"Last Hours" (11 minutes)
“Last Hours” was written by Thom Hartmann and co-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio’s father, George. This short documentary leaps far ahead of immediate issues of oceans rising to take away coastland. Frequent extreme weather events are happening in unusual places, causing record breaking destruction.
Hurricanes, tornados, ice, hail and snow storms, floods, droughts, wildfires all over the planet are happening nearly every week. Even the Department of Defense and the CIA have identified global warming as a threat to national security, as people around the world become climate change refugees, driven from their homes by the ensuing loss of food, water, livestock, shelter and employment.
Narrated by Thom Hartmann, “Last Hours” is tightly focused on the macro view of geologists, and scientists interested in the Permian Period, in which global warming resulted in the extinction of 95% of all life on Earth. The event was started by a massive volcano in Siberia, which raised the temperature 6 degrees. Then, warming of the oceans melted frozen methane at the bottom, so when it bubbled up and turned into gas, it entered the atmosphere and triggered the planet catastrophe.
There have been Five Mass Extinctions since life began on Earth. The purpose of “Last Hours” is to start looking at the possibility of a Sixth Mass Extinction, triggered by the burning of fossil fuels. The film examines situations like the melting of the Arctic Ice Sheet. In July 2013 it melted at the rate of the size of Kansas, every two days.
Endorsements for "Last Hours": Al Gore; Robert Kennedy, Jr; Michael Brune, Sierra Club; Lester Brown, Earth Policy Institute; Denis Hayes, founder of Earth Day; and others too numerous to mention.
"The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz" (1 hour, 45 minutes)
The feature film follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron's story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.
