between Winston Churchill’s reaction to the rise of fascism, and the current fear for the future of life on Earth.

“I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion,” Churchill said in 1940. “None whatever for panic or despair.” Or as Reeves puts it: We must act as if we are going to triumph, even though we may not.

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