Blog Post Comments Worth Being Blog Posts
By Hilary, Colin and Daniel de la Calle On my last post I wrote about a University of Florida Research that might have solved “the mystery of where old carbon was stored during the last glacial period”, the answer being that it “ended up in the icy waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.” I […]
Please welcome: the amazing octopus
By Daniel de la Calle During my first year of college I studied Law. I did not know what to do and my father was convinced it suited me, so between nothing and Law, Law it was. For two semesters the only lectures that caught my attention were about Roman Law. Not only was the […]
Books, Projects and PhDs
By Daniel de la Calle “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed; Second, it is violently opposed; and Third, it is accepted as self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer ¤The European Union is launching this April a new three-year project called Mediterranean Sea Acidification in a changing climate (MedSeA). Its goal is to […]
Pteropod inspired art
Phyllis Lam is a biology student at the University of Rochester. After recently watching A Sea Change in Dr. Terry Platt’s Biology class she wrote to Barbara Ettinger, our director, to thank her for the meaningful work the film is doing. She said: “I am shocked and concerned about the serious problem of ocean acidification. Global […]
Brazil, Lessons in Coexistence and Incongruence
By Daniel de la Calle What you see below is Brazil: While going through some of the pictures I took here I was struck by the realization that exactly what makes this country so fascinating is what turns it so easy to hate, impossible not to love, so tricky to fully grasp. Everything happens together, […]
Screening at the Oil Company
By Daniel de la Calle from Ipanema Beach, Brazil This past Friday the 28th A Sea Change screened at the CENPES center in Rio de Janeiro. It is a massive 25 acre complex that employs over 1,500 biologists, chemists, marine ecologists and engineers working in interdisciplinary groups at the Petrobras headquarters, one of the leading […]
Coevolution
By Daniel de la Calle I am in Paris now, just for a couple weeks, and my visit has coincided with a fantastic documentary film festival called Pariscience. From medicine to biology, botany to meteorology, computer or space science, the selection encompasses an impressively broad range of fields of study and research. For example, yesterday […]
Some News, Some Information
By Daniel de la Calle Our poor blog has remained silent for over two weeks. I do not know how to make excuses sound like explanations, so my excuses are that I was busy showing Barbara Ettinger (our director) and Sven Huseby (our protagonist) my side of the world and after their departure I suffered […]
Congrats Toby!!!
Toby Shimin’s last film, BUCK, has just been given the Sundance Audience Award for Best Documentary. Toby was the editor of A Sea Change and all of Barbara Ettinger’s previous films. Congratulations, Toby! Buck is directed by Cindy Meehl, here’s a link to Sundance’s announcement. And a link to an article about the film. Go […]
Talking About The Ocean To People That Have Never Seen It
By Daniel de la Calle I apologize for not having posted any entries since last year. As a little kid I loved the whole early January game of not-having-seen, not-having-done, not-having-eaten or drank something “since LAST YEAR”. In this case, though, it really feels like an unfairly long time. I happen to be in Brazil […]
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 […]
Medusa
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 […]
Thoughts on our oceans from Málaga, Spain
By Daniel de la Calle Back in the early 80s, when I was a kid, I loved going to the harbor in my hometown to watch locals fishing from the pier. The most fascinating technique was how cuttle fish was caught. Fishermen would have a live female in a bucket, carefully tie it up with […]
Beauty In Tragedy
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 […]
Ocean Acidification Breaks the Surface
Today is Ocean Day at COP-15. The day began with a bang with a major piece from the BBC quoting the UK’s Environmental Minister, Hilary Benn, regarding the importance of ocean acidification. Barbara and I attended panel presentations at the European Environmental Agency (EEA) here in Copenhagen. Speaker after speaker spoke about the changes […]
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 […]
Bicycle Interview
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 […]
One Victory for our Oceans: The EPA will Focus on Ocean Acidification
Check out this new article from the Christian Science Monitor about the EPA’s decision to help states study and address the increasing acidity of their waters. This will be another use of the powerful Clean Water Act, and possibly a landmark event in bringing attention to ocean acidification. This important step has been brought to […]
We Need Your Help!
We’ve just received word from Netflix that A Sea Change is officially a ‘saved’ film in their terminology. This means that they’re waiting to see how many people put it in their queue before they decide if they’ll carry it. With over 50 film festivals worldwide, a national broadcast on Planet Green and hundreds of […]
Convincing the Skeptics with Science and Film
We have just dragged our weary bodies back from a long, but productive day. The screening at the Danish Film Institute was excellent, with the Huffington Post and Carbon War Room in attendance, along with other engaged parties. We remain endebted to the scientists who continue to participate in the Q&A after the film – […]
Our COP-15 Action Plan – Upcoming Weekend Events
Here is our schedule of events for the next few days, from today Friday December 11 through to Monday December 14, designated as Ocean Day at the COP-15. Today we have plenty to do–organize an upcoming press conference for Barbara and Sven at the Klimaforum, hand out our postcards with the events on the back, […]
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 […]
Crazy Glue
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 […]
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 […]
Where will the U.S. be?
The impression we have of COP-15 is that we are two of 50,000 people plus working steadily to focus this process towards a similar goal, lowering global CO2 concentrations. There are several critical fault lines, but the largest is still, “Where is the US going to be by the end of next week?” -Sven