Before the Flood

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1

My first

visual memories are of this

framed poster above my crib.

I would stare at it every

night before I went to bed.

My father was an underground

comic distributor.

He's always been this sort of

Zelig of the counterculture

as I like to call him.

Having painted in

Warhol's studio,

being roomies with Lou

Reed, he knew R. Crumb

and all these great

artists of his generation.

I mean, I was brought up on all

kinds of wacky visuals as a kid.

So I would stare at this

painting over and over:

The Garden of Earthly Delights

by Hieronymus Bosch.

It was painted around 1500.

And if you look at these

panels long enough,

they start to tell a story.

In the first panel you have Adam

and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Birds flying off

into the distance,

elephants and giraffe and a

lot of religious iconography.

The second panel is where

it starts to become

more interesting.

The deadly sins start to infuse

their way into the painting.

There's overpopulation,

there's debauchery and excess.

And the last panel, which

is the most nightmarish one,

especially from a young child's

perspective, is this twisted,

decayed, burnt landscape.

A paradise that has been

degraded and destroyed.

Man may be

unwittingly changing the world's

climate through the waste

products of its civilization...

The burning of coal, oil and

wood is releasing carbon dioxide

into the atmosphere.

The greenhouse effect has been

detected and it is changing

our climate now.

Guess where the

temperature goes?

It goes up.

Climate change is

already in our backyards.

It's official. 2012 was the

hottest year in the...

warmest year around the globe

warmest year on record.

It is these activities

that drove mankind

out of the Garden of Eden.

- Hi, how are you?

- Ah, Mr. DiCaprio.

Pleasure, pleasure.

Great to, great

pleasure to see you.

Here.

We can move this.

This can be adjusted.

Oh wow, this

is for height control.

Yeah.

- Like this, like this.

- For shorter leaders

and taller leaders.

What specific message do you

think is the most important?

Climate change is

coming much, much faster.

We have seen such, uh,

extraordinary extreme weather

patterns.

If you consider this

vastness of this universe,

this Planet Earth is

just a small boat.

If this boat is sinking, then

I think we will have to all

sink together.

I know that he has been a

very committed and effective

environmentalist and that is

why I really count on your

leadership and vision.

Please welcome

newly appointed United Nations

Messenger of Peace,

Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio.

Thank you

Mr. Secretary General,

Your Excellencies...

I feel incredibly honored

that they chose me to be

the United Nations Messenger

of Peace on climate change.

I stand before

you, not as an expert,

I want to do everything I can

to learn more about this issue.

See for myself exactly what's

going on and what can be done.

But it all kinda seems

beyond our control.

As an actor,

I pretend for a living.

I play fictitious characters

often solving fictitious

problems.

I believe that mankind has

looked at climate change

in that same way.

We keep getting inundated with

catastrophic news about the

environment every single day,

and the problem seems to be

getting worse and

worse and worse.

Try to have a conversation with

anyone about climate change,

people just tune out.

If the U.N. really knew

how I feel,

how pessimistic I am about our

future, I mean, to be honest,

they may have picked

the wrong guy.

Hundreds of

thousands took to the streets

of New York today demonstrating

for action on climate change.

Secretary General,

Ban Ki-Moon called Leo

a credible voice in the

environmental movement,

which is like calling Jeffrey

Dahmer a credible voice

for stew.

Leonardo DiCaprio

has just naively bought into

the entire global warming hoax.

Who better to

educate world leaders on made up

climate change in a crisis that

doesn't exist than an actor

from Hollywood with zero years

of scientific training?

Hi, how are you?

I'm very good.

How are you doing,

it's a pleasure.

You too.

Hey!

Nice to see you, buddy.

Good to see you.

So I just started this new film,

it's set in the Western Frontier

of the United States

in the early 1800s.

It's basically the dawn of

the Industrial Revolution.

It has a lot to do with men who

are pillaging the natural world,

wiping species out, and

basically destroying cultures

in the process.

Those are like buffalo skulls.

Alejandro!

Crazy, are these fur-trappers?

Are these people

selling the skulls?

No, these are people

selling the skulls, yeah.

What the is this?

Isn't that embarrassing?

Man, that's crazy.

And the fact that

they never even reflected on it,

that there's an ending to these

animals, and we cannot just,

it's insane.

If you can put that

in the movie that would be

unbelievable.

How about this, I dare you!

Ah, okay.

get to the boat. Come on son.

I didn't grow up

around nature at all,

I grew up near

downtown Los Angeles.

And my escape every weekend was

the Natural History Museum.

And from a very young age, I

became fascinated with species

that had become extinct.

All these different animals,

from the dodo to the

passenger pigeon,

which was the most

plentiful bird on earth,

to the Tasmanian tiger, also

known as the thilacene

to the great auk, the

quagga, the moa.

I remember the

anger that I felt,

reading all these stories about

how explorers and settlers

would just wipe out an entire

species, and in the process,

decimate the ecosystem forever.

The difference now is we're

knowingly doing this;

it's just on a

much larger scale.

If we're gonna fight

climate change effectively,

we have to start by

acknowledging that

most of our economy is

based on fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are coal,

oil, and natural gas.

Oil powers most of the

transportation sector,

coal and natural gas power

most of the electricity.

Now, in the first couple decades

of the twenty-first century,

in order to sustain our

dependence on fossil fuels,

we're going to very risky,

very extreme new sources.

You see this in things like

mountain top removal for coal,

fracking for natural gas,

offshore drilling for oil,

and the tar sands, which is

the most devastating form

of producing fossil fuels.

They take away massive forests,

the water in the streams

and rivers is poisoned.

It has severe impacts on the

wildlife, on native communities,

and it requires a huge amount of

energy simply to get it to

our fuel tanks.

There is no such thing

as clean fossil fuel.

Headsets are

hung up at the back,

but the volume control's right

above the microphone so...

The truth is, the more

I've learned about this issue

and everything that

contributes to the problem,

the more I realize

how much I don't know.

How much I don't know

about this issue.

The first time I ever heard

the term global warming,

which was what it

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