Too Stupid

Written by Anna da Costa / 23 September 2009 / Read Anna da Costa's latest blog entries.

Yesterday evening was momentous. A day after the Global Campaign on Climate Change saw people take to the streets around the world and climate week was launched in New York, the Age of Stupid had its' global premiere.

India joined the army of 63 nations showing this groundbreaking film to more than 10,00,000 people - over two days. It shook us in our seats, waking us up to the imminent threat that climate change is already and reminding us that we still have the chance to salvage our common future.

The film tracks back from 2050, where a lone grandchild-less father sits in a deadened archive of world relics, elephants and antelopes in brine, and surrounded by all the data that ever existed saved on wind-power driven servers in a grey and dreary archive towering like a great iron mushroom above the sea. Climate change has escalated and humanity did nothing to prevent it. And there he sits, asking the question, how did we let this happen?

Following characters in India, Africa, Jordan, America, the UK and France and using actual footage from the last fifty years, the film tracked between stories of young, old, pioneers and villains. It shows how the way we are living today and have lived in the past is creating the future that we face now, yet we are being to stupid to recognize what we have or what we risk losing, all too cheaply.

'And for what?', the film asks. What is it that is stopping us from making change now? Is it our belief that we need to consume more and more, our loss of connection with the real stuff of life, our lack of value of ourselves as worth saving? Or are the choices the world makes simply in the hands of an unthinking few?

Conflict and poverty follow resources, time and again - shows the film, so why do we still continue to blindly pursue them and at what cost? India is a country still so much in touch with these questions and this one of the many things it has to share with the rest of the world. What is the real stuff of life? What do we truly seek? 

The power is both in the hands of a few, and in the hands of many.

Our political and corporate leaders need to sit up and smell the steaming scorching coffee that is reality right now and see the choice that is in their hands - to change the course of history and impact the lives of billions. But each of us in our own ways can make change happen too. There is a power in protest, a power in sharing ideas, a power in using our voice and a power in working together.

The good news is that momentum is building on climate change around the world, with a groundswell of will to work together to find common solutions. For the first time, as a species, we have the chance to see the course of our fate and change it. We have a choice. We have to take this opportunity to make change happen now. Let's take it.