ABSTRACT
The laptop screen seems to perform an immediate reciprocal fade-in, to a picture of ‘Earthrise’, the world-famous photograph taken by William Anders on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, and which has been widely understood as a major catalyst for environmental consciousness and activism. Al Gore’s high platform act is the apogee of the studio-set enactments of a vulnerable Mr. Earth; any further escalation, it could be argued, would threaten to detract and distract from the substance of the slideshow presentation. The catastrophic impact of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, one of the deadliest and most expensive environmental disasters in US history, bequeathed subsequently a vast array of precisely such affective images of risk to American citizens. The challenge of constructing a documentary about environmental risk in order to, in John Corner’s words, ‘change political understanding and promote action’ is thus well understood.
