A Sea Change Blog

Beauty In Tragedy

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:18:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

There is a mesmerizing power and intensity in tragedy, a fascination that traps the eye and pushes us toward it the way cliffs tempt bodies to fall. It is one of the main ingredients in most artistic expressions and I assume it must be linked to our desire to understand mortality.
Nine years ago I lived in downtown Manhattan and one morning woke up to the news from my brother in Spain that the WTC was on fire. I went up to the roof of the apartment building, where two workmen were drinking coffee with eyes glued to the flames and smoke on the first tower. I felt instantly drawn to it, not by some morbid attraction, simply because going there seemed to me like the only logical thing to do; it was something that could not be ignored. The thought of what ended up happening during the next couple of hours did not even cross my mind, so I had no fear. I simply grabbed the camera (I was studying at the ICP at the time) and walked South. Everyone that was close to the towers that morning has their own story about what they lived through. In my mind it all still plays like an impossible, absurd, slow dream. I recall single steps taken along the sidewalk, my glances up looking for that first tower that I did not know was gone, the white ash in the air, delicately laid on the pavement and on mailboxes, the smell, that toxic burnt smell. The scale, both in sheer size and in the number of deaths, of the catastrophe turned it forever intangible, incomprehensible, almost unacceptable for me, and the beauty of that morning enhanced this sensation, condemning me to this day to recall things with a mixture of detail and haziness. It was the day I realized I was just a sideline observer in life, that I was not made to be a photographer, or a hero, or a person touched by greatness. I just happened to be there, in a place I have not returned to. Every September I am forced to remember it all when I wake up one morning and there is that gorgeous and unmistakable blue sky that is so New York and so September Eleventh.

Edward Burtynsky's OIL series depicts a tragedy in large scale, images full of detail, with perfect composition and eerie, confusing beauty. His work combines two of the playful aesthetic choices photography offers that I very much enjoy: the abstraction of reality from aerial shots (which surprisingly also occurs in macrophotography) and texturizing from stepping down from three to two dimensions. His most recent photographs for the exhibition, the ones you can see in the link above, were taken this spring during the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. They are so beautiful, so sad.

The Price of Flying High

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:14:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

In his book How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, Chris Goodall breaks down the average 12.5 tonnes of CO2 per person yearly emissions in the UK into around 6 directly generated by the individual and another 6.5 generated by such things as "running offices, making fertilizer, smelting iron ore and transporting goods". He believes that we need to lower our emissions to at least 3 tonnes per capita to reach a sustainable level, which blatantly indicates the magnitude of the changes that need to come.
Reading further down I look at the more detailed table and see that almost 2.3 tonnes of our "own" emissions come from running the house and another 3.1 are from transportation. The alarming figure, the one I want to focus on, is the 1.8 tonnes from air travel.
I try to eat and buy local foods, organic if possible, little meat, move around mostly by bicycle or on foot, recycle all that is recyclable wherever I happen to be, but all these good habits do not add to a fraction of what I pollute just with my air travel. I am well aware that I fly much much more than those 1.8 tonnes. If I put the miles I have been in the air just this year I could probably go around the world a couple of times. I know that the best thing I could do for the environment would be to not fly, and still, it is undoubtedly the last thing I would be willing to give up. It is my way to see the people I love, to move between the two places that currently dictate my life, to work, to travel to areas that will soon no longer exist (partly because of this lifestyle).
I am selfish, and this is not just my Catholic upbringing speaking; we are self-serving animals with little self-restraint. Mr. Goodall believes in this "human virtue", as he puts it. I think I believe in it too, but my acts betray me. It is easier to fool myself into believing I am doing good and to quiet my conscience with insignificant acts rather than to truly address the problem.

Sunset behind the wing, on the way to South America.

Reading on the Beach

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:51:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

On my last blog post I promised a picture from the wind turbines around Zahara de los Atunes in Spain. Driving with my daughter on the twisty road with no shoulder three days ago I chickened out and chose life over greatness. We humbly pulled out on a dirt road that communicates the turbines and local farms, where I could only get partial views of the hundreds of three armed giants.

