#130) A Compelling Student Video from Belize to Reverse Your Thoughts on Shrimp Farming
May 12th, 2011
One small step for shrimp, one giant leap (perhaps?) for shrimpkind.
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If you’re like me and have the blanket (largely uninformed) opinion that shrimp farming has to be disastrous, then you’ll hopefully find the lifelong work of Linda Thornton to be intriguing. She is profiled in this nice video produced by the Pace University students of uber-blogger Andy Revkin — a result of their spring expedition to Belize. Contrary to popular opinion, she makes the case that there are sustainable ways to farm shrimp. Check it out!
Penguin Boy keeps getting creepier each year.
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Haven’t seen the Penguin Boy video? Not likely to? Not your cup of tea? That’s okay, he’s on Friendster.
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It’s been about five years since we did this little video with Brian Clark, then a member of the Groundlings Improv Comedy Theater, and eventually the co-star of my movie, “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy.” It became an instant classic with a number of aquariums where they use it in their training of guides as a sort of, “Don’t be like this dude,” example. We’ve had it on our Shifting Baselines website over the years, but recently were contacted by the good folks at Mote Marine Lab asking if we could post it in a little higher quality.
Back when we first released it, a friend of mine working at a scientific organization told me it became an immediate hit with the secretaries. One of them said whenever she had a bad day, all she had to do was watch “Penguin Boy,” and he would cheer her up.
There’s widespread agreement that the communication of climate change issues to the general public has not gone well. In fact, the entire climate movement was declared a failure last summer as the final extant piece of climate legislation flamed out. The problem is the baseline has been shifted on environmentalism in general. It was once a movement characterized by COOPERATION. Today it is based on COMPETITION. I would speak out against Matt Nisbet’s recent “Climate Shift,” report if I thought the conclusions sounded way off the mark. They don’t.
“Let’s not bicker over who over-spent whom.” It’s a movement with poor leadership — whadya expect.
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#127) “King Corn” Review: I’m a little late, but it’s excellent
April 21st, 2011
This is my idea of a well-made documentary.
A REALLY WELL MADE FILM. The quote on the poster of “Enormously Entertaining!” is hype. I wouldn’t say that. I’d just say it is extremely well-made — so much that it didn’t need to be enormously entertaining.
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#126) The Nerd Loopty-doo
April 18th, 2011
How would you expect academics to respond to the suggestion to be less academic?
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Last week Andy Revkin posted this Skype interview with me on his NY Times blog Dot Earth.
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Andy Revkin further explored my “Nerd Loop” essay which spawned a whole bunch of blog discussions from Keith Kloor’s communications oriented discussion titled, “The Painful Truth,” to the climate skeptic blog, Climate Audit, where their title is, “The Smug Loop.” It’s funny how many of the comments equate the idea of improving communication with “propaganda.” You’d think they would be supportive of any efforts (on either side) to make the subject less boring to the general public. One thing is clear, polls show a declining interest in climate lately.
#125) Wow! The Norwegian Students Really, Really GOT IT!
April 11th, 2011
Talk about lighting a fire. Take a look at the video the Norwegian students in our January workshop have produced.
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Mission Totally Accomplished!
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In January I spent twelve jet lagged/flu virus-clouded days in Tromso, Norway running one of my three-day intensive videomaking workshops. It was the best one ever. We viewed the final cuts of the videos on my last full day there. I left the next morning, then the following night the students showed them to an audience of several hundred at the closing night festivities of the Arctic Frontiers Conference.
What ensued was an avalanche of super-psyched emails as the students decided they wanted to keep the vibe going. They got the university to give them some funds to make a video to promote their graduate program. They sent me a few drafts of the script. I gave some input. And here it is. And it ROCKS!
THIS is the kind of science filmmaking I’m talking about. Way to go Norwegians! You’ve made me proud of my heritage (my paternal grandfather emigrated to the U.S. from somewhere around Oslo).
Mass communication is not a science. How many times do I have to say this? The more you think it is — or even let yourself talk about the science side of it without allocating EQUAL energy to the art side of it, the more you are doomed to take it deeper into the hole of boredom and irrelevance. Such is the state of climate science communication by the large science and environmental organizations who have bought into the magic bullet of metrics and messaging.
AND FURTHERMORE … eh, hem (a colleague at NASA just pointed this out to me) … look at this quote: “Recent advances in behavioral and decision science also tell us that emotion is an integral part of our thinking, perceptions, and behavior, and can be essential for making well-judged decisions.”
“RECENT ADVANCES”??? Social scientists think this is some sort of recent breakthrough — that humans are not robots? The quote comes from a paper in the first volume of the new Nature Climate journal. As my colleague said, “What rock did these guys crawl out from under? Give me a break all you social scientists and quit living up to your stereotype.”
Honestly.
#123) Malibu Lagoon: How to Combat Environmental Disinformation
March 25th, 2011
“Total Tactics” is something you can see at work in the efforts to fend off the disinformation campaign assembled around the Malibu Lagoon Restoration Project. Which is cool.
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A 5 MINUTE VIDEO with environmental senior statesman and Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Mark Dowie. He talks about the importance of “total tactics,” which is something every environmental activist should know well.
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#122) The Battle over “the facts” at Malibu Lagoon
March 17th, 2011
Given they have Pamela Anderson on their team, the issue almost seems laughable. But it’s not really that funny when you consider the 10 years of hard work and diligence by the environmental community around Malibu, California that is now teetering on the edge of collapse as a group of opponents attempt to stage a last minute attack. The environmental side has failed to engage in any sort of mass communication until now — in large part because they assumed the community was with them. So I convinced them to support me in making a short video that addresses the 5 major distortions of the facts that have been occurring.
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The 5 minute video I directed to help convey the basic facts about the Malibu Lagoon Restoration project which has been increasingly distorted by local interests.
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We’ve finally posted to Youtube a video I made nearly 20 years ago that features three women scientists who are still amazingly contemporary in what they have to say (which is maybe not entirely a great thing for women in science).
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PART I: Ignore the parts with me (I was just learning how to make videos) — just get to where they are talking — the three of them are really great. The video is a discussion with the late Ruth Turner, Cindy Van Dover, and Colleen Cavanaugh — all women scientists who work in the deep sea submersible R.V. Alvin.
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