Encounters at the End of the World

Diver under the Antarctic Ice

Paul and I watched this fantastic documentary film last night. I expected a ho-hum, “good-for-you” learning experience. Not so with Werner Herzog! It is a fascinating exploration of the strange creatures, including the humans, who live in this world of ice and extreme solitude.

Among the highlights: divers under the ice, scientists scaling the crater of a volcano into a magma lake, a deranged penguin running into the endless void.

Haunting, eerie, and mind-blowing.

February Reading

Michael Pollan - The Omnivore's Dilemma

Our next book is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Pollan traces four different food sources: industrial agriculture, large-scale organic, small-scale organic, and hunter-gatherer. I started it last night and couldn’t put it down.  The book made me feel quite virtuous for limiting my kids’ soda consumption when they were little. It’s amazing, and disturbing, how closely tied our food production is to petroleum.

One of the difficulties with books like this is that the changes necessary to address the problems outlined require seemingly massive restructuring of the American food system. My husband Paul’s home-grown tomatoes are a start, I guess.

Films of 2008

My favorites:

1. Frozen River
2. Happy Go Lucky
3. Trouble the Water
4. Slumdog Millionaire (sorry Brit)
5. Across the Universe (on DVD)

Why did I love these films? They were unusual, had that quality of “strangeness”* that sets a work of art apart from the merely “extremely well done.”

*Harold Bloom’s term/The Western Canon. Despite many disagreements with Bloom’s argument, I can adopt “strangeness” wholeheartedly.

More on Coral Reefs

From the BBC. Pretty pictures.

Porites coral on the Great Barrier Reef

Externalized costs.

Dr Glenn De’ath and colleagues investigated 328 colonies of massive Porites corals, from 69 locations…. By looking at the coral skeletons, they determined that calcification – or the deposit of calcium carbonate – has declined by 13.3% throughout the Great Barrier Reef since 1990.

Such a decline is unprecedented in at least the past 400 years, they write.

Why

Speaking of The Way We Live Now, here’s an interesting essay from Chris Hedges — author of the indispensible War is a Force that Gives us Meaning.

He quotes the documentary The Corporation:

A corporation that attempts to engage in social responsibility, that tries to pay workers a decent wage with benefits, that invests its profits to protect the environment and limit pollution, that gives consumers fair deals, can be sued by shareholders. Robert Monks, the investment manager, says in the film: “The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. There isn’t any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it was designed.” Ray Anderson, the CEO of Interface Corp., the world’s largest commercial carpet manufacturer, calls the corporation a “present day instrument of destruction” because of its compulsion to “externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize.”

“The notion that we can take and take and take and take, waste and waste, without consequences, is driving the biosphere to destruction,” Anderson says.

The ease of externalizing of costs worries me. And the difficulty of opposing that externalization — recently seen in the debates over energy, the killing of coral reefs, the debate over universal health care. I don’t see how we get past this impasse. If Obama can do that, his will truly be a transformational presidency.

Carbon Emissions

Re: my last post on the demise of coral reefs, partly due to global warming and partly to carbon dioxide.

In today’s New York Times, there’s an article on differences within the upcoming Obama administration on restriction on carbon emissions. Basically it’s Summers vs. Browner (looser restrictions vs. strict ones). Summers’ argument, during the Clinton administration, was that aggressive action to reduce carbon emissions might have a negative economic effect.

I hope that Browner wins this time around. Our oceans, our coral reefs, and, perhaps, life as we know it, cannot withstand the great increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Tipping Point

The Great Barrier Reef

Sad news:

Coral decline warns of ocean changes: Australian scientists

SYDNEY (AFP) — A sharp slowdown in coral growth on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef since 1990 is a warning sign that precipitous changes in the world’s oceans may be imminent, scientists said Friday.

You can read more at these links: Green Car Congress and EPOCA (European Congress on Ocean Acidification) blog. Here’s an alarming snippet from EPOCA:

But on the climate vulnerable Great Barrier Reef, researchers have been surprised to discover that a tipping point for coral growth has already been reached.

In the journal Science this morning they reveal that it was reached 18 years ago, as Nonee Walsh reports.

An abstract of the article by De’ath, Lough, and Fabricius appears in Science .

The Way We Live Now

The Way We Live Now

This is appropriate reading what with the current events on Wall Street. We’ll discuss it in mid-January. Should be interesting, and not without controversy.

Happy New Year!

Another Voyage to India

Though I’ve been too busy to post recently, the book club met twice. They loved Indian Summer, and also loved the book we read for June: Sarah Gruen’s Water for Elephants.

Next up, a return to India for Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. It’s loosely patterned after the 1001 Nights, with a husband telling stories to his wife, and deals with the partition of India, which began on midnight August 15, 1947. Hence, the title. Two babies, one a wealthy Muslim, the other a poor Hindu, both born at that fatal hour, are switched in the hospital as raised by each other’s parents, leading to all sorts of fantastic intrigues, woes, and magical events. Especially after one discovers that all of the 1001 babies born at the moment of partition have special powers.