These days we are in Europe's Southernmost camping ground, Rio Jara, so we have breakfast with eyes on the Riff mountains of Morocco, barely 20 miles away. Only a narrow sliver of Atlantic Ocean separates both continents at this point. A simple life: we pick up shells, watch kite surfers, throw seaweed at each other, move sand around in the futile and insane fashion everyone with kids does (here a pool, there a mountain with a castle on top) and if she happens to make a friend, I read a bit. Two or three years ago, when we were shooting on Oslo, I bought a book titled "How To Live A Low Carbon Life", written by a man named Chris Goodall. I had meant to start it for a long time, but only now I threw it in the backpack. I am so glad I did, all I have read so far is profoundly interesting, informative and true.
"The generation brought up in times when energy was much more expensive compared to manual labour are gradually disappearing. Their habits of turning off appliances or of walking rather than driving will die with them. Younger people may have never acquired those behaviors but, perhaps even more worryingly, also appear to be much less interested in environmental matters. Unlike earlier environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s, interest in climate change appears to be lower in the young than among the old."
I am sure to include more quotes and information extracted from the book during the next few weeks. In five pages I will come to the simple daily measures everyone can take to live that life with less carbon. Now I think you should mover your mouse over the title, which hides a link, and click.

Learning about Ocean Acidification completely changed the way I look at shells (or the ocean, for that matter). When we go hunting we are both particularly fond of those that have eroded to the point that only the mother-of-pearl is left. Must be the hardest part, that is why it is the last to turn to sand. Some are paper thin, like yellow, read, white and purple baby nails, so brittle they break in my pocket. Why are crows and us people so fond of colorful shiny things?
Some of our hundreds of treasures:

Summer Winds

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 02:46:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

Over twenty years ago I saw my first wind farm around the Gibraltar Strait. I was going with my parents and brothers to the town of Tarifa, on the Cádiz coast, "the windsurfing capital of the world" as they called it back then. Tarifa has a much higher suicide rate than the rest of the country; many blame its incessant winds for this. The mistral wind is considered an extenuating circumstance for murder trials in the South of France.
Driving along the Cádiz coast a couple days ago the original wind turbines that looked so futuristic back then seemed shrunk, small, decrepit, like old old radio antenna, rusty gray. Beside the few dozen there were hundreds and hundreds of the most gigantic, majestic white turbines, filling endless fields, in the middle of toro de lidia (a special breed of bull that is raised for bullfights) farms, outlining the tops of all the hills. They certainly take over a landscape and brake the natural scale of things, but I like seeing them because I like what they do and what they stand for. My neighbor in the village happens to be an engineer that works in a local farm. He tells me they break a lot and that the efficiency is sometimes low. I only half listen to him, I want to keep dreaming a bit. In a few days I will be going there again and promise to take some shots, but in the meantime here is a picture I took of "our" local ones, the ones my neighbor climbs up to fix.

A NEW APPOINTMENT IN THE U.S.
The White House has nominated Scott Doney to be NOAA's chief scientist. Doney, a well respected marine biochemist, has done research on climate change, the global carbon cycle and ocean acidification. Here is a link to this news and to a letter by Jane Lubchenco, NOAA's administrator.
I feel the scientific community and all matters environmental are treated with more respect and given more importance under this Administration.

POISONOUS CURRENTS
The internet is like a vast ocean, so it also holds quite a lot of poison. Some of what I have read on different blogs and sites goes like this: scientists are making all this talk about the environment up in order to get funding for their research and because they have some "hidden agenda", they work for a third party with dubious interests.
What an insult to our intelligence. Almost all these women and men were the best and brightest students through elementary school, high school, college. They did not choose to go to business school, study economics, law, to go to the money-making career where they could pursue a fancy lifestyle. They are individuals with a thirst for knowledge, a passion for research and discovery, for exactitude and rigorousness, their jobs are almost a vocation or a call like that of religious priests. But the ongoing argument from the poisoned depths of the ocean yells that this was all planned in order to secure funding for false and biased research. This line of thought claims that the scientists did not want to do research after all, instead they wanted to fabricate lies, to convince us of them and to scare us with those carefully made up stories so they could get money, lots of money that they still do not see because they are stupid in the end and spend it in lab equipment, buoys, months of holidays in the Arctic. Por favor.

For Sleepless Nights

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:05:00 GMT

Sven always forwards me things he thinks might interest me or help me do my job at Niijii Films, but above all we keep each other informed of the latest cycling news. He was the first one to congratulate me on Alberto Contador winning his third Tour de France. Three weeks ago he innocently emailed me a pdf telling me that it was "for those long sleepless nights when you are feeling intellectually starved". It was a document titled Searching for a Miracle, written by Richard Heinberg.

As I almost always do, I followed Sven's recommendation and opened it the other night. I began scrolling down the pages, casually looking here and there. It is an interesting text, I think you should click on the link and take a look yourself. I just want to mention one of the tables I saw, Table 4, which lists the energy use in different countries in 2006. The per capita use is in million Btu and the total country use in quadrillion Btu.

