Home is an important, sobering film, but it’s also beautiful and optimistic. It’s available on YouTube in its entirety, in high definition, for free.

It is directed by the renowned aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which affords the film a powerfully god-like perspective, albeit one weakened by a rather uninspiring narration; the information is good, but the diction is clichéd and the delivery flawed (some words are mispronounced by the narrator, hardly in-keeping with a god-like voice, and she often sounds unenthusiastic and disengaged, like she isn’t thinking about what she’s saying — give me David Attenborough or Dr. Ian Stewart!).

The effect of Bertrand’s aerial perspective is that we get to take a step back — avoiding sentimental human detours for the most part — and consider the earth as one big organism. Everything is linked, as the narrator reminds us constantly.

The general message to take home is that although our planet is in jeopardy, we can save it through “moderation, intelligence and sharing”.

There have been other films like this. This film stays quite general and factual in its approach however, choosing not to hammer away at any one specific point — simply letting the powerful images and facts do the work. The plain facts and footage it offers on meat production, for example, — without rhetoric demanding people stop eating meat — should be enough to convey to people the severity of the impact of humanity’s meat-fixation. That particular section was quite powerful, I thought, as that particular environmental issue has generally been skirted recently, as if it were not even an issue worth considering, or as if there were no sensitive way to broach the topic to a world of meat-lovers.

Cheers to Aengus who aroused my attention to this.