When in Rio
By Daniel de la Calle Yesterday was the first of our two screenings at Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) museums during the RIO+20 summit. The brand new Environmental Museum (Museu do Meio Ambiente), located beside the Botanical Gardens has the glow of the brand new and still smells of paint, having been inaugurated just four days […]
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
By Daniel de la Calle Two news, one good and one bad. Then the ugly: THE GOOD: NASA claims to have developed an innovative method called OMEGA (Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae), that grows algae, cleans waste-water, captures carbon dioxide and ultimately generates biofuel without competing with agriculture for water, fertilizer or land. Wow. […]
Seeing Ghosts
By Daniel de la Calle Over the past few days you might have read about a Japanese “ghost ship”, a victim of last year’s tsunami, that just reached British Columbia. Experts expected most of the 20 million tons of debris from the natural disaster (about the size of California!) to arrive to the other side […]
Shepherd Dolphins
By Daniel de la Calle If we finished the month of May with our classic news, photo and video update I thought it is only fair to also begin June in the same fashion and color. Here they are, a few more news items as we slowly catch up with the latest on the oceans […]
End Of April News
By Daniel de la Calle »The Center for Biological Diversity has launched a new Endangered Oceans campaign in the US to save our sea life from the “unprecedented threat” of Ocean Acidification. The website is WWW.ENDANGEREDOCEANS.ORG and they want to call on “the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency to produce a national action […]
The Shape of Shells
By Daniel de la Calle Every shell protects the life of the creature that builds it and many of them continue to have a brief second existence as homes for hermit crabs or the base surface onto which algae and intrepid barnacles attach, but with time they inexorably break into sand. The ones I want […]
Chile, From Santiago to Valparaíso
By Daniel de la Calle After Puerto Montt, the second half of the series of screenings in Chile unfolded at universities in Santiago and Valparaíso. Although they shared the name, “Universidad Católica”, there was no connection between the two. We were in Santiago thanks to an invitation by Professor José M. Farina, showing the film […]
Summer News
By Daniel de la Calle Children in Rio de Janeiro were on vacation for the three Rio+20 summit days. Schools organized activities that involved the environment, sustainability, recycling, awareness; like this sculpture made out of used plastic bottles. ≈Science Magazine recently published an article on Ocean Acidification and the results coming from a new high […]
Winterless Spring
By Daniel de la Calle As seasons disappear and blend together, summer swallowing autumn and winter coming in glimpses and bursts, spring is still our queen of hope, a beginning, the unraveling of emotions and profusion: creativity. If you live in a city spring might make you lust green in the eyes and in mouth, […]
The Transit of Venus
By Daniel de la Calle From Maya Lin’s interview in our film to the recent NYC Pteropod exhibit by Cornelia Kavanagh that we wrote about in April, we have always enjoyed looking at nature, science or Ocean Acidification through an artistic filter. With that in mind we bring you now a sample plate made of […]
Fog
By Daniel de la Calle June 20th, with the RIO+20 summit here in Brazil. An agreement to be signed by the heads of governments and ministers was reached yesterday. It is raining, misty, clouds cover at times the peaks encircling Guanabara Bay. We have a screening downtown, in the Museu da República, at 6:30PM […]
“O Rio De Janeiro Continua Lindo”
By Daniel de la Calle After the visit to Southern and Central Chile in early May we are catching up with some of the latest news on Ocean Acidification while preparing as well for the +20 summit at the end of June in “lindo” Rio de Janeiro. Here are some news sifted through the web […]
Moncktons And Abrahams
By Daniel de la Calle Whether in our tangible daily slippers-and-ties lives or in our ever growing virtual internet browsing hours, we are often faced with opinions and discourses about the environment, about scientific work and data that are diametrically opposed to what we see and read everywhere. The environment has become a polarized political […]
Saint Nicholas Post
By Daniel de la Calle As advanced celebration of Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker tomorrow, here are a few links, photos, videos and news for you all, stuffed inside the shoes you are putting out tonight: •A team of scientists at Santa Cruz’s University of California have spent the past three years studying the submarine […]
Pizza Vs. Sushi
By Daniel de la Calle Researchers believe we should prepare ourselves for a world with more anchovies and less tuna: Various recent studies indicate a constant decrease in the number of marine predators; from sharks to tuna, our “lions and tigers of the seas” are becoming less and less abundant. If certain key elements […]
Weekend Material
By Daniel de la Calle ¤Marine Spacial Planning presents a rational approach to ocean management. The system tries to “allocate space in the ocean allowing compatible uses to coexist, separating incompatible ones, all while protecting the environment”. This video presentation with Philippe Cousteau explains things in more detail: “The ocean economy in the USA […]
The Tough Choice
By Daniel de la Calle Let me ask you this question: in the fight to save ecosystems and biodiversity around the globe, do you think we should begin targeting those areas and species with more chances of survival? Or should most funding resources still go to those areas that seem more fragile, more threatened by […]
Stupid Monkey
By Daniel de la Calle Having a trivial talk last fall with friends at a bar in Spain the conversation took a sudden turn to 9/11. To my shock everyone around was convinced that 1: those planes never hit the towers, or 2: they simply weren’t what caused the towers to collapse. Some dark, […]
To Save Corals
By Daniel de la Calle Right where you read these words now many others have stood, layer upon layer, in a frustrated attempt to write about corals and my dives at the Tayrona National Park back in June. They were not the problem, the source of trouble was the confusing mixture of sensations and […]
Shored Up, a Documentary in Progress
By Daniel de la Calle Ben Kalina, my friend, coworker and associate producer of A Sea Change at Niijii Films has been working on a new documentary of his own titled Shored Up. He is only a few months away from finishing and now needs our help to give it the last push, work […]
Screening in Medellín Tomorrow
By Daniel de la Calle On Thursday, June 23rd, we will be screening A Sea Change at the 3D cinema in Medellin’s Parque Explora. Prior to it I will be doing two days of interviews with local, regional and national media on Ocean Acidification and the documentary. So far we have had amazing media coverage […]
That Elusive Golden Past
By Daniel de la Calle The screening at Maloka and the countless interviews in Bogotá couldn’t have gone any better. Some sort of miracle, some magic must have turned my pumpkin backpack into the Ocean Acidification ambassador’s golden chariot (caught up in the worst traffic jams ever, though!) and I was welcomed like royalty, asked […]
Paradise Lost
By Daniel de la Calle In a world of persistent human interference and degradation we sometimes forget that, unbelievable as it now may seem, there still are a few barely touched paradises left in this ever-shrinking planet. While extreme northern and southern locations have inclement weather and remoteness as their accomplices, to imagine a […]
Taganga
By Daniel de la Calle While in Santa Marta, on Colombia’s eastern Caribbean coast, a old beggar in front of a supermarket told me he was a fisherman in a small neighboring village called Taganga. He explained that fishing was worse these days. The last few days he caught enough to eat, but was there […]
Sanctuary
By Daniel de la Calle Islands make for miniature universes, like snow globes: they transform a few miles distance into the crossing of a continent, produce insular dwarfism (where even the animals try to scale down and look only into the restricted cosmos) and remarkable adaptation from its species. I know what it […]