Here are a few sample countries:
COUNTRY             Per Capita                 Total
Brazil                            51.2                 9.635
Canada                      427.2                 13.95
China                       56.2             73.8
Denmark                    161.3                 .879
France                          180.7           11.445
Germany                177.5             14.62
Iceland                       568.6               .17
Italy                          138.7              8.06
Japan                         178.7          22.78
Mexico                       68.5                  7.35
Nigeria                         7.8              1.02
Norway                        410.8                1.89
Qatar                        1,023.3                      .9
Russia                          213.9          30.38
Spain                           161.2                 6.51
UK                              161.7                 9.8
USA                    334.6           99.856

I could mention how surprised I am to read Canada's numbers (or Norway's, Sven), I could point out how similar they are across most European countries, but today I just feel like saying one thing: what the hell is going on in Qatar!?

10 Good News, 10

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:28:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

It might be the cosmetic work of politicians, it may be hard to see the good side of it, could even leave you a bit confused, but here are 10 pieces of news that could ignite (emissions free, of course) true, authentic change:

1   Britain decides to stop airport growth around London to try to curb its emissions. The decision came from Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron.

2   Researches studying the Cretaceous period have discovered that many marine creatures survived ancient cases of ocean acidification.
This very same argument has repeatedly been mentioned by climate change, ocean acidification and environmental disaster skeptics, ignoring the basic importance of gradual adaptation, but it is nice to think that some things could have a chance to survive the new pH levels in our oceans, even if we might not be here to witness it. I would just feel horrible if I thought we are killing everything.

3   China has become the biggest energy user, passing the US.
I am no US citizen, but if I was I would probably be a little relieved to know that the rest of the world can point its finger somewhere else to uncover the biggest piggy of all. Let's skip that there are four Chinese for every US citizen, I do not want to spoil my third point.
Maybe China, as the biggest energy user and future First-World power will do the leading the US is failing to do. Hope is clearly a state of mind.

4   A new monitoring buoy has been deployed off the North Olympic Peninsula to check the composition of seawater coming into the Sound and Hood Canal.
More monitoring equipment and money spent on research. Always feels good.

5   President Obama launches a 10 point policy to protect the US National Waters. And one of the key issues will be Ocean Acidification.

6   Monterey, CA, will host the Third Symposium on The Ocean in a High CO2 World in 2012.
This will come at a time when public awareness on this threat to the environment is much higher than in Paris 2008.

7   Thanks to the band Pearl Jam the term "ocean acidification" has appeared on Rolling Stone's website. This is what I call a clear sign of hope. One of the problems of Ocean Acidification was that the media did nor find it hot enough, that the term was not catchy, but how can you get any cooler than having Pearl Jam release a song about the oceans and giving the proceedings to Conservation International's Marine Programs?
In the article they mention Eddie Vedder's interest and worry about renewable energy, ocean acidification, alternative energy, sustainable fishing and beach clean up work.
The video has some nice footage, by the way. Need to listen to the song more to see if is shower whistle-able.

8   A new study shows that baby fish become confused and reckless in more acidic water.
How can this be good news? Well, it is good news because it is knowledge, and knowledge is always good. Also, if we know more about the effects of ocean acidification on marine creatures we will see a broader picture of what is at stake and there will be a greater chance of action through public demand and legislation. Pathetic the number of websites that have covered this news about the fish having a "death wish" under acidic oceans. Does everything need to be or become a joke?

9   The National Research Council published a new book on Ocean Acidification titled "Ocean Acidification: A National Strategy to Meet the Challenges of a Changing Ocean".
And you can read the whole book online for free here

10   The EPOCA project (European Project on Ocean Acidification) is under way, an initiative employing 100 researchers worldwide, 30 of them in the Arctic.
Nice to see The Economist writing about Ocean Acidification as well.

OK, I have to run now to pick up my daughter and head to our little village in the Andalusian mountains. I hope you find some of the links interesting.

World Champions

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 14:51:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

Three days ago Spain, "we" since I am Spanish, won the Soccer World Championship for the first time. While I was in Brazil in June I attended, absolutely mesmerized, all the Brazilian games and witnessed a paralyzed country absolutely mad about their 11 heroes. People gathered in bars, drank beer and ate a bit wearing the national colors, dancing to the thousands of live bands that played live samba music at halftime and after the match and then drove around town in a madness of trumpets, horns and firecrackers until the next morning. The country is fortunate the World Cup only takes place every four years, otherwise their industry would collapse. I have never seen, and probably never will so many men and women wearing that trickiest color in fashion: yellow.

