National-Anarchist Movement: Call of Life: Facing The Mass Extinction (Documentary video)

Thursday 8 August 2013

Call of Life: Facing The Mass Extinction (Documentary video)

If current trends continue, scientists warn that within a few decades at least half of all plant and animal species on earth will disappear forever.

All over the world species are becoming extinct at an astonishing rate, from 1000 to 10,000 times faster than normal. The loss of biodiversity has become so severe that scientists are calling it a mass extinction event.

Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction is the first feature documentary to investigate the growing threat to Earth’s life support systems from this unprecedented loss of biodiversity. Through interviews with leading scientists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and indigenous and religious leaders, the film explores the causes, the scope, and the potential effects of the mass extinction, but also looks beyond the immediate causes of the crisis to consider how our cultural and economic systems, along with deep-seated psychological and behavioral patterns, have allowed this situation to develop, continue to reinforce it, and even determine our response to it.

Featuring leading scientists, social scientists, environmentalists and others, the film explores the scope, the causes, and the predicted global impact of a mass extinction occurring on a scale not seen since the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Call of Life tells the story of a crisis not only in nature, but also in human nature, a crisis more threatening than anything human beings have ever faced before.

If current trends continue, scientists warn that half or more of all plant and animal species on Earth will become extinct within the next few decades. Entirely caused by human activities, this contemporary mass extinction is disrupting and destroying the complex, interconnected biological systems that support life on earth.

Through interviews with eminent biologists and ecologists, the film examines the primary drivers of species loss: habitat destruction, global warming, pollution, and invasive species, all compounded by the expanding human population and our consumption patterns.

Call of Life tells the story not only of a crisis in nature, but also in human nature. In interviews with psychologists, anthropologists, and historians, the film looks beyond the immediate causes of the mass extinction to consider how cultural and economic myths, along with deep-seated behavioral patterns have allowed this crisis to develop, continue to reinforce it, and even determine our response to it.

Call of Life examines the collective and individual choices we have before us, and how the decisions we make -- or fail to make -- in the next decade will affect the habitability of Earth possibly for millions of years to come.

Among the scientists and other authorities featured in the film are Richard Leakey, famed paleonanthropologist and author of The Sixth Extinction; Norman Myers, renowned Oxford University authority on biodiversity, author of The Sinking Ark; Stuart Pimm, Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, author of A Scientist Audits the Earth; Gretchen Daly, Director of the Stanford Center for Conservation Biology, author of The New Economy of Nature; Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University conservation biologist and author of The Population Bomb; Mary Evelyn Tucker, Co-Director, Yale University Forum on Religion and Ecology.