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Fri, 08/17/2007

Viking Author Paul Hawken Featured in Environmental Documentary The 11th Hour:

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Unless you've been hermetically sealed away in a bomb shelter or have been orbiting the planet in a space station, you're probably painfully aware of the earth's environmental predicament.

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth shocked the world last year with its facts and images, and today, almost exactly a year later, The 11th Hour takes the stage to scrutinize the global crisis and galvanize us into action.

Called "an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary" and "essential viewing" by The New York Times, The 11th Hour is narrated by a "sincere and passionate" Leonardo DiCaprio and stars luminaries as varied as physicist Stephen Hawking, to former Soviet Union Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev. Dozens of conservationists, policy wonks, gurus and scientists are interviewed, and all of them agree: though the situation has become dire, it's not too late, and in fact there may even be cause for hope.

A key guest in the documentary is Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, a proponent of grassroots environmental activism. After spending more than a decade researching groups as diverse as billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, he concludes that there is a vital, thriving movement in the works, a global desire to re-imagine mankind's relationship with the environment.

“Life is the most fundamental human right,” Hawken writes, “and all of the movements within the movement are dedicated to creating the conditions for life, conditions that include livelihood, food, security, peace, a stable environment and freedom from external tyranny.”

The 11th Hour is out in theaters today, and everybody from the lead singer of Green Day to the former director of the C.I.A. under President Clinton, encourage you to go watch it.

Get involved, get educated, and become part of the rising social collective that Paul Hawken's describes as part of our planet's own immunological response.

-- Philip Tucker, Online Producer