On Earth Day, April 22, PBS (America’s Public Broadcasting Service) will premiere a compelling new documentary, Climate Change – The Facts, presenting scientific evidence of the impact of global warming.

The program also examines possible solutions to the crisis, including the latest innovations, technology and actions individuals can take to prevent further damage. The one-hour special, hosted by natural historian Sir David Attenborough, premieres Wednesday, April 22, 2020 on PBS in the United States.

350.org’s Phil Aroneanu On How To Build An Environmental Movement In The Middle East

Climate Change – The Facts brings together leading climate scientists who explain what might happen if global warming increases 1.5 degrees. Experts examine the consequences of rising temperatures on ice sheets, fragile ecosystems, developing communities and extreme weather events. Personal accounts of California wildfires, extreme coastal flooding in Louisiana and increasing temperatures in Australia paint vivid pictures of these devastating effects.

“In the 20 years since I first started talking about the impact of climate change on our world, conditions have changed far faster than I ever imagined,” said Sir David Attenborough in Climate Change – The Facts.

“It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies. We’re running out of time, but there is still hope,” he says.

The program warns of potential tipping points that could trigger further catastrophic events, such as methane gas escaping from melting lakes in the arctic. While these scenarios are discouraging, the program also inspires individuals to take action and make a difference.

Experts offer hope that changes can be made in the next decade to reduce CO2 emissions and limit further damage. These include increased advocacy, advances in alternative energy technologies and innovative solutions to capture existing carbon dioxide.

Greta but no Gore?

Researchers from around the world provide global context to the crisis in the movie.

Featured experts include Dr. James Hansen, former director of NASA Goddard Institute for Science Studies; professor Naomi Oreskes, science historian at Harvard University; professor Michael Mann, climate scientist at Penn State University; Richard Black, director of the UK Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit; professor Andrew Shepherd, climate scientist at The University of Leeds, Sunita Narain, director general of India’s Centre for Science and Environment; and Greta Thunberg, Swedish teenage climate advocate and Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

The post David Attenborough’s PBS climate special features Greta, not Gore appeared first on Green Prophet.

Hollywood loves adventure stories, especially tales of humans struggling to survive in the wilderness. The Martian has something in common with The Life of Pi, 127 Hours, Castaway, Into the Wild and All is Lost.

But a much more direct comparison can be made to two much older films, Apollo 13 (1995) and Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964.)

Matt Damon plays botanist, terraformer and extreme survivalist Mark Watney in The Martian, a film directed by Ridley Scott and based on the best-selling novel by Andy Weir.

When Drew Goddard wrote the screenplay for The Martian,  he wisely chose to use the novel’s first-person journal format. This gives the reader a glimpse inside Mark Watney’s head, something we would miss if the film had used the third person point of view as in All is Lost. This also works well for the YouTube generation, already familiar with the wide-angle views of video blogging and what appears to be an authentic-looking GoPro camera strapped to Mark’s spacesuit.

Even with this adaptation, we know much less about the character’s backstory than we did in the novel. Matt Damon’s expressions and colorful language fill in some of the gaps.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars also uses this first-person narrative technique when Commander Kit Draper finds himself alone on Mars. He begins to record his experiences into an authentic-looking early 1960s tape recorder. Something about the film’s creepy etherphone music, the fire-colored sky and the sound of the clanging in the Martian wind gives this movie an atmosphere of loneliness beyond what we see in The Martian.

Kit explains, “All right, here’s another note for you boys in Survival…for you geniuses in Human Factors. A guy can lick the problems of heat, water, shelter, food. I know. I’ve done it. And here’s the hairiest problem of all – isolation, being alone. Boy, here’s where he’ll crack. Here’s where he’ll go under. I know, I know. I had great training, including two months in the isolation chamber. But when I was in that chamber, I knew I was coming out. I knew I’d be with people again. But up here on Mars…”

Is it OK for kids?

