The formula was tried and true. On the first night the priest would send everybody to hell. He would lay it out for them — there is a crisis, and it involves you and your soul. It was the kind of fire and brimstone intended to impel people into prayer.

The second evening was mostly more of the same. As Father glowered down from the pulpit, people in their pews were assured they were still in hell. But as the sermon went on, hell’s door opened just a crack. This time, the people were allowed to suspect a distant possibility of salvation.

On the third night the door flew open. Heaven exists and it’s there for the taking. Prayers don’t go nowhere and you’re not in church to keep the pews warm.

Just because it was a formula doesn’t mean it was a con. The reason it worked is because it was, is and always will be based on a great, underlying truth. That three-day sequence is how redemption works. First we have to know we’re in hell. Then we have to know we belong in heaven.

Leonardo Di Caprio Presents The 11th Hour works precisely because it employs the strategies of those old Redemptorists. There’s no subtlety, polite reserve or studied objectivity. It’s as much a sledgehammer argument as any of Michael Moore’s documentaries. Unlike Moore’s screeds, there are no belly laughs or ad hominem attacks or winks at the viewer. It’s an earnest effort, and admirable for the courage it takes to be earnest in an age of insouciant irony.

Before the narration begins or the title flashes on the screen, the movie shows us the apocalypse as we see it on 24-hour news channels. There are images of Hurricane Katrina, glaciers collapsing into the Arctic Ocean, the oil industry at war with the Earth. The audience is plunged into a recognizable hell.

What we’re looking at when we watch the weather of disaster on the news is “a convergence of crises,” Di Caprio tells us. But the aging teen heartthrob is not imposed on the audience very frequently. It’s left to a list of about 70 expert witnesses to explain just what the crises are, how they are converging and what it means. From physicist Stephen Hawking, through broadcaster David Suzuki, designer Bruce Mau, Mikhail Gorbachev and native elder Oren Lyons, the audience hears the message preached out of the mouths of experts.

The science presented is well known and no more complex than a Grade 9 biology class. Neither is the politics convoluted. Leaders who have tap danced around climate change at the behest of big oil stand condemned by the simple science they’ve been trying to avoid.

But the principal conclusions the film draws are not political. Ultimately, the film is interested in morality.

By the time we come to the declaration that humans could reduce their footprint upon the Earth by 90 per cent using existing technology, we begin to see the shape of the problem. Climate change, desertification, mass extinction and the impoverishment of most of the world through an economic system which cannot account for the value of such basic natural resources as air is basically a moral crisis, which must be met with a new ethic of consumption. Frugality, a shift from the sense of well-having to well-being and a recognition that we can never get enough of what we don’t really want are urged as the cultural keys to changing the political and social dynamic which is eating up Earth’s resources faster than they can be replenished.

Heaven is real, concrete and immediate. “We get to re-imagine everything we do,” declares business environmentalist Paul Hawken. “This generation gets to completely change the world.”

That the culture needs to change such that our desires and choices change is certainly true. Nor should it be easy to dismiss the idea that the Earth faces a crisis. But there is a tragic flaw, all too common in the West, in an environmental morality which sees nothing but individual choices (consumer choices and political choices). As laudable as it may be to adjust middle-class values, to rediscover frugality and simplicity, it is not enough, and too simple by half.

There are large corporate interests built on uncompromising exploitation of natural resources. There is a global trading system which enriches us and impoverishes two-thirds of the world. The wealth we derive from the ethic of exploitation is interwoven with everything good and everything wrong with our civilization. Our environmental sins are not simply personal sins and cannot be reformed by diverting our desires away from SUVs and overbuilt, air-conditioned houses. We need to address our social sins against the environment, and we can only do that as a society. And it is just as necessary to recognize the original sin which scars our world and which we cannot heal of our own efforts.

Of course there is nothing really original in The 11th Hour’s arguments or the facts marshalled in support of them. They are slickly and convincingly presented in the film’s two web sites — 11thhouraction.com and wip.warnerbros.com/ 11thhour/site.html. But it would be a mistake to mine the web sites for information and neglect the movie. It makes an emotional appeal to our passions. The fate of the planet should engage our emotions.