When I arrived back in Spain two weeks ago I was surprised to see my country covered in red. It has been ten years since I moved to the States and a lot has changed. To my generation and to anyone older than me the national flag had a lot of connotations, most of which were negative and had to do with Franco's dictatorship.

That is over: after the victory in the final against The Netherlands (to many this is the biggest thing that has happened in their lives) everyone is wearing some red, flags are in every balcony and there are several songs out there that refer to the pride of being Spanish. There is a general sense of joy and pride that is probably as silly as contagious. And the craziest thing of it all is that this game that rules so many people's lives, this state of mind, is actually going to affect the economy: the prognoses is 0.7 to 1% extra growth this year. It seems we will have more faith in ourselves, we will be elated by the win and buy more, consume more, which will increase production in a way that our politicians seem incapable to do. Things are better now than a week ago, we are coming out of recession.

In a way I find it funny and touching, that a mood change can have such an impact. In a way as well it gives me hope to think that something as small and simple as a little extra happiness can turn things around. But in another way as well I have to admit that it truly and deeply pisses me off. It pisses me off big time, because I can almost touch and smell how simple it could be to change certain things if we all decided this is where we want to go, this is what we believe in, these are our priorities.

There is a heat wave around Europe. Somebody interviewed Michael Laudrup (former fantastic soccer player) on the radio the other day and he said it was as hot in Sweden as it was in Spain. The interviewer thought it was a joke, but Laudrup answered in a very matter of fact way and said: " No, no, it is 38 degrees [celsius]. Must be climate change". And then they moved on to the next subject: pre-season training. It gave me goose bumps. We have assimilated this as our new reality and will soon assimilate in the same casual way when the effects of ocean acidification are more visible to the general public. There will probably be some funny jokes about coral reefs or the scarcity of oysters. We will assimilate and pretend to "adapt" to the extent we can, and move on. For a while longer, at least.

Back to Brazil, back to FICA

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 02:40:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

I really wanted to visit some of the cerrado National Parks during the screening tour in Brazil in March and April, but it was not possible. The dates did not leave a window of time big enough to "escape" to the countryside between each city. I thought it would be a long time before I had another chance to fly to South America and fulfill this desire, but I was so wrong. Not even a week after my return to the US the production company received an invitation to take part in FICA again, the film festival that A Sea Change won last year, this time as part of a series of films to be screened for school children from the State of Goias. I wrote to the organizers and suggested we did a little more than just show the film; I wanted to go down there and meet them, talk to them about ocean acidification and do a simple chemistry experiment to exemplify what an acidic ocean does to shell forming organisms. They liked the idea and so it was that, barely a month after leaving Río, that I was heading South again on an early June night.

My expectations were very high, but even so the cerrado did not disappoint me at all. It is wild, it is pure, it is extremely beautiful, bizarre and surprising. Animals, birds and plants seem to have come out of a Dr. Seuss book. The giant anteater with its long hairs, nose and tongue, the toucans and parrots, the palms, sticky plants, fragrant leaves, thorny bushes. Everything was new and unique to me. And for good reason, forty some percent of all I saw was endemic; this ecosystem is so important that, in a country like Brazil that holds the Amazon jungle, the cerrado still counts for over thirty percent of all the biodiversity in the nation. The big threat to these gorgeous savannas and bushy areas are the dry season fires and the clearings done for soy and cattle farming. Fires are strictly forbidden, but one would think that they are actually encouraged. Everywhere I went people were burning grass and low bush by the side of the road, in farms, in the forests. This practice could not be more dangerous. The dry season lasts half of the year and usually, once a fire gets out of control during these months there is absolutely no way people will manage to stop it. Some plants have adapted to fires and have the most ingenious ways of "escaping" or surviving fires, but many others and all animals caught in it perish and take an awful long time to repopulate the area because conditions in the cerrado are extreme and hard (six months of rain, six months of "seca", the dry season). I came to realize that legislation is not going to do much to discourage "winter" burnings, that the only way to dissuade Brazilians from eradicating the mato is to educate them, to teach them to love this magnificent environment that they take for granted and to teach them about the consequences of fires. The cerrado, as I have already mentioned on previous posts in this blog, is the most threatened environment in all Brazil, way above the Amazonia.