Except for an opening scene involving adult behavior at a party, Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 is good fun for kids of almost any age. There were no presidential visits to strip clubs that made The Right Stuff the wrong stuff for less LB-jaded eyes. The Martian also aims at a younger and broader audience than has been usual in recent years. Anyone sensitive to seeing people hurt, should probably go out for popcorn about ten minutes into the movie. But there is nothing that you wouldn’t see in an average TV medical show.

The movie withheld some of the book’s salty dialog. “Like”, “Dude” and “F***” may make up a growing proportion of the YouTube generation’s vocabulary, but their overuse can be distracting or offensive to some people. Jane Hawking was distracted by the profanity in The Theory of Everything even though their own children admitted to adding swear words to Stephen Hawking’s voice synthesizer. This movie could have easily aimed for a profitable 18+ rating, but that would have prevented it from inspiring a younger generation.

Is it as good as the book?

Matt Damon does a good job of translating some of the novels jokes and curses into something we can watch on the screen. He tones down the character’s abrasiveness enough to make him believable as a crew member on a long voyage. The movie does miss some of the novel’s humor and scientific detail, especially regarding biology, energy flow and maintaining a terraformed environment.

But it is fun and it adds some beautifully interesting visuals. It is amazing to see the color and landscape of Mars especially when we have photographic evidence that Mars actually does look like that. The movement of shadow and light in the scenes depicting the centrifugal artificial gravity of the Hermes ion drive spacecraft is a beautiful detail until someone starts trying to calculate if the spin rate and position of the sun are correct. The way weightlessness and artificial gravity are portrayed along with the physics of tethered bodies in microgravity is realistic enough to make us wonder whether this was filmed aboard the ISS or inside a CGI computer. The Martian was filmed in 3D but this wasn’t overused. In fact it was barely noticeable except for a few scenes inside the spacecraft.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars was filmed in technicolor at a time when electromechanical rocket fuel gauges, zippo lighter flames, models, strings and gelatin filters were pushing the bleeding edge of Hollywood special effects. The movie is apologetically campy with a supporting cast that includes monkey named Mona and Colonel Dan McReady, played by Adam West – aka Batman and a man named Friday.

The movie’s poster boldly claims, “This film is scientifically authentic… it is only one step ahead of present reality!” Well– maybe a couple of steps. But given that this was filmed before any probes had photographed Mars, the landscape and the color of the sky was realistic enough, Ignore the orbiting flameballs and flying saucers. Unlike sparkling Ceres and Technicolor Pluto, Mars isn’t so very different from what we imagined more than 50 years ago. Even the production of oxygen and water by heating rocks might be plausible now that we know a little more about the chemistry of Mars.

Is it believable?

As with the book, you’ll find endless online debates over the scientific accuracy of The Martian. The fact that people are complaining about the force of Martian winds and the color of Hydrogen flames gives a clue as to how little suspension of disbelief is required for those of us without PhDs in Astrophysics. Some have noted that it is probably safer to be a castaway on Mars than it is to be exposed to interstellar radiation while on board the spacecraft on its way home.

Apollo 13 was filmed in 1995 when CGI wasn’t nearly good enough to simulate weightlessness. So the more fun/nauseating comet comet option was necessary. The weightlessness was realistic because it was real. Director Ron Howard had the support of NASA engineers and astronauts and history to guide him in making a film about a story that didn’t need any Hollywood embellishment to be compelling. Other than the need to fit this storyinto a 2 hour and 20 minute, there was no reason to change anything and it probably the most accurate fictionalization of Apollo era spacecraft. But when Ron Howard talked to audience members after its first screening, many people told him that it was unrealistic. “There’s no way those guys would have survived.” Indeed, truth is much stranger than fiction.

The Martian faces the opposite problem. Many people left this movie assuming that it was non-fiction. That’s right, they believed that we already had a large ion-drive spaceship like Hermes and habitats on Mars. This film strays furthest from reality in its portrayal of our culture and politics. Humans first set foot on another world with Apollo 11. Only eight months later when Apollo 13 launched, the mission wasn’t even broadcast on the America’s TV networks until things started to go wrong. How will we maintain our cultural attention span when a single Mars mission could take as long as the entire Apollo space program?

