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A new documentary, on the supposed environmental crisis of climate change had its New Zealand premier in Hamilton on June 5^th  and there seems no doubt that it will appear everywhere soon, since there is a large amount of both money and moral fervour behind it.  The documentary, which runs all of two hours, is simply entitled, Home, and it is the work of French photographer and environmental activist, Yann Arthus-Bertrand.  It is also very much inspired in purpose and methodology by Al Gore’s, An Inconvenient Truth, and, like the latter, it will also be accompanied by a vast amount of material aimed at schools.  Arthus-Bertrand is a noted aerial photographer, who has made enormous use of the helicopter in covering Paris/Dakar rallies and his 1994 Earth from Above.  In 2005 he founded the international environmental organisation GoodPlanet and also set up Action Carbone.  Home may be seen, in part, as expiation for his carbon ‘sins’.

Home played in a University lecture theatre in Hamilton (sponsored by the local branch of the Alliance Française) to a large and enthusiastic audience, many of whom stood to applaud at the end.  What were they applauding?  Home is certainly enormously visually appealing and it presents, particularly in its early parts, a vivid depiction of the evolving planet and the many environmental problems that beset the modern world. In many ways this is the best of it. There are challenges that accompany human development and they need attention. The treatment in Home, though, is too simplistic to be useful and, overall, it tends to encourage the stultifying illusion that there is really only one problem and solving it is just a matter of commitment.  The fact is that there are many problems and they each have their own characteristics and difficulties and to solve them will frequently demand time, compromise and cost.

However, much of Home is of a significantly different character.   It stands in an infamous tradition of propaganda films that set out to rally public sentiment via the attachment of emotions.  In this, absolute conviction about the rightness of the cause washes away any qualms about the methodology.  As Lenin would have had it, the end justifies the means and the end (in the case of Communism) was unquestionably good.  In the case of Home, the cause, as Arthus-Bertrand and his supporters see it, is immediate action to deal with the problems of the planet: injustice, environmental degradation, poverty …and all exacerbated by the imminent disaster of global warming, which turns out to be his major focus. 

In many ways Home is not so much a documentary as a massive ‘party political broadcast on behalf of the Green Party’.  As such, it makes no attempt at balance or analysis, or the representation of contrary views.  In its second half in particular, it is simply a vague and almost hysterical call to arms.  In passing, it might also be noted that it is also rather selective in its choice of targets.  Big cities, and particularly those built where there is a water shortage, are bad (Las Vegas and Dubai) but Qatar (right next door to the latter in the desert of Saudi Arabia) is good.  Qatar supports education. It also supplied $1 million to the making of the film, which may have helped in producing a kinder treatment.  

The methodology of Home is sadly familiar: a nearly two-hour torrent of exaggeration and downright lies and all beautifully, almost mesmerizingly filmed.  But is this latter feature a virtue that can stand alone?  Can a film built around the presentation of untruths be justified on the grounds that it is visually stunning?  Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Triumph of the Will has been said to be a masterpiece of documentary film making but we do not appreciate it in that way because of its subject.  Propaganda that is exquisitely produced is nonetheless propaganda and it is the more dangerous for it.

In many ways there is less excuse for the persistent misrepresentations of Home than there was for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.  Since he made that documentary, there has been a great deal of academic commentary on so-called ‘global warming’ and, of course, there was a well-reported court-case in the UK in which many of the misrepresentations of Gore’s movie were exposed.  It is thus not plausible to argue that Arthus-Bertrand and his supporters would not have known that, for example, the polar ice-sheets are not presently shrinking in a dramatic way but rather they are about the same as they were forty years ago, when satellite measurement began and that the featured transit of the Northwest Passage was not ‘unprecedented’:  in fact it was done about 100 years ago and has probably been possible at various times in human history (during the Medieval Warm Period, for example).  More generally, it is scarcely credible that Arthus-Bertrand could be unaware that global temperatures are presently falling and have been doing so for several years.  In fact, some scientists now think that far from warming, we may be entering a cold period.  There is some similarity between the present pattern of sun-spot activity and the onset of the so-called Little Ice Age of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.  Of course there is still room for doubt about whether this will happen but it would be bizarre indeed if we were launch into mitigation measures on the assumption of global warming when there was any possibility that the opposite might occur.

This, of course, is the enormous political danger that Home presents: that misled citizenries in the Western World (those that have obligations under Kyoto) will oblige their governments to have imposed on them financial imposts that will seriously damage their economies and their standards of living, with minimal likelihood of any benefit to the wider world.  The crucial principle must be that of ‘reasonable doubt’.  In this context, ordinary citizens need to attempt to engage with the facts as far as global climate change is concerned and the media need to play their part, in making sure that the facts are available and by avoiding the naïve prejudgement that has characterised their treatment of environmental issues to date.  It is not in our interest to allow Arthus-Bertrand and his backers to pre-empt the debate. 

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