Put 5 June 2009 in your diary and order some popcorn. The world may never look the same again.
Cinemas worldwide will be showing a film that aims to change the way you and I look at and look after our planet.
And, best of all, it will be free to see.
Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the French photographer behind The Earth From The Air, has teamed up with Luc Besson, the film director who brought us The Big Blue.
Their movie Home will be released to celebrate World Environment Day next year and their ambition is to do for the natural world what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change.
Max Boykoff, a researcher at the University of Oxford, has shown that Al Gore’s film helped create a big increase in media attention to climate change in the United States and United Kingdom.
This will have helped raise awareness of the issue worldwide, given that so many media outlets across the globe use material from a handful of Western news agencies.
To emulate this impact, Home will feature footage shot from the air that shows our planet’s beauty and fragility. But will this be enough to get viewers to do more than be awestuck at the former and anxious about the latter?
The answer will depend on how Home portrays humanity.
I think a major factor that is helping climate change to enter the public consciousness is the way it is being communicated.
In particular, I think it is because environmentalists, scientists and others are starting to give climate-change a human face: they are dropping the polar bear and bringing people and their views to centre stage.
Meanwhile other environmental issues such as biodiversity loss remain in the margins, communicated in (over)familiar stories about rainforests and tigers, coral reefs and gorillas but oh so rarely about people.
Often missing are the points that people depend on the environment and that we as a species are part of nature, not distinct from it.
Thankfully, Yann Arthus-Bertrand and his Good Planet charity have another big project in the pipeline, which could combine with Home, to great effect.
Six Billion Others is a film based on 6,000 interviews in 65 countries. It asks people from all sorts of backgrounds the same big questions about life and the world we share.
I’m looking forward to seeing what’s different and what is held in common.
And I’m looking forward to learning more about Good Planet and Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who seems to have the power and the principles to make a positive difference to this messed-up planet of ours.