Education has always looked to me like the only true key to hope and change in all matters, including the way we treat the planet, so I was elated to have the opportunity to show the film to 500 kids and talk to them for a couple minutes. There were children and teenagers of all ages, from 5 to 17. They were loud, they were having fun, they were nervous. The room was huge, it is the same one used for the Festival's closing ceremony, but in less than five minutes it filled up. They were making so much noise during the opening scene that you could not hear a thing. How loud were they? About this LOUD

Unfortunately, some of them had to leave before it was over because they had come by bus from distant towns and villages and had to begin their way back, but a good number of them stayed until the end. I had promised to ask a few simple questions about the film and reward those that knew the answers with some of our merchandise, so the kids (and quite many adults) were pretty excited. I also asked the younger children to please make a drawing with whatever part of the documentary or animal shown in it that they liked and we quickly assembled an informal jury to reward the best five or six with a Niijii Films baseball cap as well. I wished I had brought 100 and not just a handful, it was heartbreaking to see some of those disappointed eyes. The most difficult question I asked seemed to be to name in an understandable way the little shell with wings that appears several times throughout the film. The word "pteropod" is not the easiest one to pronounce for a 12 year old Brazilian kid; some pretty comical and unintelligible replies, formed mostly by the urge to own a baseball cap, came out of those mouths. Finally, I told them all to come close to the stage and hold two cups in their hands, one filled with water and one filled with vinegar. Then we gave each one of them several pieces of chalk while I explained that they should imagine the acidic ocean being the cup of vinegar and the shell forming organism being the pieces of chalk. There was some initial confusion because the chalk was bubbling in the water as well as in the vinegar, but once the air inside it had come out they could see the vinegar getting all murky and the chalk stick slowly dissolving. I knew all this was quite a stretch for a little girl that has never seen the ocean or eaten shellfish and is at the beginning of her school years, but I think they got the essence of the message and both students and teachers were absolutely fascinated by the chemistry behind the terrible problem of ocean acidification. I believe and hope the experiment is going to be replicated in classrooms during the next few months.

Here are a few of the drawings I took with me, all of them winners of the Niijii Films cap that is now often seen around the State of Goias:

Winner in Calabria

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:52:00 GMT

We just received news that on June 27th A Sea Change won the competition for Best Video at the Gaia International Festival in Calabria, Italy. The film was screened in the beautiful Aieta Renaissance Palace:

Michael Leonardi, the Festival Organizer, wrote Barbara Ettinger to tell her the wonderful news and complement the film: "With all of the terrible news about our seas and oceans it is good to know that there are people like you out there looking to leave something behind to our children and grandchildren. I am the father of an almost two year old named Gaia Valmaree Leonardi who inspired this festival."

We are so proud and full of joy that the film continues to travel around the globe, taking part in film festivals, winning awards and informing people about the increasingly more known problem of ocean acidification.

Crazy Glue

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 05:15:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

A few months ago I broke a toenail after kicking a stone and reacted to the accident with what I thought was a quick brilliant idea: I would apply several layers of crazy glue to hold it together until it grew past the breaking point. Hysteria leaves no room to ponder the side effects of glue on open wounds, so I grabbed a tube and did my job until, layer after layer, I had the mother of all nails, an oyster-like looking big toenail that looked invincible and mighty and even withstood flexing. That initial repair was so successful that I began fantasizing about a possible crazy glue ad campaign that included commercials and made me rich.
Still, truth being more patient than dreams, quietly put things in place: less than a week after I thought I had made my great discovery I was struggling in a desperately slow race against the nail growth and its repeated cracks. My crazy glue helped, but did no miracles.

When the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began more than two months ago I promised myself I would not write about it. Such a horrendous catastrophe took over my thoughts and made me begin to measure time in spilled gallons, to go back again and again in my head to that deadly lava lamp at the bottom of the ocean, spreading its black ooze throughout the gulf, enveloping beaches, birds, fish, changing people's lives. I did not want to talk about it because in all honesty I knew I had absolutely nothing to add to what all the knowledgeable and intelligent thinkers, scientists, journalists have already been writing. I do wonder, though, why all those words keep coming short over and over again when describing the way we are affecting the environment, why it is that they are not causing a resolute change. They have to be coming short, otherwise we would be taking real measures.
Now, at the end of June, billions of liters of oil have come out and the ongoing calamity is too great to even fathom. I fear we are even getting used to it, growing tired of the news. It will only be thirty or a hundred years from now that people will be able to look back upon the disaster and assess its magnitude, in just measure. I once read that the Gulf of Mexico could be where a giant meteor crashed against the Earth and caused the extinction of dinosaurs. Macabre coincidence. Having reached such a point this is too great a calamity for me not write a couple lines and at least leave a small trace of anger and disgust. Just sitting in front of my laptop here in Niquelandia (Brazil) makes me short of breath and my stomach feel rock solid. I read angry voices against BP and President Obama and find it so absurd to think in that direction. It is either ridiculous or a way to keep us distracted from what we know the real problem is and where to look for answers, culprits and solutions. Personally, I am surprised that nothing similar had happened before.
What do 480 millions liters (127 million gallons) look like anyway? How many football fields can you cover with that? How much energy is inside all that fuel? I cannot visualize it, it does not fit in my head.

