“2040” paints an optimistic picture of the future of the environment

By C.G. | BERLIN

“LET’S PRETEND our house is our planet,” Damon Gameau, an Australian actor and writer, says. In front of his fireplace he explains that burning fossil fuels cause carbon emissions, and animated black dots crowd the room. Reaching into his bathtub, where computer-generated waves ebb and crash, he pulls out a misshapen sea shell to illustrate the effects of carbon dioxide on the ocean. Extreme weather events—such as heavy rainfalls and thunderstorms—take place in his shower; when he opens the freezer, the ice is melting. “The predictions are pretty negative,” he says. “But there must be room for a different story.”

In “2040”, a documentary which premiered at the Berlinale, Mr Gameau seeks to wrest hope from the bleak reports of climate change. He was inspired by Project Drawdown, the first comprehensive plan to reverse global warming, and the film is intended as a “virtual letter to his four-year-old daughter to show her an alternative future”. “Many films,” Mr Gameau thinks, are too dystopian, and “paint a future that is really hard to engage and to connect with”. “2040” acknowledges that the Earth has set off down a hazardous path, but focuses on the work that is being done now to steer the right course. What, the film asks, could make 2040 a time worth living in?

First, the question is put to more than 100 children, and Mr Gameau says that he was taken aback by their mature answers. “While kids in Tanzania hope for proper roads, one factory and many things we take for granted, children in Brooklyn were more political,” he says. The answers that are included are touching, serious and funny, but most of all they are an appeal to governments and leaders to “care for the world” and “be respectful to earth”. “I would have liked the government to do something against global warming and pollution,” one young girl laments. It is not clear where she is from, and the viewer is not told, which helps to give her wish a universal quality.

Mr Gameau then embarks on a global journey to meet engineers, agriculturalists and scientists offering innovative answers of their own. “We have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” Eric Toensmeier, an author and lecturer at Yale University, tells Mr Gameau, so new methods and crops, as well as familiar ideas such as urban farming and increased tree planting, can help agriculture to be “part of the solution instead of part of the problem”. After Colin Seis, an Australian farmer and cropping specialist, lost 3,000 sheep in a bush fire, he learnt about how to refrain from using fertilisers, how to regenerate land, which plants to grow and how to best feed livestock. Now he educates other farmers around the world. Brian Herzen, an expert in maritime permaculture, takes Mr Gameau on a trip (on a low-carbon vessel) to Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Among a huge crop of seaweeds, Mr Gameau explains that this plant grows up to half a metre a day and can reach up to 50 metres long. It not only helps restore life in subtropical waters but is a healthy food source for animals and human beings alike, and can be used in biofuel and clothing. The film shows many such promising examples.

It also touches on the renewable and “clean” energy sources that might replace fossil fuels. In Bangladesh Mr Gameau meets Neel Tamhane, a young engineer who built a decentralised grid in his village that uses solar energy. He sits on top of a digitally-rendered turbine with Paul Hawken, an environmentalist and founder of Project Drawdown, to talk about biomass and wind energy.

By the end, it is hard not to share the film’s upbeat vision of the future. It hopes that highways packed with cars in 2019 will be used by fast trains instead in 2040; that cyclists and electric buses might replace traffic jams. It imagines rich pastures with roaming cattle instead of factory farming. This is the 2040 Mr Gameau would like his daughter to enjoy, but his film does not strike a complacent tone. He makes it clear that it is up to her and her generation to make it a reality.