A new documentary opened last Thursday, in a way a follow--up on last year's environmental wake-up call An Inconvenient Truth. According to the New York Times, the 11th Hour is "an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary about our environmental calamity", and "is such essential viewing."

As hard as this movie may be to watch (again), the alternative of putting our heads in the sand is becoming less and less of an option. And as this issue of abusing our living environment heats up really nicely, it is slowly becoming apparent that we're facing a moral issue, one that will need to be resolved by unity, collaboration, selflessness, sacrifice and consideration of forces that are able to inspire behavioral change.  

The 11th Hour is produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio and deals with the state of our environment. It was directed by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners and financed by Adam Lewis, Pierre André Senizergues and Doyle Brunson. Distributed by Warner Independent Pictures. Its world premiere was at the 2007 60th Annual Cannes Film Festival and is to be released on August 17th, 2007.

With the contributions of over fifty of the world's most prominent thinkers and activists, including reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, physicist Stephen Hawking, and Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai, the film documents the grave problems facing the planet's life systems. Global warming, deforestation, mass species extinction, and depletion of the oceans' habitats are all addressed. The film's premise is that the future of humanity is in jeopardy.

The film offers hope and potential solutions to these problems by calling for restorative action by the reshaping and rethinking of global human activity through technology and social responsibility and conservation. Scientists and environmental advocates such as David Orr, David Suzuki, and Gloria Flora paint a portrait for a radically new and different future in which it is not humanity's intent to dominate the planet's life systems, but to mimic and coexist with them.