Heinz Awards 2010
By Daniel de la Calle In a case of unprecedented coincidence, two of this year’s Heinz Awards winners are very closely related to A Sea Change and Ocean Acidification. Richard Feely, one of our favorite NOAA scientists, and Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker journalist that wrote the article “The Darkening Sea” that inspired the film […]
World Champions
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 […]
South of Africa
A couple weeks ago we had several screenings at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town, South Africa. Thanks to the efforts from the Sustainable Seas Trust, Andreas Spath with his While You Were Sleeping team, and Tessa Hempson from the University of Cape Town it was a great success that even took them by surprise. […]
The Price of Flying High
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 […]
Reading on the Beach
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 […]
Summer Winds
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 […]
Into the Cerrado
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 […]
Cupuaçu and Air Conditioning
By Daniel de la Calle Iraquara is a village in a mountainous area called Chapada Diamantina, a place of great natural beauty, full of caves and amazing rock formations. To get there we left Salvador’s airport through a long and dense giant bamboo tunnel, managed to squeeze out of the city’s chaotic rush hour to […]
Anthropocentric Geoengineering!
By Daniel de la Calle If there is one possible scenario that frightens me more than our current lack of action to stop the countless maladies we are inflicting upon the planet it is this very tempting flight forward casino gamble of geoengineering. Just two unoriginal thoughts I want to throw out there: No scientist […]
Dancing the Forro
By Daniel de la Calle The first couple screenings in Rio have been the hardest to set up. I had little time to prepare them, to meet the people that pull the strings six thousand miles away. The amount of trust and generosity people I had only met via email have displayed has been so […]
Doc in Río
By Daniel de la Calle Dear blog readers, During the next forty some days I will be in Brazil, screening the film around cities and representing the A Sea Change crew at an environmental film festival called FASAI, in the state of Bahía. I will do my best to deliver updates of how things go […]
Understanding Hens
By Daniel de la Calle Brazilians do not like Brasilia, Brasilienses do. I guess it must be the LA of the Southern Hemisphere. Brasilia was conceived after a dream, but some think of it as a vision, even see it as a prophecy. In the mid 18th century some Salesian priest in Italy (!) prophesied […]
Audience Award
Earlier this week A Sea Change won the Best World Documentary Audience Award at the Sedona International Film Festival. Ever since the FICA Film Festival in Brazil in June of 2009 our documentary has won numerous prizes, but I am sure that this one is particularly meaningful for Barbara Ettinger and Sven Huseby; we are […]
Lazaro Ramos
By Daniel de la Calle One of the things that worry me the most when I do the screenings or talk to people here in Brazil is that it feels I am preaching amongst believers. The vast majority of Brazilians that do not know about Ocean Acidification, the ones that do not care about or […]
Sao Paulo de Janeiro
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 […]
Webcombing
By Daniel de la Calle I did a little webcombing this afternoon and found some news that could interest you, whoever you are, the reader of this blog. These are the fruits of that labor: 1 NOAA is proposing to establish a research area in Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary. Their idea is to designate an […]
10 Good News, 10
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 […]
Back in Brazil
By Daniel de la Calle The sand in Copacabana is light blond and fine from the relentless beating of the Atlantic. A wall of tall soulless buildings demarcates the long wide beach, describing a perfect gentle curve, like eyelashes to an eye. It takes very little to forget that something was something else not long […]
Sea Level Rise, Ocean Warming and Ocean Acidification
By Daniel de la Calle If you can spare 18 minutes, please watch this video of a conference about the oceans delivered by Professor Rob Dunbar, of Stanford University. I believe it was held in the Galapagos Islands not long ago. Professor Dunbar talks about sea level rise, ocean warming and about what “frightens [him] […]
Back to Brazil, back to FICA
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 […]