|  OBERLIN, Ohio, Aug. 20, 2007 - Oberlin College faculty member and noted environmentalist David Orr appears in Leonardo DiCaprio’s feature-length documentary, The 11th Hour, which just opened in this country in limited release.
He is among more than 50 leading international scientists, thinkers, and leaders who contribute their views to what Variety calls “a ruminative essay on what it means to be human in a scarce world.”
One among a batch of celebrity-fronted eco-documentaries that are hitting screens this summer, the film will open in Cleveland August 31.
Inspired by Al Gore’s environmental efforts, DiCaprio cowrote and coproduced the film and serves as its narrator. Besides being interviewed and appearing in the film, Orr served as an advisor, assisting the directors in identifying specific themes and experts and reviewing final cuts—the culmination of 150 interviews with 70 commentators.
Also involved in the project as executive producer is Adam Lewis, a philanthropist, businessman, and supporter of ecological design projects, including the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin.
Orr says the documentary takes a panoramic view of environmental issues and casts a wider net than Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. “The 11th Hour has come at the tipping point of public perception,” he adds, “a time when the 11th hour has indeed come for the world’s diminishing resources, and the big issue is what to do.”
Described by the Toronto Sun as “a relentless but passionate chronicle of the crisis that planet Earth is in because of the deterioration of all life systems,” the 91-minute “doomsday doc” was introduced by Dicaprio as a special presentation during this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Speaking with reporters at the premiere, DiCaprio said The 11th Hour was not meant to be “a platform for his personal opinions.” He created it, rather, to provide a forum in which “real experts,” such as Orr, could speak.
Orr pointed out that if the Earth were sent into a hospital’s emergency room as a patient, the diagnosis would not be very good.” But there is hope and there is time, he added, just not much of it.
“This is the generation that has to move on these issues. This is the time and we’re the people. The film is an attempt to convey very complicated things to the public in a way that touches the hearts of people.”
According to the producers, “The 11th Hour explores how we’ve arrived at this moment -- how we live, how we impact the earth’s ecosystems, and what we can do to change our course. However, the most powerful element of The 11th Hour is not a portrait of a planet in crisis, but the offering of hope and solutions.
“Scientists and environmental advocates such as David Orr … paint a portrait for a radically new and exciting future in which humanity seeks not to dominate the earth’s life systems, but to mimic them and coexist.”
Best known for his pioneering work on environmental literacy in higher education, Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin.
Related Links:
The 11th Hour Website |
