In Chasing Ice (2012), the goal is to provide a visual portrait of climate change. Director James Balog even exclaims of the images his many cameras capture, "If I hadn't seen it in the pictures, I wouldn't have believed it at all." Another quote from the film, however highlights the film's strong connection with the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Balog declares of his images, "This is the memory of the landscape. That landscape is gone. Never to be seen again in the history of civilization, and it's stored right here."
That same visual rhetoric grounded in nostalgia underpins the earlier documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. An Inconvenient Truth argues powerfully for sustainable environmental policies by invoking both personal and universal ecological memories, as do Silent Running (1971), Omega Man (1971), and (even more closely entwined with Gore’s narrative) Soylent Green (1973). The film opens with two scenes illustrating two historical memories of the world thirty years ago. One of those memories grows out of a meandering river that flowed near Al Gore’s family farm, a river we see flowing clean and clear through a pristine green landscape. The year is 1973, and Al and wife Tipper float along in a canoe over gentle ripples of the Caney Fork River. Living nature is highlighted here by the river, the foliage that lines it and the fact that Tipper is close to giving birth to the Gores’ first child. The footage shows its age, showing us that this is a memory, not a view of the present, and that it rests on personal history.
The other more universal historical memory is highlighted by images of Planet Earth shot from outer space, beginning with the 1968 shot from Apollo Eight and the 1972 shot from Apollo Seventeen (the last Apollo mission) and continuing through a series of satellite images that show all Earth’s continents and seas. The images serve as a starting point for a poignant slide presentation that shows us the impact humans have had on the Earth during the last thirty years especially. But beginning with thirty-year-old shots of a river and photographs of Earth shot in outer space from the Apollo missions also introduces the most powerful tool behind the documentary’s success—environmental nostalgia or what we see as “eco-memory.” Gore’s personal memories not only add to his credibility by drawing empathy from his audience; they also serve as powerful environmental messages that connect tightly with the science on display in his slide show because they are framed by scenes of river near his family home.
An Inconvenient Truth’s pictures of Planet Earth shot from space provide not only a view of an eco-memory but of what some may see as the present state of our world—pristine and untouched. But the views also serve as a bridge to Gore’s discussion of our thin atmosphere and how changing its composition has contributed to global warming and its repercussions. The juxtaposition of the shots of Earth from space with shots of a polluted Earth below draws further on our nostalgia for an environmentally sound world.
Gore reinforces this message by countering photographic evidence from thirty years ago with that from today, highlighting clear changes in the global environment. A shot of Kilimanjaro from 1970 sharply contrasts with photographs taken thirty years later, for example. The amount of snow capping the mountain has obviously receded, and in a shot from 2005, the mountain is nearly clear of ice and snow. Similar photographic evidence shows Glacier National Park losing more and more of its glaciers. And images around the world tell the same story of rapidly receding ice, snow, and glaciers. These images gain force in opposition to one another. The current views of parks and mountains, even those now without snow, mean nothing unless juxtaposed against earlier shots that show the devastating changes that have occurred there, at least partially because of our contribution to global warming.
Because of these earlier shots, we look back nostalgically on this world on which our own footprint might seem lighter. And then Gore shows us further evidence that we have made the negative impression those shots of glaciers imply. Ice cylinders taken from Antarctica paint a picture of earth’s temperature over the past 650,000 years, pointing to 2005 as the hottest year in the cycles revealed there. Gore shows us some of the repercussions of this overall warming trend, focusing on heat waves and strengthening storms across the world. He reinforces his more general claims with a series of images highlighting the devastation in Hurricane Katrina’s wake, images that not only remind us of the destruction there but also of our cry to save the city of New Orleans, our nostalgia for an untouched city prior to the hurricane and levee breaks.
The same pathos is in effect when Gore notes other consequences of global warming, including an increase in pests like pine beetles that destroy trees we yearn to save. Trees serve as reminders of a natural world we seem ready to preserve, and images of a treeless Haiti beside a tree-covered Dominican Republic again broach our environmental nostalgia. The images of the impact development has on the world add weight to the wish on which the film seems to rest, a wish for a return to a world like that of 1970. In fact, Silent Running, from 1971, sends a similar message regarding saving trees, but the film ends tragically, with hope for life other than humans in the hands of a lone robot. An Inconvenient Truth, on the other hand, ends with some effortless (and painless) ways we can change our future, without sacrificing ourselves, a point perhaps missing from Chasing Ice.
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