Module #9: Environmental Education

The film HOME by Yann Arthus-Bertrand is a beautifully shot panorama of the Earth and the damage done to it by modern humanity. It includes a moving narration about the evolution of the Earth, nature, agriculture, humans, and the crises of habitat destruction, energy depletion, climate disruption, degradation... of the environment, health, economic disparity, and more. They are well integrated in the film, but many assumptions in the script make this film hard to recommend unless accompanied by a reality check on energy and the value of traditional ways. The movie starts by taking the viewer back to the beginning of time, and explains how and when life on Earth came about. We learn, for example, that the world is four billion years old, whereas humans are only 200,000 years old. In the relatively short time we have been around, however, we have had more impact than any other species. In the last 50 years alone, the movie says, the Earth has been more radically changed than by all previous generations of humanity. The movie narrates how our mother earth evolved, how the beautiful trenches were molded, the placid and bluish color of the sea, the formation of rocks, mountains, and other magnificent sceneries were being shown and narrated.

The film also shows the ecological cycle of life. The biological evolution of plants where many kinds of plants were growing and cultivating around the world and the evolution of human and animal lives that we never thought would be the one who will destroy the beautiful picturesque of our mother earth.   From time to time, in the film, the narrator demonstrates and explains the structure of our earth 200 billion years ago.

One thing that I observed in the film was that in every continent in our globe there are these big changes that happened. In Asia, the continent where I belong has so many natural resources. These resources are disappearing little by little. No one can prevent the changes because these changes help us to survive without knowing that by surviving, our mother earth is also suffering.