NASA’s current budget is anemic, less than 1/50th the amount spent on the first bank bailout, less than what will be spent on mudslinging in America’s 2016 election campaign. The movie imagines a 1960s NASA transposed into the near future with no sign of the private space companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Hopefully we won’t have to repeat the failures portrayed in the movie in order to convince ourselves that global cooperation will be necessary to make this happen. Hopefully someone will be inspired by watching this movie. Maybe it will be you.

Photos are from the movie posters of Apollo 13, Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Martian.

The post The Martian stars the Wadi Rum Desert and every Sci-Fi book we love appeared first on Green Prophet.

The Life of Pi is a novel by Yann Martel, first published in 2001. It told the story of a boy whose family is shipwrecked while moving their private zoo’s animals from French India to Canada. It was thought to be unfilmable. In Ang Lee’s film adaptation, Piscine Molitor (aka Pi) , played by the delightful young Suraj Sharma, is the only human survivor of the shipwreck. No, I haven’t given the story away. The Life of Pi is open in Turkey, Jordan and other cinemas throughout the Mideast. It faces stiff competition from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit and Les Misérables, but if you’re looking for a beautiful movie with a thought-provoking environmental connection, consider the Life of Pi.

“We’re dying Richard Parker. I’m sorry.” A tearful Pi says this to a surviving castaway aboard his lifeboat. His companion is a Bengal tiger who was dubbed Richard Parker after a name mix up between a tiger its hunter. Like the novel it was based on, The Life of Pi takes us on a philosophical adventure. It explores the nature of reality, truth, religion and storytelling. Like the book it also contains some fascinating ecological metaphors. We can imagine his lifeboat as Noah’s ark or as a microcosm of our world. As a boy, Pi studied many religions and several of these hold that humans are stewards over our planet.

From Genesis 1:26:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, to be like us. Let them be masters over the fish in the ocean, the birds that fly, the livestock, everything that crawls on the earth, and over the earth itself!

This is exactly what Pi must do if he is to survive. But as an ethical vegetarian who shares a small boat with a top predator, he finds that this is not a simple task. His strategy mirrors that of human civilization, at first he distances himself from the beast. He builds a ramshackle raft and ties a long rope between it and the more seaworthy boat occupied by the tiger, keeping nature at a distance.

Later Pi makes fun of survival guides by inventing his own which details, “What to do if  you are a castaway alone on a lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger. Step one…”  He considers methods of taming the beast much as a circus trainer might. I don’t want to give too much away but the complex symbiotic relationship between man and nature is a recurring theme in both movie and book. Sustainability is expressed most clearly when it is a matter of survival.

There are some disturbing scenes for animal lovers and children. Most involve animals preying on other animals. Pi’s father uses a goat to teach his son a lesson about the true predator behind the seemingly soulful eyes of a tiger. Much of the blood and gore is off-screen and suggested rather than simulated. This makes The Life of Pi much more watchable than so many films whose directors believe special effects should appeal to the prurient interests of our violent civilization.

Ang Lee seemed to focus much of his special effects budget on creating realistic computer generated (CGI) animal to spare real animals from the horrors of Hollywood. It is mysterious why The Life of Pi didn’t get an official “No animals were harmed” label. Was it that Ang Lee did not feel the need to hire animal rights watchdogs for simulated animals? At least this film doesn’t seem to have triggered the animal cruelty controversy of The Hobbit whose filming location was associated with up to 27 animals deaths. The Life of Pi is proof that it is possible to make a movie about a Bengal tiger without disturbing any of the 1850 remaining in the world.

Ang Lee couldn’t film everything in Yann Martel’s novel but David Magee well-crafted screenplay didn’t leave any gaping holes. Nor did it sprawl out and dilute the book as The Hobbit seems to have. This movie did add something that only the film-making art form can provide. The Life of Pi is a visually beautiful movie that requires neither 3D nor 48 FPS high frame rate (HFR) to enjoy.

