Compulsive viewing

Explain this to me. Over the past couple of weeks the film An Inconvenient Truth has cropped up three times in my conversations with people in the industry. The first conversation was with a director at Savills, who told me it had changed his way of thinking. The second was with a director at a services consultant who told me it had changed his way of thinking. And the third was with a director of the Berkeley Group who told me that his boss Tony Pidgley had hired a cinema to show the film to the company’s directors and guests, and yes, it had changed his way of thinking.

So why then at the launch debate of the C-Scaipe centre for sustainable communities at Kingston University earlier this month were the participants still bemoaning the fact that the big bad world of property development is failing to take environmental concerns on board?

I’m not singling out the industry for criticism here. When I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, the audience applauded at the end, but then, like everyone else, I came out of the cinema, got in the car, drove home and basically just carried on squandering natural resources. I was shaken by the film, yes, but not stirred enough to do anything. Like everyone else, perhaps.