Critical Mass

A documentary on Al Gore's campaign to make the issue of global warming a recognized problem worldwide.

A decade after An Inconvenient Truth brought climate change into the heart of popular culture comes the riveting and rousing follow-up that shows just how close we are to a real energy revolution. Vice President Al Gore continues his tireless fight, traveling around the world training an army of climate champions and influencing international climate policy. Cameras follow him behind the scenes—in moments private and public, funny and poignant—as he pursues the empowering notion that while the stakes have never been higher, the perils of climate change can be overcome with human ingenuity and passion.

Passionate about ocean life, a filmmaker sets out to document the harm that humans do to marine species — and uncovers an alarming global conspiracy.

Ben Fogle spends a week living inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, gaining privileged access to the doomed Control Room 4 where the disaster first began to unfold.

Ten years after the film Home (2009), Yann Arthus-Bertrand looks back, with Legacy, on his life and fifty years of commitment. It's his most personal film. The photographer and director tells the story of nature and man. He also reveals a suffering planet and the ecological damage caused by man. He finally invites us to reconcile with nature and proposes several solutions

On April 27th, at 2pm, National Geographic is using a version of the Environmental Performance Index to take a "pulse" of how countries are performing in regards to their environmental stewardship of the planet. Please forward this video to those you love, our planet Earth needs you. We don't have a moment to waste. Let's love and protect our Mother Planet now

In the cobalt mining areas of Katanga in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), babies are being born with horrific birth defects. Scientists and doctors are finding increasing evidence of environmental pollution from industrial mining which, they believe, may be the cause of a range of malformations from cleft palate to some so serious the baby is stillborn. More than 60% of the world’s reserves of cobalt are in the DRC and this mineral is essential for the production of electric car batteries, which may be the key to reducing carbon emissions and to slowing climate change. In The Cost of Cobalt we meet the doctors treating the children affected and the scientists who are measuring the pollution. Cobalt may be part of the global solution to climate change, but is it right that Congo’s next generation pay the price with their health? Many are hoping that the more the world understands their plight, the more pressure will be put on the industry here to clean up its act.

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired “Surviving Progress”, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps”—alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behaviour, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.

For generations, fishermen have made their home on Tangier Island, in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay on the east coast of the US. Two-thirds of the island has disappeared over the last 150 years, and local people are concerned about rising sea levels—and the lack of progress on reinforcing the sea wall—but the church remains the bedrock of this small, close-knit community.