The thing about my nail could be a metaphor to exemplify the best and worst in us. On the one hand, we have this ability to come up with quick ingenious solutions to unexpected problems and mishaps, on the other, we are so naive that when shit happens we also think that all we need to do is use a little crazy glue to fix it.

A picture I just took of the oil spill

The "Oceans Are Talking" CD is out

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 20:54:00 GMT

Congratulations, Sam, on a great video (below), and many fantastic songs for us all to enjoy on your new CD, "Oceans Are Talking." Sam has included a catchy tune called Pteropods, inspired by A Sea Change. The CD is available in our store on our website. You are amazing, Sam. Thank you!

Bicycle Interview

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 09:56:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

Barbara and Sven returned from the West Coast a few days back and this past Thursday Sven and I had a chance to go on a morning ride, discuss how Liquigas was doing in the Giro de Italia and talk about the 2010 NOAA Environmental Hero Award ceremony in La Jolla, CA.
"Thanks" to some stomach problems this spring (or so he claims) Sven is looking lean and mean and was able to talk even when the road got steep.

"It was exciting to be out there," he said. "Obviously, it is a delight when you work hard and try to pull the best team together to make a film to in the end get this kind of recognition. We are lucky to have Barbara as a director. She is a good storyteller so the rest of us did what we were told and tried to do it well."

From left to right, Tony Haymet, Dick Feely, Barbara Ettinger and Sven Huseby

"The evening started with a slideshow with clips from the film and Youtube pieces related to the history of the film, television shows where it had appeared and those sort of things. There was a major buffet and soon after the ceremony.
Dick Feely came down from the Seattle office of NOAA to present the award on behalf of Doctor Jane Lubchenko, the Administrative Director of NOAA. She is a woman with deep knowledge of ocean acidification as a result of her work at Oregon State University," said Sven.
"After the award ceremony we had a screening of the full 83 minute version of the documentary for the 250 attendees and finally a q&a with Barbara and myself, Andrew Dickson, Tony Haymet and Victoria Fabry."

I did not recognize a couple of the names, so Sven, water bottle in his hand, explained: "Tony Haymet is the president of Scripps. Andrew Dickson is known as the man who came up with a standardized way of calibrating instruments to measure pH levels around the world seas, whether it is Japan, Norway, Australia or the United States. And Victoria Fabry, or Vicky Fabry as we know her, is the scientist who was originally interviewed by Elizabeth Kolbert in her seminal article for the November 2006 issue of the New Yorker titled "The Darkening Sea". It is always a treat to catch up with Vicky."

"The best part of getting an award like this is you can leverage it into more publicity and greater milage for the film," he concluded.

Sao Paulo de Janeiro

Mon, 24 May 2010 11:28:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

It is 60 degrees, cloudy and windy at times and I am listening to the National's new record surrounded by maple, oak and pine tress in my office. No more Tim Maia, Marisa Monte, funky carioca or forró. No more Os Mutantes. I will need to close my eyes really tight to remember what it was and felt like 5,000 miles further South, over in Brazil. Right now Barbara and Sven are on the West Coast receiving their Environmental Hero Award from NOAA and visiting Elias and his family while back here in NY we received this past week news of three broadcasts on Norwegian national television, NRK (which made Sven particularly happy), and of the screening at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver. The Vancouver Observer did a nice little piece about it that you can read here.

