Leo DiCaprio sees the danger Before The Flood
Director: Fisher Stevens
Narrator: Leo DiCaprio
Being United Nations Messenger of Peace Leo DiCaprio, travels different parts of world to witness firsthand effects of climate change and global warming. The journey of the committed and environment enthusiast DiCaprio in this documentary portrays the look at how climate change affects our environment and the steps taken by the leaders, scientists, activists as well as public to prevent the ecological imbalance and its harsh effect on wildlife, native communities and human lifestyle.
Leo also spoke to experts who hope to improve the climate issues such as the GigaFactory CEO Elon Musk, professors with socio-economic and political insight, Pope Francis and Barack Obama himself on the matter.
Before the Flood starts and ends with Leo DiCaprio’s discussion of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, a piece of artwork that shows humanity’s progression from creation to debauchery to ultimate doom. He made a speech before the United Nations calling for greater action on climate change and environmental degradation.
He travelled to the Sumatran rainforest, the Arctic, Greenland, India, China, Miami, and many other places that are being disrupted by climate change.
The human needs of coal, crude oil, and natural gas are provided by fossil fuels, which cover about 80% of total energy need and are totally dependent on nature.
Big industries and factories work on them for production and supply to fulfill the energy need.
More buildings leads to more consumption of power and electricity to live luxurious lifestyle. But more the energy consumption more will be the depletion of nature.
The land degradation caused by this leads to melting of polar ice caps resulting in increase of water current along with sea levels. The weather patterns get disturbed by this resulting in heavy flood and droughts. As presented in documentary the mayor of Miami had done work to overcome such flood by raising roads and building electric pumps. This required a huge amount of fund by government. But the most of governors and cabinet members didn’t believe the talks going about climate change which mentioned the climate change as the effect of human activity. Some of them were corrupt officials who in turn gave the permission to destroy forests for industrial use. At the time talking about climate change was banned. The medias were also lobbied by the congressmen and were confusing publics by saying that the scientists and activists are lying about the situation and called them fraud.
Michael E. Mann, professor of atmospheric science and his coauthors presented a report on abrupt increasing trend of global warming due to climate change and published the graph on The Wall Street Journal. After this he said that he was being attacked by congressmen and was having death threats.
The government was funded by industry profits so they denied to lessen the production of industries which were totally dependent on fossil fuels. The coal consumption by big countries other than USA like China was high due to industrialization and urbanization.
The waste release with high amount of CO2 causes pollution with increase in toxicity level affecting the health of people living near waste dump. More than 1 billion farmers were benefitted from fishery across the world. But the coastal ecosystem is disturbed resulting in the decrease of sea species.
Largely populated countries daily life is based on supermarket products which are mostly non renewable and cause environmental degradation. Also enormous beef consumption and production in these big countries has increased the content of toxic gas like methane in air. Due to these facts of big countries, their leadership for controlling climate change is not helping.
Thus, the overall documentary with the great actor Leo DiCaprio depicted the climate change and environmental degradation as one of the biggest threat and challenge to human race and sustainability of business. We humans must be accountable for all our deeds to the nature as we can only think and act about the solutions and prevention of the problem.
Possible solutions to the problems captured by the documentary
In the documentary the actor Leo DiCaprio came across several solutions to the ongoing climate change and its effects presented in what follows
- Role of power plants, industries and companies: They must be transparent in every work they carryout. They must give their daily resource consumption data to public to monitor them so that publics can push them towards climate control. Also renewable sources must be given high consideration on their production.
- Role of alternative sources: Windmills must be prioritized than coal industries, which will result in less consumption of fossil fuels. Also production of batteries to store solar energy must be increased. Use of biomass such as cow dung cakes instead of firewood will also help in forest conservation.
- Role of Government: Carbon tax system must be implemented. This system can result in public consuming less carbon related products and hence less production by industries. Also the government must address the problem of climate change to public and not deny it. Government should engage in environmental protection
- Role of media: Media must broadcast programs openly talking about climate change and convey the message of controlling it to the public. This can educate people and enhance their understanding on the matter.
- Role of consumers: They must decrease their consumption of non-renewable products. They should prefer ecofriendly products. The consumption of beef should be minimized and so the diet plan of every individual should be changed.