The Highest High, The Lowest Low
By Daniel de la Calle Today is World Water Day. All kinds of events must be taking place around the planet with the spotlight on water, on its current state and its importance to us living creatures. Some of them will surely point out our dependency on good water and the paradoxical way we treat […]
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, […]
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 […]
News, Links and Videos
By Daniel de la Calle Some news on Ocean Acidification from the past few weeks: ¤ NOAA has released a new page on Ocean Acidification that delivers general information on the topic and describes the work that the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration is carrying out. A couple links to the content and nice […]
The Sea of Huge Breams
By Daniel de la Calle When we are a small person, the novelty of life and language combined with our imagination sometimes makes us come to the most hilarious and endearing words and conclusions. My daughter is bilingual and I have to confess that oftentimes I delay correcting some of her funny Spanglish words to […]
An Alternative Soundtrack
By Daniel de la Calle On last Wednesday’s post I forgot to mention the following astounding coincidence on the BBC’s “The End of the Oceans?” documentary: just as David Attenborough talks about Ocean Acidification Philip Glass’ Closing is played, a theme that is part of the A Sea Change soundtrack. Isn’t that something? This led […]
Angry Denials
By Daniel de la Calle The internet, that jungle out there. If you have looked for articles about ocean acidification or any of the uncountable environmental problems we are facing I am certain you have already stumbled upon a website or personal blog where it is all refuted and mocked, most times with a shockingly […]
News: What Blogs Are For
By Daniel de la Calle Here is the classic list of web finds you have seen right here in the past. This week I dug out two great videos, info about a workshop in China, a job offer, some news and a literary reference, clearly enough to enhance your weekend experience. Echinoderms will be fine. […]
Artistic License
By Daniel de la Calle Creative work filters life, the natural world, history, words, even our ambiguous, volatile human emotions through the distorted prism of the artist’s senses. When done with genius this does the magic of shedding a certain light and revelation to that reality; it somehow touches us more profoundly and brings us […]
That Cranky Old Man
By Daniel de la Calle A few years from now I will inevitably become an insufferable cranky old man. I am actually almost there now: On World Water Day last week I turned my forgotten TV set on, the one that comes back to life during cycling season, and watched the 3 p.m. news. […]
“The Death of the Oceans?”
By Daniel de la Calle Same day the Census For Marine Life made public the results of those ten years of research (read October 16th blog post) the BBC broadcast a new documentary narrated by David Attenborough and titled “The Death of the Oceans?”. The hour long film shows the outstanding marine footage we have […]
Enough of the “evil twin”
By Daniel de la Calle They might partly share its origin, but Ocean Acidification is not the “evil twin” of Global Warming. They operate in quite a different fashion and their effects upon the planet, both present and future, even contrasting at times. Most importantly though, this “evil twin” business indirectly implies that there is […]
Oceanic News
By Daniel de la Calle I just spent five hours flying over the Atlantic and as a tribute to it have decided to list five nuggets of information about our oceans, those two thirds of Earth that we normally see as highways, supermarkets, dumpsters, bounties of riches or playgrounds, but are seldom given the importance […]
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 […]
THE CENSUS OF MARINE LIFE
By Daniel de la Calle This month the Census of Marine Life (COML) project announced the results of their mammoth work since the year 2000, one of the biggest collaborations in the history of science with 2,700 researchers from 80 countries embarked in a total of 540 logged ocean expeditions. The total cost of the […]
On Drowning
By Daniel de la Calle I was 9 years old in 1981 when a local diver submerged a marble image of the Virgin of Carmen on the beach in front of my house as a sign of gratitude for a personal favor or miracle granted. At the time the event barely made the news, but […]
When You Reach Maturity
By Daniel de la Calle A couple blog entries ago I mentioned A Sea Change has been present so far at more than fifty film festivals worldwide. We have a saying in Spanish that goes: “life is but a sigh”, partly to show our tragic sense of life, but mainly to stress its brevity. The […]
THE END OF OCEAN ACIDIFICATION (Our contribution to April Fools Day)
By Daniel de la Calle This is probably the most exciting and positive news of my life. Reading The London Times this morning I could hardly hold the tears, tears of joy and relief for once. While I am aware there are plenty other hazards and pending threats to the environment and that this is […]
Win the A SEA CHANGE DVD!
By Daniel de la Calle I had not heard about Ocean Acidification until I began working for Niijii Films on A Sea Change. The research, the people we talked to, experts we interviewed, places we saw have affected me deeply. If I had to describe it in a nutshell I would highlight two aspects: I […]
Giant Waves and Broken Bones
By Daniel de la Calle I was ready to put up this morning a new blog post with Ocean Acidification information found on the internet when I turned the radio on, my morning coffee in hand, and was swept by the news of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami off the Pacific coast of Japan. […]
Monday’s Smorgasbord
By Daniel de la Calle Every few weeks there is a new one, March was not going to be an exception. Here you go, the list of A Sea Change news, Ocean Acidification videos and assorted internet links. ¤¤ Barbara and Sven spent this past month on the West Coast attending screenings, meeting people, […]
Pearls in Vinegar
By Daniel de la Calle I am a very slow museum visitor. Last month I went to the Louvre for a couple of hours on three consecutive days and did not even make it through the marvelous Egyptian wing. When I was a kid, one of the first stories that fascinated me about ancient Egypt […]
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. […]