Leila Connors Petersen Director of 'The 11th Hour'

In the 2nd of a 2 part series of interviews with the folks that brought us the recently released film ‘The 11th Hour’, I interviewed Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen, the founders of Tree Media and directors of the film. We spoke about the coming geopolitical realities surrounding the environment, the excitement of frugality as a solution and how to overcome the laziness epidemic in our country.

Leslie Berliant: How did Tree Media first start?

Leila Conners Petersen: It started 10 years ago with the intention to create a media company with an independent spirit. We had a very progressive vision that we wanted to share, not just about the environment, but about politics, too. We wanted to tell stories that were not yet being told.

LB: How did this film first come to Tree Media?

LCP: We co-created it with Leo (Leonardo DiCaprio). We had worked on two short films for Leo’s website, ‘Global Warning’ about climate change and ‘Water Planet’ about the water crisis. They were intended for the website only, but ended up on television and at film festivals. Given the success of the shorts, we decided to do a longer, feature documentary together and to make a film not about global warming but that asked the question ‘why global warming?’. Clearly, the earth is our only home, so why are we treating it the way we do? It’s a suicidal position. We wanted to get at the root of that idea of acting in a way that is not really in our self interest, so we asked the question why in regards to climate change, pollution and our general mistreatment of the earth.

LB: Leila, I know that your background is in international relations and that you are a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, can you speak to how the current environmental crises relate to foreign policy and global relations currently?

LCP: That’s why the issue of the environment is really going to be a huge issue in international politics. Because of the current state of the environment, there are impending resource wars. This environmental destruction is a looming international catastrophe that we all need to pull together around. There are some earlier movers like Jens Stoltenberg of Norway who is the first to be a green Prime Minister. We had the Rio rounds and then Johannesburg (climate talks), all of which helped raise awareness. And on some international issues, fishing, the atmosphere, Kyoto, we’ve had international cooperation, but it’s not yet where it needs to be on a priority level. It is up to the international community to decide if we are going to wait to address the environment. Right now, we have a lot of options in terms of solutions. If we wait, we will have much fewer options. One of the lines in the film that I love is that the earth has all the time in the world, but we don’t. It is so true. While things like the international balance of power are important, we are undermining the life force of the planet, so all that other stuff kind of becomes irrelevant. It is interesting about the human animal that we will wait until it’s almost too late to address things. And by too late, I mean that billions of people will die and suffer. It’s frustrating because it’s not necessary. Thinking about this makes me very impassioned. We are dealing with something that doesn’t need to happen. The crisis is really of our own making and of our own solving. Right now, we are choosing not to solve it for lots of reasons; environmental policy is considered soft policy, environmentalism is thought to hurt the economy, etc. These sorts of misconceptions are a form of denial and we are in denial because we are too comfortable in the way we created our world. People don’t like change. Maybe we are just too fat and too lazy. For the last 50 years, we have stopped being frugal in this country. While it used to be something to strive for, frugality is no longer something we care about. The truth is, the idea that everything is disposable will no longer work. My favorite statistic is that in America alone, 2.5 million plastic bottles are thrown away every day. That is astounding. I’m not really blaming anyone here, this was a trajectory from the discovery of fossil fuels which led to us inventing all sorts of important things but now that trajectory is not working and we need to make changes. And the damage is happening faster than we thought. It’s not going to be for the next generation to handle, it’s happening now, in our lifetime.

LB: Nadia, your background is in film and graphic design. One of my pet peeves is the over packaging of goods, particularly in the U.S. The AIGA; the Professional Design Association, is taking this on to some degree but how do we get the design community to start valuing principles of conservation and not just aesthetics?

Nadia Connors Director of 'The 11th Hour'

Nadia Conners: Something that personally astounds me since doing this film is that food has been turned into a logo. The average person thinks that packaging is about the safety of the food, but in reality it’s about putting logos on everything that we eat. We desperately need to get food back from the corporate logo. I lived in France for 4 years and when we would go to the local cheese merchant, he would cut out a chunk of butter, put it on wax paper and hand it to you. No logo, no fancy packaging. Getting people involved in solutions like taking back our food from corporations, gets me excited. These ideas are broad and far reaching and really get people thinking. We intentionally stayed away from talking about the Prius and people changing their light bulbs in this film because it doesn’t inspire people’s imaginations to think on a really grand scale. If we could take back food, for example, it would have a huge, beneficial impact on the environment. I have to admit that I feel utterly complicit in this, too. Other than shopping at the farmer’s market and doing small things, we live in a country where probably only 10% of your life can easily be green because we live in a non-green world. I get annoyed when people attack messengers like Leonardo DiCaprio or Al Gore for doing the things that everyone else does because we don’t live in a green world. Those big things that would create a greener world need to be dealt with at high levels. Individuals need to push for those changes to be made and to tell our leaders that these issues are important to us because some of the biggest needed changes must happen at a regulatory and policy level.

