Cultural Mobilization

IF YOU HAVE FOND MEMORIES of those high school afternoons when your science teacher would roll out the TV, you’ll be right at home with Carbon Nation. The scholastically friendly documentary explores the issue of climate change, but not from the usual dour, fire-and-brimstone point of view. Which isn’t to say that the film doesn’t inspire fear; it makes no bones about the fact that if we, as a species, don’t mobilize, we are doomed. However, that news is approached as a challenge, and all the film’s various experts are ready roll up their sleeves and get to it.

There’s more than a whiff of patriotism running through the film as well, which stresses the importance of the United States becoming a leader in the development and propagation of clean energy. Carbon Nation also uses an effective comparison to the industrial mobilization that took place after the bombing of Pearl Harbor—noting that the American workforce was transformed in as little as three months. The point being? If our grandparents could do it, then so should we. Complete with bouncy text and boredom-fighting graphic design tricks, Carbon Nation‘s pragmatic diagnosis and can-do determination make it worth seeing in order to know where we all stand—even if that’s not as far to the front of the line as we’d hope.