This movie’s CGI has finally bridged the so-called uncanny valley which made the simulated life in Jurassic park and Polar Express disturbingly surreal. If real animals were used in this movie it isn’t possible to discern them from their simulations. There are scenes where artistic license was used and the artist chose beauty, poetry and magic over absolute realism or ‘truth’ but if you’ve read the book you’ll understand that that too is what it’s all about.

I have seen pods of dolphins but I wouldn’t have believed they ever reached the numbers portrayed here until I saw the disturbing true-life documentary, The Cove. I have seen luminescent undersea life and can’t prove that they wouldn’t appear as bright in the middle of the lonesome Pacific. Would gazing into the eye of a starving tiger reveal the mysteries of  the world’s religions? I don’t think any of us can say.

Pi promises that his story will make you believe in God. I can’t promise that, but it may reveal the truth that even in this world of science and technology, satellite navigation, and 24-hour digital news, we don’t know everything. Admitting that is a good start. And if you haven’t already read the book, you should. The movie Life of Pi was excellent but the book was even better.

Image of Bengal tiger via shutterstock

The post The Life of Pi Film is a Visual Poem About Humans and Nature appeared first on Green Prophet.

This year’s Abu Dhabi film festival featured two green-themed films aimed at raising awareness of a decidedly un-Hollywood subject: global waste management. Both movies, Trashed and Polluting Paradise, were sponsored by sustainable innovations company Masdar. Trashed follows British actor Jeremy Irons as he globe-trots from Lebanon to Iceland to some of the most visually arresting and disturbing scenes of garbage devastation. Exquisite cinematography and thought-provoking interviews place a frightening scale on our reckless trash generation.  Peek at the path our garbage takes once it leaves our trash bins. Director Candida Brady’s global perspective on pollution is a powerful reminder of our shared responsibility.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/ctf8CWgAQ5g[/youtube]

Turkish-German director Fatih Akın’s documentary on landfills is set in Çamburnu, a mountain village on the Black Sea coast where villagers have lived for centuries cultivating tea and fishing.  The festival website describes Polluting Paradise as shining a “spotlight on a devastating hazard that threatens this idyllic environment: the decision by the Turkish government, made ten years ago, to establish the region’s largest garbage landfill on the outskirts of the town.”

The film tracks transformation of once-lush plantations into barren desert with polluted air, contaminated groundwater, and residual waste flowing to the sea. Akın’s film focuses on villager activism as they protest against policymakers and strive to stem the environmental degradation.

“The film is about human stupidity,” Faith Akın says, “(and) about civil courage.”

[youtube]http://youtu.be/5z2s_klZkFg[/youtube]

Both films (with screeners above) challenge our passivity regarding our constant contribution to the world waste stream. By raising awareness, these movies provide an appropriate opening act for next January’s Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week.

That event will attract 30,000 participants from 150 countries to for  the largest gathering on sustainability in the history of the Middle East.

The post Green Abu Dhabi Film Festival Raises Ecological Awareness appeared first on Green Prophet.

This tragic tale was panned by some critics for being too apocalyptic and probably inappropriate for children. The 2012 movie loosely based on The Lorax is… well, it’s difficult to know where to begin. So let’s look back at the book and I’ll try to explain why I believe its message will resonate long after the movie is a forgotten tuft of Hollywood fluff.

The original Lorax

The message of the original Lorax was stark. Perhaps Dr. Seuss did stray into the kind of dystopian environmentalism which triggers helplessness at least as often as it inspires activism. But his message is surprisingly relevant to the problems of our time. Forests, minerals, oil, water and fisheries are being consumed much faster than nature can replace them. Thousand year old ecosystems and million year old resource deposits are being converted into a few months profit, leaving environmental and economic wastelands.

When The Lorax was first published in 1971, the Pacific paradise of Nauru was a phosphate mining rentier state with the highest per-capita wealth in the world.  Its citizens hadn’t yet relived the fictional Once Ler’s mistake by having their homeland mined from beneath their feet. In 1971 ocean cod catch was peaking at 800,000 tons per year.