The penultimate screening was at the Cineclube Socioambiental Crisantempo in Vila Madalena. Vila Madalena fools you into thinking that the gigantic city that envelops it does not exist. It is a beautiful neighborhood with posh restaurants, bars with terraces, boutiques, artists' studios, bakeries. If you are rich in Sao Paulo, you want to hang out around Vila Madalena and forget about the traffic jams, the hectic Avenida Paulista, the putrid Pinheiros River, the more than 20 million people around. Crisantempo offers a fantastic space in which to host film, theatre, dance and music performances. It is all very well organized and cared for, all extremely professional. Everybody talks about the city being the engine of South America, more cosmopolitan, faster paced and wealthier than anywhere else in the continent and I guess it is true. For me it was a relief to have the last screenings being a little less stressful and unpredictable. In preparation for our night the organizers had contacted Leandra Gonçalves from Greenpeace Brasil to be present during the Q&A. That gave me the opportunity to not have to listen so much to myself again and learn some very interesting things about the attempts (or lack thereof) in Brazil to preserve coastal waters and marine ecosystems. Although I had already noticed how much meat is eaten everywhere, I was surprised to know that the average consumption per capita of fish in Brazil barely reaches 8 kilograms (it is 58 kilograms over in Spain, but we might only be beat by Japan in our dependency and love for fish). It is a bit of a paradox that a country so associated with sandy beaches and coconut groves, surfing, water and nature can literally have its back turned in another direction if we just look at their national policies and their diet. Ms Gonçalves was very keen to talk about whales (a symbol for Greenpeace), so took the opportunity to tell the audience that one of the possible future lines of research in regards to ocean acidification and marine life could be the impact a more acidic ocean will have on animals that communicate through sound underwater. One of the lesser known facts about acidification is that a decrease of 0.3 in the PH equals a 40% decrease in the sound absorption coefficient. Yes, there could be acoustic contamination in the oceans as well.

100 different types of fruit at the Municipal Market in Sao Paulo.

In a city like Sao Paulo some of the favelas are vertical. Outside the Municipal Market.

Then it was time to go back to Río, catch a few more waves on Ipanema beach, watch the city at sunset from Sugar Loaf, buy a kilo of powdered guaraná and go to the final screening, at the Solar da Imperatriz in the Jardim Botanico; no less!

The place was also known as Facenda dos Macacos, after the river that passes through it, but either macaques really liked the name or I want to believe their profusion had something to do with it as well. They run up and down electric wires, roll on roofs, feed along the fences, curious and nervous, mothers carrying several offspring on the backs. With those curled up tails, hanging at different heights, they looked like musical notes on a score to the Mata Atlântica.

The somewhat long drive up to this lush location in the outskirts of Rio did not prevent the screening form going really well. Cecilia Herzog from Inverde and her husband Alex (Amigos do Parque) were in charge of the whole thing and through their hard work, devotion and energy made sure that it all run smoothly, in a brilliant manner. The most positive thing about this trip has certainly been meeting people like them and like Fabiana Duarte de Paula, Eudaldo Guimaraes, Ana Arruda, Suzana Sattamini, Pedro Cavalcanti, Natalia Ribeiro, Andrea Palatnik, Luciano Mariz, Gina Boemer or so many other amazing folks that I am surely forgetting now and have shown to me such conviction and hope in change, such great generosity and will to help, sharing their energy and intelligence for this project. They have restored my at times damaged faith in human kind.

This time at the end we had a panel discussion with journalist Amélia Gonzales from O Globo and oceanographer David Zee from the University Veiga de Almeida and the collaboration from members of the audience, like Trajano Paiva, who runs a website devoted to the oceans called sosoceanos.org.
What a great aftertaste to six fantastic weeks in Brazil. And now for something completely different.

This post is dedicated to my good friend Miguel Gil, who helped me throughout the whole trip, shared the laughter, joys and miseries that come from traveling and just yesterday experienced the tragedy of his half of the cupuaçu cracking in the dry Granada air. We will go and get some more, Miguel.

Into the Cerrado

Sat, 15 May 2010 10:56:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

The screening in Goiania marked the beginning of my last week in Brazil. I sped up the visits to the açai na tigela parlor, tried to look more closely at plants in the parks and to spot all the macaques on the electric wires; ay! so many things I would not be able do back home. It was also the time to revisit the places and people I met last year on my first visit to the country.

Goiania is not pleasing to the eye, no. No historical landmarks, no beautiful neighborhoods, no pretty avenues, no magnificent gardens, no cultural life to speak of. It feels provincial, but is home to 1.5 million people. Still, locals are proud and quick to tell you that year after year it is labeled one of the top two cities to live in Brazil and also that its beautiful women, seven to every man, are famous nationwide. Now, this is something people from Minas Gerais strongly disagree about, but I want to believe goianienses.
Goias' wealth comes from cattle and farming (primarily soy) and from the car industry. These activities seem to be putting tremendous pressure on the "cerrado" ecosystem, making it the most threatened area in all Brazil, above the Amazon. It is always tragic to see or hear of an endangered environment, but with the "brazilian savannah" this is even more the case, because walking or driving through it is where I have seen the most beautiful landscapes in the tropics.

The cerrado is both open and bushy to the point of being dense, jungly with abundant and unique varieties of trees and birds. At times it resembles a garden of Eden, a primeval forest that has not seem man yet. Everywhere you see red termite mounds, wild grass and scattered endemic palms that break the tree line deciding to reach up higher.

