Home

a few days ago ago, i watched Home, a beautiful film about us that is at once documentary, science fiction, drama, thriller and horror. directed by yann arthus bertrand, this moving journey through our own world felt as though i was drifting across the kind of surreal pandorean landscape that could only be imagined with a US$300 million budget.



in two hours, the little computer screen in my room (i had inexplicably passed up a chance to watch Home in the cinema last year in an event organized by my own company) showed me more about my planet than possibly any other thing i've read or watched. i stared in growing amazement as the narrator told the story of my Earth, accompanied by a gripping soundtrack and real-life aerial footage that often looked so bizarre that they might as well have been CGI images.


i had no idea that all this was, in fact, my own backyard.

the world that i have grown so familiar with is one of brick and concrete lined superfluously with neat rows of rainforest trees that shade not the rainforest, but fast-moving metal boxes on painted asphalt. and while we bask in our government's assurance that this self-proclaimed "garden city" is doing its part in protecting the fragile balance of nature that sustains our lives, it really isn't. we are one of the worst polluters in the world, but the nature of our economy makes it very difficult for us to take concrete steps to save this planet, so say our leaders. for instance, our booming population and our affluent way of life puts us way up there in terms of carbon emissions per capita, relative to other countries. but for the sake of the economy, we are encouraged (often explicitly) to have more and more children, each of them wearing elephant-sized carbon boots. topics relating to public transport and hybrid cars appear occasionally in the news, but most of the time it is to announce yet another hike in prices. bicycle lanes have been tried out in small neighborhoods, but most of singapore is still a cyclist's worst nightmare.

and the bad news is, it's like that everywhere else -- only sometimes a lot worse.


in the meantime, the real world, the beautiful eden that few of us have ever really experienced, is disappearing. it chilled me to my bones to hear the narrator in Home talk about ice sheets disintegrating, of low-lying nations (like ours) submerged in the sea, of rainforests being completely wiped out -- all in a matter of decades. decades as in 10 to 20 years, not 80 to 90 years. which means that within our lifetime, the world as we have barely had time to know it will be gone, and the beautiful creatures that fascinated us in our childhood would be mere legends when we talk about them to our children.




what was made brutally clear at the end of this film (as well as in An Inconvenient Truth which i had watched a week before) was that this is our home, and that there is ONLY ONE of it. once it's gone (and it's going), there's no back-up Earth. that's it.

it's frightening. and what's more frightening is that i don't know what to do about it.