Before The Flood: Review of DiCaprio’s Climate Documentary
(*Originally published November 2nd 2016 on www.systems-souls-society*)
I just finished watching Leonardo Dicaprio’s much anticipated documentary about climate change. Before the Flood is deeply intelligent, profoundly human and ‘realistic’ in the best senses of the term. The film is steadfastly real and even quite dark about where we might be heading, but it rightly emphasises our individual and collective scope to adapt the world to our wills and be realistic by changing reality — what I have previously called reflexive realism.
I’m not sure where to start. So many things impressed me. This review is for everybody, but to contextualise why I loved the film so much, I need to share some of my experience of working on climate change over the last four years.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS AN EVERYTHING AND EVERYBODY ISSUE.
First, the main value of the film may prove to be the breadth and depth of the presentation and argument — a recasting of what climate change is.
In my experience, most people, including those working directly on particular aspects of the climate challenge (eg energy policy, behaviour change, environmental economics, climate communication) often seem to work at a ‘zoomed in’ level, and without ‘zooming out’, they can’t always know whether what they are trying to do is worthwhile.
To put that point more technically, climate change has plural ontologies and epistemologies; it is full of different kinds of realities and different ways of knowing. We need to broaden awareness of the global, systemic, political and multifacted nature of the climate challenge. This feeling that we need to expand our perspective and think and feel wider and deeper about climate change arose from engaging properly with the issue during an intense exploration in 2013, a process assisted by reading the excellent book The Burning Question and leading to my report: A New Agenda on Climate Change.
It might sound niche or fussy, but the lazy conflation of climate change with environmentalism more generally is a huge part of the climate problem. Through carelessness with our categories we have unwittingly turned a shared problem into a struggle between competing interests, broadly environmentalists vs non environmentalists. This apparently minor issue is in fact a conceptual catastrophe, reflected not only in cliched images of polar bears, planets and melting icebergs, but also in cliched and limited thinking about a discrete problem somehow ‘over there’ in the box marked environmental/green/sustainable. In terms of tribes and organisations and the semiotics in play, that box is for some and not others, while climate change is an issue that has to be seen as literally about everybody and everything.
Dicaprio (and Fisher Stevens, the Director) manages to move us beyond that unhelpfully sticky and limiting association. And yet — and here I felt a little humbled — he does so elegantly, subtly conveying a love of the natural world, other species and the planet as such — all of which genuinely are under threat due to climate change. So it’s by no means anti-environmental, and yet the documentary succeeds in showing that environmentalism as such is only one instrument in the orchestra in play, and rightly so.
At present I am building on my previous climate change work at the RSA by writing a short academic book for Palgrave Macmillan called The Seven Dimensions of Climate Change: rethinking the world’s toughest problem. These dimensions are Science, Technology, Law, Economy, Democracy, Culture and Behaviour and they each contain an implicit injunction (see image below):
The point of the seven dimensions framework is that the ‘solution’ to climate change will have to come from outside the conventional contours of the issue itself. Indeed part of the rationale for my new organisation that hosts this blog, Perspectiva, is the conviction that we have to grow in our epistemic and emotional range to grasp the full magnitude of the climate issue. Before the Flood helps us to do that.
VISUAL DIVERSITY
The documentary is beautifully produced and the visual texture and cinematography is unsurprisingly impressive. There is a delicate balance between natural, human and political symbols; a mixture of individuals, one to ones and groups; and a huge range of shapes, sizes, genders and colours from across the globe — it felt truly global. One minute the visual context is a scorched rain forest, then a newsflash, then a memory, then an interview, then the planet from space, then a coal mine, then a solar farm…the imagery renders visually what is much harder to grasp conceptually — that climate change contains a myriad of issues that are very different in nature and yet completely interdependent — in Perspectiva’s terms, there are systems, souls and society (p5).
Leo meets the great and the good from around the world, including Obama and the Pope, and he also has challenging conversations with climate leaders in China and India and Small Island States. I particularly liked his vivid and lucid conversation with Johan Rockstrom of theStockholm Resilience Centre where the projections of likely impacts at differing global mean surface temperatures (1 degree to 2 to 3 to 4 etc) was deftly designed and delivered. In another context, but directly relevant to the spirit of the film, Rockstrom gave one of my favourite lines about climate change:
“We have a paradox unique to our era. On a scientific basis there is more reason to be nervous than ever before. But at the same time there has never before been so much reason for hope.”
That’s very much the spirit of Before the Flood — suspended between hope and despair.
THE MESSENGER EFFECT
And then Leo himself. Obviously he’s a huge star, but what I admired most about his role in this documentary is that he was situated as a learner rather than a teacher. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth is a useful comparison here — on the one hand that film was a huge success in drawing attention to an issue that had been ignored, but it also proved to be politically polarising because the messenger was professorial and a politican partly associated with dramatic failure. In Before the Flood you get a better sense, through Leo, of the existential dimensions of theclimate challenge — the fragility and perplexity of a single human life, and the challenge of living it well.
Dicaprio is an actor, not a scientist or a politician, and I am guessing, given the way his career has gone, that he hasn’t undergone several years of higher education like many of the people he was interviewing. Leo is clearly highly intelligent, but you can sense, in a way that is palpable and even touching, that he is often at the edge of his competence, straining but still succeeding in getting to the nub of the complex information he is being presented with. It is in this respect that he shows his deepest moral leadership because we need that kind of intellectual courage — climate change has to be for amatuers — literally those who love — as well as experts — literally those who have been tested.