LB: You also worked on several political campaigns; can you speak on what we are hearing currently about the environment on the campaign trail and how that may or may not translate into action?

NC: I’m not feeling like it’s the number one issue, it feels like cosmetics for the campaigns right now. I thought this would be the big movement of our time already. Very soon, it will have to be whether we like it or not because it will tie into trade, the economy, international debt, etc. The problem is that currently, we are not putting those pieces together with the environment and seeing how they are interrelated. I wish there was an environmental candidate that took the heavy lifting of this kind of change very seriously. We could have a green economy, a green ‘new deal’. Government has been big in the oil industry, why not get big into renewable energy, trains, clean transportation? I was excited when John Edwards said that Americans can sacrifice their SUVs. Politicians have been afraid to ask for sacrifice, but the upside of sacrifice can be something great that was never anticipated. We might have to sacrifice some short term convenience, but we might actually get something better. Personally, I would love to have a much smaller car, but when I’m sitting here watching cars go by, it’s one SUV after another, making it unsafe to drive a really small car. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if cities banned big cars and everyone would be safer in smaller cars? My friend drives 7 children around and she needs a big car. But there are many people that have no need for that much space in their car. I really wish society had more common sense, but in the meantime we have to get to a point of having more and better regulation because individuals are still not connecting to the consequences of their actions. Once we do, though, then an occasional indulgence would not have as much impact. Right now, everything we do is excessive, but we don’t get the benefits or pleasure of our excesses because we don’t even realize they are excesses. If we can redo our balance sheet and get really efficient on other things, we can have some indulgences and actually appreciate them.

LB: Leila, the film takes on a host of environmental issues, in your mind, which are the most critical?

LCP: They are all interrelated. For example, the soil issue alone should be frightening to people, but they don’t understand that soil equals food. I didn’t fully understand it when we went into this project, but if we don’t have productive soil, we don’t have food. We are already seeing declining rates of food production because of soil degradation. When China can’t produce the rice and wheat that they need, it will throw the whole world into a situation where resources become more expensive. We’re in a state of diminishing returns right now. Lester Brown writes very compellingly about the relationship between China, food, the environment and global relations.

LB: Nadia, what do you think it will take to make the changes that are necessary and what is the role of entertainment media and consumer based businesses in general in expediting those changes?

NC: I think the biggest thing is developing a real consciousness, a real awareness, of the environmental crises. When that happens, there’s no turning back. Ray Anderson (Founder of Interface) said during one of our interviews that he’s never met an ex-environmentalist. Once people realize the impact of the environment and connect it to their own well being, it’s really about creating a more satisfying life for ourselves. I know that our movie is very challenging to people. ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ put global warming on the front page, and that was critical, but I don’t know what people did with the information. I don’t know what the transformative aspect has been for individuals. Our film creates an emotional reaction in people. There’s a shift after they see it. People say they will never look at the world the same way again. The film doesn’t tell people what to do, it asks people to tell the world what they are going to do with this new perception. If you are a chemistry student, maybe you will be inspired to work on biomimicry. If you are in campaign politics, maybe you will start working on an environmental campaign. If you’re a mom, maybe you will start buying green cleaning supplies. We don’t know what the changes will be yet, but we want to inspire them. It’s like the difference between saying we should treat people of color better and embodying the sweeping changes of the civil rights movement. Now, we can’t believe that we treated people that way. I hope we look back in 20 years and can’t believe that we were ever this wasteful. This is outside the normal environmental thinking box, but if we don’t connect all of these issues, we’re not going to make it. When people get it on a fundamental level, it can be overwhelming and seem impossible, but we have to know the truth. If these stories were being covered every day, it wouldn’t be such a shock when people hear about the environmental crises. When people hear about a crisis for the first time, they shut down and look to leaders to tell them what to do and the vacuum of leadership becomes a real problem. But if we develop a process of continuing to educate about the environment, people will feel more empowered and understand their options and start acting.

LB: Nadia, since you went to school in France, any thoughts on how the French perspective on environmental issues differs from the American one?

