Tzeporah and Paris: Two Images of Ourselves

Tzeporah Berman meets Paris Hilton. Surrealistic as it seems, it has happened. Standing shoulder to shoulder in a colour photograph (Globe & Mail , Aug. 11/07), Paris is looking characteristically coy, offering that subtle come-hither smile so typical of the blonde, soft-porn socialite. She is wearing white trimmed in black, the thin, high belt of her dress accentuating her breasts while hinting at girlishness. With bare arms and a generous display of upper torso, she is the image of faux purity and innocence.

Tzeporah is looking modestly incredulous, a slightly ironic twist to her smile as if she is somewhat surprised that a strange combination of environmentalism and connections have brought her to such circumstances. Her noticeable attire is a long sleeved, earthen brown tunic made of wood fibres harvested in a sustainable way. She looks willful and defiant, a person of strong conviction and arresting conversation. Instead of discussing Paris's recent jail time and the spiritual epiphany resulting from such a trauma, she confesses that their small talk turned to the environment.

Oh rapturous joy! The distance we've come!

The two women were at the Gold Theatre in Hollywood for a preview screening of Leonardo DiCaprio's climate-change documentary, The 11th Hour. Tzeporah arrived at the event in a zero-emissions electric car. How Paris arrived was not reported. For the occasion, the red carpet for the parade of about 450 stars and dignitaries, was appropriately green.

Despite Tzeporah's brown tunic, her background would be greener than the carpet. She began as an environmental activist in Tofino, and was instrumental in organizing the Clayoquot demonstrations that eventually established the area as a United Nations‚ bio-reserve. After much other conservation work, she eventually founded Forest Ethics, an organization that was a strong partner in protecting the Great Bear Rainforest, and has since been active in protecting virgin forests, boreal forests, forest ecologies, and imposing an ethical dimension on the public and corporate use of wood products. DiCaprio's film is just the latest effort by the entertainment industry to catch up to her by seriously considering a subject that is looking grimly serious.

But Hollywood didn't begin that way. A film of a couple of years ago, The Day After Tomorrow, was a rather silly and formulaic drama about havoc in New York after the collapse of the thermal-halide current which circulates warm water from the eastern seaboard of the US across the Atlantic to heat the north coast of Europe. Aside from being conspicuously American-centric, the film grossly misrepresents the short term consequences should the current actually stop.

We should not be surprised if we first approach scary environmental subjects obliquely. The scope and consequences of the environmental changes sweeping the planet are difficult for most people to comprehend, accept, internalize and then process. So the function of a quasi-science film is to scare us with a fiction, to be a prelude to confronting reality, very much the way fairy tales are lies to children so they will be prepared in later life to kiss frogs and meet sleeping princesses who will never awaken. Most adults think they are mature, composed and rational ˜ until they meet something that doesn‚t belong in their paradigm of understanding.

This applies collectively as well as personally. The environmental realities we are being forced to accept are incompatible with the operating paradigm of our present civilization. Reduce, recycle and re-use is a slogan with just the vaguest hint of the changes we will have to make to bring ourselves into compliance with nature‚s insistence on limits. As a sample of our challenge, just consider the 90 percent reduction in world-wide carbon dioxide emissions we must reach by 2050 if we are to stabilize global warming. How are we to accomplish this without a profound renovation of virtually everything we think and do?

DiCaprio's The 11th Hour is brave. It closely follows Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, a power-point presentation that won an Academy Award and forced people to consider the unthinkable. Gore's presentation was a semblance of our graduation from childhood to adulthood, the moment when we first realize that babies are not delivered by storks, that endings may not last happily ever after, and that even the most sophisticated medical magic may not awaken sleeping princesses. Blessed are the children. Would anyone choose to grow up knowing what adulthood brings? But time and circumstances unfold as they do, forcing us to become what we both fear and anticipate. Peter Pan eventually becomes a sad anachronism if he does not face this inevitable reality.

We are slowly awakening to an environmental reality we would rather not confront. In the great scheme of things, overcoming this resistance will take time. Perhaps we are accepting it as quickly as our capabilities allow. And the entertainment industry, in its own way, is helping us by mixing its fiction with fact to ease us into a new paradigm of understanding and behaving.

Tzeporah and Paris are symbols of ourselves in transformation, two images at different ends of a spectrum. But we must grow up. We really don‚t have a choice. Paris's socialite platitudes, maudlin hysterics and feigned innocence are no substitute for the honesty of serious reality, meaningful conversation and mature commitment. A frolic with a fairy tale is never as substantial as real life. And in the world of authentic adults, environmental subjects are no longer small talk.