How to Boil a Frog

How to Boil a Frog

I had the opportunity this week to preview a new documentary about Global Warming. It’s called How to Boil a Frog and is the creation of Jon Cooksey --- with a lot of help from many other people. Just being released this week ( find it at its terrific website www.howtoboilafrog.com) it’s the best, funniest, most comprehensive, least sentimental, fast passed, urgent, best teaching tool, and least condescending film I’ve seen yet on climate issues.

Jon Cooksey narrates the entire film --- all 85 minutes --- in a style that at times suggests John Cleese of Monty Python and at times the best teacher you ever had. And, while he is explaining the mechanisms of Global Warming, hilarious graphics are playing behind and around him illustrating the ideas. The pace of the film is hectic. In classrooms, I would suggest that teachers show only sections of it at a time and follow each section with discussion and further research. In fact, the many ideas in the film could easily provide curriculum for an entire year’s science class.

In the first paragraph I said the film was not condescending. What I meant was that Mr. Cooksey assumes that his audience, whether adults or children, prefers to hear the truth of the situation we are in, and that only by knowing the truth will we be able to act in time to affect our future. Toward the end of the film he says we all know that the future is going to be --- has to be --- different. If we act now we will have some say about what kind of different that will be. If we don’t, catastrophic events will decide for us.

The title of the film refers to a curious fact: a frog placed in a pot of cold water, under which the heat is gradually raised, will boil to death instead of jumping out. The analogy he is making is to humans not acting to protect themselves from the gradual heating of the planet. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to compare the frog to our governments. Some people are trying to react to the rising temperature. Governments are mired in the status quo. Why is that?

Near the beginning of How To Boil a Frog Mr. Cooksey confronts the issue that most commentators on this issue are afraid of. The issue is the economic model by which we have chosen to live, the one that demands increased profit, perpetual growth, and increased consumption as a way to determine the progress of our species. Using some funky graphs he shows how this model of straight line growth is completely at odds with nature’s model because it uses up resources faster than the earth can replenish them. The earth, as we have chosen to forget, has to be the standard of our reality. We can only live out of harmony with that reality for a short time before nature calls us back --- rudely. Global Warming. The film shows that climate change is a symptom of a set of other problems --- overpopulation, exploiting and trashing nature, vast divisions between the rich and the poor, peak oil, and the yearly production of three times as much carbon dioxide as the world can absorb. It’s a taboo in this society to denounce growth and economic recovery. Mr. Cooksey is telling us --- quite accurately --- that our economy is destroying our chance of survival.

Once the problems are identified, he then asks, “Who is going to fix it? Governments? Big corporations? Technology?” No, we will not be saved by the people who are causing the problems and profiting from them. We will be saved by ourselves. You and me. And the film then prescribes five categories of action. What’s refreshing about his solutions is again that they are not condescending. They are appropriate to the gravity of the dire predicament --- everything from direct disruptive political action to the necessary changing of our habitual behavior. He quotes Utah Phillips (one of the portraits in this collection): “The earth is not dying. The earth is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses.” Utah was urging all of us to directly confront the powerful people doing the damage. They don’t like to be confronted. They don’t like embarrassing news that exposes their bad behavior. It’s bad for their profit. Exposure can force change for the better.

Jon Cooksey ends the film with a vision of the future as if we have acted to transition from a global economy addicted to fossil fuels and consumption to a collection of local communities caring for each other and the earth in a sustainable way. His vision is not pie in the sky. It’s fraught with warnings. But it is neither magical nor dishonest. It’s a vision that I agree is our best hope. And I urge as many people as possible to see this film. I urge teachers to show it in schools and insist on having real discussions with students about the future, not the future which is constantly advertised to them and in reality is a mirage, but the future they must create if they want to have one at all.