Brilio.net/en - Leonardo DiCaprio has been getting a lot of attention recently with the release of a documentary film he hosts and narrates.
Before The Flood follows DiCaprio around the world as he investigates the devastating affects of forest destruction and climate change and speaks to the world's foremost business, political and international figures, including Elon Musk, US President Barack Obama and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.
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The superstar actor and Academy Award winner has played leading roles in Titanic, The Basketball Diaries, The Revenant (for which he won the Oscar for Best Actor), The Wolf Of Wall Street and Catch Me If You Can. He is also a committed environmentalist and in 2014 was named a UN Messenger of Peace with a special focus on climate change.
Indonesia, with its tropical landscape and rampat deforestation, unsurprisingly features in the film. Forest and ground fires set to clear land for palm oil plantations burn out of control every dry season in places like Sumatra and Kalimantan, destroying habitat and oxygen-producing trees and displacing the water table, causing flooding over previously dry land. The fires smother cities and even Singapore and parts of Malaysia at times with a thick, toxic haze.
The country appears within the first minute of the film, as DiCaprio views fires in Sumatra from a helicopter with Indonesian activist Farwiza Farhan.
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The 41 year-old actor says that the smog unable him to see the view. He also asks whether the fire started naturally or someone did it intentionally.
The narration explains that Sumatra’s forest destruction occurrs due to the desire to clear land for oil palm cultivation - which means palm oil.
The following scene shows how some of the world's biggest companies rely on palm oil, and how their demand is indirectly fuelling the fires.
Palm oil is the world’s cheapest vegetable oil which makes it a must-have for food and cosmetic companies.
DiCaprio also visits Leuser, which straddles the border of Aceh and North Sumatra.
“We’re standing in the last place on earth that still have elephant, rhino, orangutan, and tiger together in the wild.” he says.
The Leuser Ecosystem is a protected area (Gunung Leuser National Park) and is very vulnerable to the effects of deforestation, hunting and fires.
The fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan burn out of control because they are in peat rainforest.
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