NC: They acknowledge and accept that climate change and these environmental crises are happening. Even President Sarkozy, who is the George Bush of France, has made this a priority. They really haven’t argued since the late 80’s about the existence of climate change and whether people are the cause. In fact, most of Europe has started working on solutions much faster than Americans. When I graduated from American University in Paris in 1992, I wrote an article about global warming and the environment being the issue of my generation. I was shocked to find out that it wasn’t the case in the States. At the time, Progressives had a bigger issue in the U.S., getting Republicans out of the White House after 12 years. The environment was lightly there, but not a big political mover. People talked about it, but it didn’t transpire into anything. When we were doing research on this film, we received footage from CBS of (Futurist) Jim Canton testifying before Congress. I was confused because he looked so young. Turns out, it was him testifying in 1988, basically the same testimony he gave on the environmental crises in 2006. We lost all that time doing nothing. It can be very depressing. But we had to go through the depressing information in our film to take viewers to the positive information so that they would understand the urgency. The next film needs to be all about solutions.

LB: Leila, I saw the film at the Laemmle Theater in Santa Monica and was horrified to find out when I left that they have no provisions there for recycling. When I called the company to find out why, they said it was too complicated to do. If a small theater chain in a city with curb side recycling pick up won’t even allot a recycling bin in their theater, how are we going to get businesses on board?

LCP: We will get them on board by increasing awareness and getting more people involved. As part of the 11th Hour ACTION campaign, we went and talked to a deli owner down the street and asked him why he didn’t use recycled deli containers. He was very nice but said it was too expensive and not feasible for a business like his. A month later he looked into it and found out that the containers were not much more than what he was currently paying, so he switched to recycled and corn based containers. That movie house is lazy. They don’t see it as a priority because they don’t see their welfare affected by it, but they’re wrong. Businesses need to understand that it matters. People are not bad, they are just unaware and lazy. We can be a very lazy society, insulated from the reality of others. It’s a form of success in some ways that we have the luxury to be insulated, but we also can’t see the feedback loops going on telling us the consequences of our actions. When you lose the ability to see, you’re in danger. At the same time, we are getting 30,000 people a day on our website and lots of activity with our campaign. We are launching a $100,000 campus challenge next. So, people are definitely taking the blinders off.

LB: How did making the film change each of you?

LCP: I experienced several layers of change. On one level it made me want to change my life. What I really understood for the first time, which was a gift and I can’t wait to put some of the full length interviews online so that we can share it, is who I am as a human and where I live. All of a sudden I saw how everything is connected and how things really matter. I better understood everything; the environment, politics, my neighbors, my community, food, health, all of it.

NC: I knew about the problems, but I also never saw how it was all connected. And I don’t think that I have yet reached the point of living the change it has inspired, but I’m feeling it. I don’t see anything the same way as a result of the people we met. It was really a personal transformation. After the grueling process of filming and editing 150 hours of tape, I was left feeling incredibly hopeful. It helped me recognize that we are a species that needs to consume resources and that we don’t have to run into the woods and eat nuts and berries to solve this. It really is about frugality and that’s what excited me. We live in excess and I know that personally, it doesn’t make me happy. I don’t think it makes very many people happy. I’m speaking to you surrounded by hundreds of throw away publications that will end up in the trash, watching workers carry in tons of bagged Cheetos. I think about all the energy that created them, the water to create the plastic, the soil degradation from that genetically modified corn, the orange stuff that is really just an edible logo and the fossil fuels used to transport them. All that went into the process to get a bag of chips that is bad for you. Only the corporation profits and everyone else is being betrayed along the way. It can be overwhelming to look at the world that way. But I keep going back to frugality as an answer that is very exciting. We can’t deny that we like clothing, fashion, design and decoration, but the extent we have taken that is too much and no longer enjoyable. We used to pass things down through generations and have them as part of our family history. How many items do we buy now that last more than 2 years? They just get thrown away. Environmentalism can seem very urban, sort of like a fashion statement, but it’s not. In order to work, everyone has to participate. Leo Gerard, head of the United Steelworkers Union, has been talking about the environment and how steel workers were dealing with illness because of the contaminants in the steel process. They were able to get workers protection, but he knows that those same toxins go out into the world. When groups like these get connected to protecting the environment, we can see that it is a universal issue that touches all of us. The more diverse we can become as a movement, the better. The World Wrestling Foundation is talking about creating a green wrestler. That’s great because we reach this whole other audience.

LB: I hear that Tree Media Group will be working on a series of projects on solutions, can you give us any previews?

LCP: Mushrooms. We are doing a documentary on mycologist Paul Stametz and the work he is doing with mushrooms. It won’t be anything like 11th Hour and there will be a lot of story telling in it.

NC: Earthquake Weather, which is a drama I wrote, will be going into production in early 2008. Although I wrote it before we started ‘The 11th Hour’, it examines lots of the same issues. It really deals with the beginning of the numbing in American culture. The key for us now is to become un-numbed.