Tag Archives: environment

DVD of the week

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General Orders No. 9, a documentary written and directed by Robert Persons, is extraordinary. Persons, in a short 72 minute film, poetically describes a way of life and living that is healthy, and contrasts it with the modern large city, surrounded by and entwined with freeways generating an overall experience negating humanity. His views on the impact of interstate highways is clear:

The interstate does not serve, it possesses. It has the power to make the land invisible to our attention.

Because of the absence of “place” in modern cities, he declares these cities to be machines. And he graphically illustrates the point with beautiful, disturbing imagery.  This  alienation in the midst of a huge constructed landscape grossly out of proportion to human interaction is one many people can agree with The city chews people up and spits them out. Others may find that his views reflect a longing for a simpler way of living on a smaller scale that may be unworkable or actually disturbing.

Nonetheless, for me the poetry of the piece is compelling. You can read an interview with the director here.

This is what Michael Tulley had to say:

Before General Orders No. 9, Robert Persons had never made a film. His first foray into the land of cinema is a mesmerizing experience, a 71-minute reflection upon his home state of Georgia and the somber evolution of a quieter, greener, more gentle America into the loud, cement-highwayed 21st century. It’s hard to experience Persons’ film and not make an immediate connection to the work of Terrence Malick, yet as I tweeted after seeing it for the first time at the 2010 Sarasota Film Festival, General Orders No. 9 makes Malick look like a straight shot of Hollywood. Experimental, dense, and poetic, Persons’ film casts a truly hypnotic spell.

You can watch the trailer below or at Apple:

Rent or buy this movie.

Who could have predicted this?

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Via The New York Times:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday that fracking — a controversial method of improving the productivity of oil and gas wells — may be to blame for causing groundwater pollution.

The draft finding could have a chilling effect in states trying to determine how to regulate the process.

By the way, there is a terrific documentary showing the dangers of fracking called GasLand. It is easy to access if you have a Netflix DVD rental account, or via the link on Amazon for sale or rental. Here is the trailer.

And here is more info from the film:

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BP is back (updated)

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Well, not BP exactly. But oil is leaking again from BP’s well in the Gulf that was supposedly sealed.

Update: Do not go to Transocean’s website deepwater.com looking for more info. It is lousy with malware.

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Political suicide?

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I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that. It’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors.

– (former?) GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, speaking in New Hampshire on Friday.

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Political quote of the day

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Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rain forests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?  Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?

– Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), questioning a climate change scientist and demonstrating to the world that he does not know that trees capture carbon emissions.  He really deserves his position on the House Committee on Science, huh?

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Pray for humanity

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Anthony Doerr raises an alarm about our collective path to overall environmental destruction. He believes humanity is never likely to change our current behavior profoundly enough to make a difference, so we should prepare for what might seem radical solutions or face an end to human domination of the planet. Terrific read.

We—and by we I mean me, my friends, my older brothers, everyone I know under 45—we are the first generation that cannot claim we did not know. Silent Spring was published 10 years before I was born. At elementary school assemblies I was among the little curly-headed ciphers who read cheerful environmental tips into the microphone: “Don’t let the faucet run while brushing your teeth!” Freshman year in college we were handed Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature. During my sophomore year, 1992, 1,500 scientists, including more than half the living Nobel laureates, admonished in their Warning to Humanity: “A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”

So what have we done? Not much. From 1992 to 2007, global CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels rose 38 percent. Emissions in 2008 rose a full 2 percent despite a global economic slump. Honeybees are dying by the billions1, amphibians by the millions, and shallow Caribbean reefs are mostly dead already.2 Our soil is disappearing faster than ever before, half of all mammals are in decline, and a recent climate change model predicts that the Arctic could have ice-free summers by 2013. Unchecked, carbon emissions from China alone will probably match the current global level by 2030.

“The god thou servest,” Marlowe wrote in Dr. Faustus, almost four hundred years before the invention of internet shopping, “is thine own appetite.” Was he wrong? How significantly have you reduced your own emissions since you first heard the phrase “climate change?” By a tenth? A quarter? A half? That’s better than I’m doing. The shirt I’m wearing was shipped here from Thailand. The Twinkie I just ate had 37 ingredients in it. I biked to work through 91-degree heat this morning but back at my house the air conditioner is grinding away, keeping all three bedrooms a pleasant 74 degrees.

Side note: If you like his writing, you might enjoy Doerr’s new book Memory Wall: Stories. And for a similar and startling view, check out Bill McKibbon’s new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet and his recent appearance on David Letterman.

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BP threats

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BP is making threats about being unable to pay for damage they caused in the Gulf if they are prohibited to drill in the grill because of the the harm they have caused. The company has a horrible safety record stretching for years.

BP is warning Congress that if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits, it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

This is like a repeated drunk driver arguing that he must be allowed a drivers license so he can get to work to pay damages to the families of those he injured.

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Not so fast, BP

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There was great relief when BP‘s runaway well in the Gulf was sealed. But new studies show that there is continuing danger from the dispersed oil remaining in the water and on the sea bed.

Scientists from the University of South Florida, working from a research vessel northeast of the wellhead, found oil droplets scattered in sediment along the gulf floor and in the water column, they said in a report on Tuesday. The dispersed oil appeared to be having a toxic effect on bacteria and phytoplankton, a photosynthetic microorganism that serves as a vital food for fish and other marine life.

Update: More from the Wall Street Journal.

The end of fishing

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A great article from the current New Yorker. Elizabeth Kolbert on the rapid demise of fish in our oceans due to over-fishing.

If the Atlantic bluefin tuna were the first species to be fished into oblivion, its destruction would be shameful. But, of course, its story has become routine. Cod, once so plentiful off the coast of Newfoundland that they could be scooped up in baskets, are now scarce. The same goes for halibut, haddock, swordfish, marlin, and skate; it’s been calculated that stocks of large predatory fish have declined by ninety per cent in the past half century. In 1943, Rachel Carson was a young biologist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when she wrote a booklet titled “Food from the Sea.” The point of the boosterish guide was to convince American consumers of the delectableness of fish like the wolffish, an enormous creature with a bulbous head, big teeth, and an eel-like body. Wolffish is “one of New England’s underexploited fishes, a condition that will be corrected when housewives discover its excellence,” Carson wrote. Apparently, she was so persuasive—and bottom trawling so wrecked its habitat—that the wolffish is now considered a threatened species.

The sorry state of ocean life has led to a new kind of fish story—a lament not for the one that got away but for the countless others that didn’t. In “Saved by the Sea: A Love Story with Fish” (St. Martin’s; $25.99), David Helvarg notes that each year sharks kill some five to eight humans worldwide; meanwhile we kill a hundred million of them. Dean Bavington, the author of “Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse” (University of British Columbia; $94), observes that two hundred billion pounds’ worth of cod were taken from Canada’s Grand Banks before 1992, when the cod simply ran out. In “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food” (Penguin Press; $25.95), Paul Greenberg estimates that somewhere in the range of a hundred million salmon larvae used to hatch in the Connecticut River each year. Now the number’s a lot easier to pin down: it’s zero. “The broad, complex genetic potential of the Connecticut River salmon,” Greenberg writes, has “vanished from the face of the earth.”