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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
More November News on Ocean Acidification and the Environment
By Daniel de la Calle This November I’m looking for traces of “Ocean Acidification”, not in water, but on the internet. I found the following news and links I thought could/would/should interest you. ¤ Britain sets up the world’s largest marine reserve. Since November 1st, the world’s largest fully protected marine reserve is located in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Visit to Anchorage
Three photos from the Sea Change crew’s visit to Alaska in the Summer of 2007: On the waterfront Claudia in the Chugach preserve At the home of activist Anna Davidson
National Ocean Month
President Bush has officially declared June to be National Oceans Month. So maybe it’s time to celebrate pteropods, some of the creatures most vulnerable to changes in ocean pH. They’re a kind of plankton. When you get up close and personal to pteropods they’re delicate, captivating animals, actually tiny molluscs and relatives of clams and […]