Toucans, araras and other smaller birds feast on the different kinds of dates and tiny coconut-looking seeds they produce. The plants are striking, many twist around in still violence, a testimony to the six months without rain. They are resinous and fragrant and bear unique fruits that locals eat in popular dishes and ice cream. My beloved pequi would deserve a whole paragraph, but I know I am already overextending myself here, so I will leave it to your curiosity and to Wikipedia to find out more. Love pequi. Love love love it.

Was it a dream or did three blue and golden araras just fly over our heads?

We arrived by car from Brasilia the afternoon of the screening. On this occasion I had no worries as to how things would turn out: this is the city where I know the most people in the country and I had had so much help from everyone to promote the event and send out emails that I felt calm. Eudaldo Guimaraes deserves special praise and a huge thank you for all his help providing contact information for so many crucial people around the country, not just in Goiania, and for sending me many copies in different formats of the Portuguese subtitled version of the film. What a man, the kind you need if you were to begin to losing hope in humankind. Anyway, the screening went very smoothly, with a really pleasant vibe among the audience and the Q & A stretched itself into almost infinity. Yes, Brazilians really love to engage in the art of conversation, adore acquiring information, socializing and listening to their own beautiful voices and language. I myself felt somewhat awkward. The cinema was rather long and narrow and I must have suffered from flight attendant complex; it was also weird to talk in front of friends in a more formal manner and with a microphone. Still, it was a success and it sure feels sensational to get such a shower of kind words of praise and good intentions on behalf of the A Sea Change crew. All those men and women, all the kids that came to the screenings clearly see the flaws and want a better world, a society more respectful towards nature where the real priorities are put at the top of the list. I am not much of a believer in large groups of people and majorities, but stand fully convinced most people in the world want exactly that. That question Sven so emphatically asks in the film (man, after seeing it 20 times it seems to be engraved in my brain!) comes to my mind: "Why is it so hard?" I think we have to be louder, because we are more and we want the right thing.

As an anecdote, it was in Goiania where I for once had no clue what to respond to a question from the audience. Someone raised his hand and asked why o why Barbara Ettinger had chosen so and so font on the film, what the meaning behind it was. Boy did that catch me off guard. It is quite a testimony about how shameless ("cara de pau" in Portuguese, "caradura" in Spanish) I have become during these past five weeks: to be able to answer all possible questions about ocean acidity, global environmental policies, biodiversity or the future of the planet and only choke when when we finally stepped into the kingdom of typography.

A final note: the next morning I was very fortunate to attend a private screening of the film Oceans in its original hoarse and sexy French version. It is an absolute feast to the eyes, I strongly encourage you to go see it if you get the chance. This is the French site with the trailer:

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The last sunset, on the way to Sao Paulo

Medusa

Tue, 11 May 2010 09:49:00 GMT

By Daniel de la Calle

In Spanish we call jellyfish "medusas". Medusa was a beautiful young priestess in Athena's Temple. She was desired by many men until she lay together on the temple floor with Poseidon, the god of the sea, and an enraged Athena transformed her gorgeous hair into serpents and her face into the one of a monster. From then on, those that dared look at her turned into stone. What a torrid story.

The sea nettle exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the one that appears at the beginning of A Sea Change, was in my opinion more than eye catching. It made you revere nature.

We decide what is good and what is not and our minds adapt to that thought with frightening ease. Roses might be roses, but a plague is a pest is a bliss is a beast.
I once read that in New York City there is a rat for every person. I bet this is one of those exaggerations so good for shocking and scaring one another, a sentence that sticks in the head and is perfect to pepper dull chats with friends, to write in letters. As I am doing now.

Well, the ratio might be off, but it accurately depicts what we think and feel about rats (the pest) and about us. Nine Million, going strong, no plague in sight.

Until recently jellyfish were just seen as a beach goer's annoyance of little use. For some reason, though, along sections of the coastal Chinese waters, where pollution and overfishing has finished with all else, they are thriving (as in "good, good") and have become part of the diet. My guess is that we will soon follow suit, since eating seems to be a necessity here as well.
Last week in Spain the Portuguese Man o' War was on the news because many (a "plague"?) had been spotted along the Catalonian beaches, dragged by the currents away from their usual habitat in Atlantic waters. "The assassin jellyfish", said a cute reporter to the camera that brought her to my father's living room.

Sea nettles are very abundant on Monterey Bay. There is a man that has made a business out of scooping them out and sending them to private aquariums around the country, but in most people's eyes they are seen as, yes, a pest. Rumor has it that this is why their tank is gone.