Two decades later it would collapse to less than 1/10th of this. Deforestation was also proceeding at a breakneck pace as the world fell below one acre of healthy forest per person. Minamata Bay was a distant memory. Love Canal, Times Beach, Bhopal, Chernobyl and numerous oil spills from the Mideast to the arctic were in the unimaginable future. In light of all that has happened since The Lorax was published, I believe it undersold the dangers of rampant resource commercialization.

The movie: FAIL

I really wanted to like The Lorax movie. Its greatest failing is that it squanders the limited resource of an audience’s attention span. Hollywood directors understand that their art can teach, persuade and inspire. This power must be used wisely. For example, Finding Nemo (2003) was a beautiful film which tried to teach us that it is wrong to poach fish from coral reefs. Instead, it convinced hundreds of children to flush tropical fish down their toilets. The failings in The Lorax (2012) aren’t coherent enough to lead to a mass flushing, but you’ll wish the editor had left a few scenes on his compost heap.

The movie begins in sterile Thneedville where even the trees are made of plastic and where a businessman named O’Hare profits from selling bottled air. The protagonist Ted (Zac Efron) is inspired to seek trees not because he has any intrinsic interest in nature, but because his heartthrob Audrey (Taylor Swift), shows a love for trees through her art. Both Granny (Betty White) and the mysterious Once-Ler remember trees, but neither the characters nor the writers seem to have the vaguest interest in actual nature. Ted is confined to a big-wheeled motorcycle throughout movie. Have animators forgotten how to make their characters walk?

The graphics and special effects were jarring, manic, flat and occasionally beautiful. I’m thankful that I didn’t see this movie in 3D, but the waterfall scene was made for this hideous format. Much of the rest of the movie barely crawled above one dimension. I can only hope that whoever dubs this into Middle Eastern languages will correct the haphazard casting.

Danny DeVito is the voice of the Lorax, Ed Helms is the Once-Ler and Rob Riggle is Mr. O’Hare.  O’Hare bears a passing resemblance to a young Danny DeVito, so one wonders if this was a last minute voice swap. My eight-year-old daughter wondered why O’Hare is in the movie at all. By introducing this villain, the writers distance the audience from any responsibility in causing the smogulous smoke.

Like a sweet and empty soft drink ad

The O’Hare subplot attacked the commercialization of free natural resources such as water and air. Such commercialization is one of my pet peeves, so here the movie was preaching to the converted. But this preaching was another part of the problem.  In an interview with Reading Rockets, Theodore Seuss Geisel’s widow Audrey said that every Dr. Seuss book contained a message and that Theodore would often ask if he was preaching too much. Occasionally he was, but  each message was wrapped inside a book full of fun fantasy art and sing-song rhymes.

By contrast, the 2012 movie only used a few lines of Seuss’s fun sing-song poetry and his art took a back-seat to typical 3D computer animation. The bad soundtrack pasted over this muddled morass of artificially sweetened messages did nothing to dampen the feeling of being buried in preachiness. The movie’s pale sarcasm completely misses the mark and the “cute” singing fish and barbaloots couldn’t begin to compensate for this weak screenplay. Only the final song and dance, “Let it Grow” was somewhat redeeming, resembling the 1970s soft drink ad, “I’d Like to Teach the World To Sing.”

That about sums it up, as sweet and empty as a 1970s soft drink ad. But don’t blame the writers, director, producers and actors for the sad state of this film. This is just what happens when a movie with an anti-commercialization message is churned out of the Hollywood commercialization empire.

And unless someone cares a whole awful lot, this isn’t going to get any better, it’s not. So my advice to you is please skip this movie and the plastic merchandise too.

The Lorax (1971 book) *****
The Lorax (2012 film) *

(The book is always better than the movie, isn’t it?)

More Movie Reviews:
Free Movie: First Earth – Uncompromising Earth Architecture
A Camel Film With Big Heart – Collective Moments of Madness

Exploring Human Apathy in the Age of Stupid

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