Some have said Dicaprio’s high (huge, even) carbon footprint in general and in the making of this film is a problem for his role as a messenger, but I am not sure. I think it might even be an asset that helps move the conversation along. Pointing out hypocrisy on climate change is often just another way of delaying action and diverting attention from our own need to engage politically with deeper resolve. The fact that Leo is defenceless on this issue is a way of forcing the conversation to move beyond that annoying cul-de-sac. After all, on climate change, themajority of people in developed countries have acquired huge levels of ecological debt.
This issue is worth probing. Some believe we have to make climate change a moral issue of this nature, but I am not so sure. In Amitav Ghosh’s wonderful book The Great Derangement he gets to the heart of the conundrum as follows which I quote verbatim because it is so lucid (p177–178):
“Of late, many activists and concerned people have begun to frame climate change as a ‘moral issue’. This has become almost a plea of last resort, appeals of many other kinds having failed to produce concerted action on climate change. So, in an ironic twist, the individual conscience is now increasingly seen as the battleground of choice for a conflict that is self-evidently a problem of the global commons, requiring collective action: it is as if every other resource of democratic governance has been exhausted, leaving only this residue — the moral.
This framing of the issue certainly has one great virtue, in that it breaks decisively with the economistic, cost-benefit language that the international climate change bureaucracy has imposed on it. But at the same time, this approach also invokes a ‘politics of sincerity’ that may ultimately work to the advantage of those on the opposite side. For if the crisis of climate change is to be seen in terms of the questions it poses to the individual conscience, then sincerity and consistency will inevitably become the touchstones by which political positions will be judged. This in turn will enable ‘deniers’ to accuse activists of personal hypocrisy by pointing out their individual lifestyle choices. When framed in this way, authenticity and sacrifice become central to the issue, which then comes to rest on matters like the number of lightbulbs in Al Gore’s home and the forms of transport that demonstrators use to get to a march.”
To which we could add the abundant air miles of Leo and his crew in making this film. But this is a typically stupid human game — part of ‘thegreat derangement’. The scale and urgency of the climate crisis is not like other moral issues and individual decisions only really make a difference when they galvanise collective action. The way out of this trap, I think, is to distinguish between personal and political morality. In a world of billions scrambling to survive and thrive, is utterly lame to think we can address the climate crisis one person at a time in which we voluntarily forgo desires for the sake of the global habitat.
We can, however, justify and evaluate individual behaviour on climate related matters in terms of their likely systemic impact — what are we tacitly accepting or signalling through how we behave? Clearly we do need to try to model a new normal where we can. In this case, Leo offset his carbon emissions. Offsetting has its detractors of course, but given the need to show the global problem for a global audience, and not to pretend to be a moral exemplar, this may have been the best he could do.
Reflecting on this issue, which was also implicit in the recent foolish decision to build a third runway at Heathrow, I think we have to encourage moral leadership in behavioural terms, but not be too quick to assign moral blame. The focus must remain resolutely systemic and global and therefore primarily about action at scale. Let’s accept those necessary trade offs in which — at a moral level — we may have to sacrifice personal consistency for the sake of political impact.
ANSWERS?
I liked that the documentary doesn’t give facile answers, but rather points towards things that people can and should do do act upon theinformation they have just received. The emphasis on a carbon tax was good, as was the recognition that policies like that only succeed when elected representatives sense that the people want it — which means the behavioural and cultural work we need to do on climate change is not an alternative to the heavy lifting of complex technocratic solutions. On the contrary, it is an indispensable foundation for them.
That’s the whole idea of the seven dimensions of climate change — in this case you’re only likely to get economic change (price of carbon) with a legal constraint (carbon tax) through democracy (manifesto commitments) if you also have an alternative technology story — in this case mostly the success of renewable energy. And that set of policy dominoes don’t tend to move much until cultural (news, conversations, stories) and behavioural changes (consumption choices, dietary changes) signal to the social animals that we are that acting resolutely on climate change is the new normal. The documentary doesn’t put it in these terms, but this sense of systemic agency that we all need to feel is quite tangible throughout.
Of course, lots of things were not really mentioned at all, eg nuclear energy, fracking, divestment and there are inevitably moments where complex issues are covered too fast, for instance the implication that giving up on meat (especially beef) necessarily meant eating Tofu. But on the whole I admire the clarity and coherence and parsimony of the film — it packs in a lot in a way that has what Gregory Bateson calls ‘aesthetic unity’ — it feels whole.
But then there is the whole impact question. Will anybody watch this film who doesn’t already care about climate change? What difference will it make? We don’t (perhaps can’t) really know what will follow, but in this case I can imagine many unusual suspects wanting to watch it, partly because of Leo’s star quality, but also because it is gripping and moving and posed as a shared human question rather than an interest group’s agenda.
Before the Flood ends on a sublime note, coming full circle back to an arresting piece of artwork (above) — The Garden of Earthly Delights by Heironymous Bosch in 1485 — that hung above Leo’s crib as a boy. He shares a book about that image with the Pope and ends on a suitably spiritual note about praying for humankind, and doing what we can, while we still can.
Of course, in this context it’s worth considering that recent research suggests the Pope’s Encyclical on climate change may not have had much ‘impact’ at all — people are not so easily swayed on climate change, because it can so easily ‘bounce off’ their worldview. So even if Leo’s documentary gets hundreds of millions of views — which it might well do- it is, sadly, possible, that it will not make a significant political difference.
However, I feel more upbeat about the contribution. Even if Before the Flood is viewed mostly by the already converted, it may be precisely the boost to climate perspective and morale and therefore constructive action that the world needs to keep the momentum generated at Paris Cop21 (which features in the film).
Please do give it your time, and share it far and wide, especially with those who would not otherwise watch it.
Dr Jonathan Rowson is Founding Director of Perspectiva, a chess Grandmaster and the author of The Seven Dimensions of Climate Change: rethinking the world’s toughest problem (Forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan 2017). You can reach him on Twitter @jonathan_rowson
