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Reviews
Racing Extinction (2015)
An eyeopening film about our past, present, and future!
Racing Extinction is one documentary that will never quite leave your mind. This is probably because it deals with issues we see every day. Now when I use my car or go to the beach I'm going to think about how this is affecting the environment, my environment. Since I'm a very worried person this will most likely stay present in my mind for far longer than I'd like to admit but that's the point of documentaries like this. To change the way people think about their lives. Racing Extinction was an incredible documentary in the aspect that it did its job.
"65 million years ago, there was an asteroid that struck, and caused the dinosaurs to go extinct.. humanity has become the asteroid." This was the first sentence that struck me. As children, we grow up around the stories of dinosaurs but we never knew the full extent of extinction. Extinction to its definition is the termination of a kind of organism or a group of kinds, usually a species. Extinction is when a whole species dies. Just let that sink in. A whole species, gone. Racing Extinction uses Blue Whales as an example of this at the beginning of the documentary. The pre-whaling population of this species was over 350,000. Now there are as few as 10,000 blue whales in existence. About 340,000 blue whales have been killed by humans. Whaling is an industry that started as early as the 11th century. This was when whales we killed and traded from country to country. This industry is one main reason why whales are so defunct.
The documentary continues to a more controversial topic in the destruction of our environment; fossil fuels. I learned that the mass increase in carbon dioxide is a common factor in all 5 mass extinctions which is unsettling considering we produce carbon dioxide ourselves every time we breathe out. This means that just to survive we are slowly destroying our environment. But this documentary focuses mostly on oil companies. And although I agree this is an issue and it will continue to affect our environment poorly, they never talked about an alternative for this. I mean if we just got rid of all oil companies and pollution we would no longer be able to live our lives. The fact is we use fossil fuels way too much to just get rid of it.
Watching the environmentalist travel all over the world and getting themselves into dangerous situations just to prove their point was very inspiring. I learned that just in this last decade, about over 800 environmental activists lost their lives to the cause. As this documentary expressed every life has a meaning and losing a life is so much more than simply one life. This documentary was an eye-opener to the horrific things happening around the world. Some of these things we can change but others are too important to change, in my opinion.
I believe this documentary relates to two of the 7 revolutions which are population and resource management. With the increase in population comes the increase in carbon dioxide which we learned harms our environment greatly. While Resource Management is applied when talking about climate change in Alaska. Overall this documentary was an amazing watch. It introduced many topics that the media sometimes is reluctant to share. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about the world we live in.