RI Selects: Beautiful Film, Ugly Predicament
Friday, February 26 @ 7 p.m
“We have a 10-15 year window to make some noise,” says Columbia County resident Sven Huseby. “I would love to see the term ‘ocean acidification’ become part of the political discourse.”
According to the documentary Huseby appears in and co-produced and that his wife Barbara Ettinger directed, A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish, the familiar global warming horror story is actually even more horrific than we’ve been led to believe. For all we hear about melting icecaps and rising sea levels, until now, few of us have known of the disastrous consequences that carbon emissions have on ocean water’s chemistry and the impact that will ultimately have on marine life.
When this film debuted to an unprecedented SRO audience at the Smithsonian Institution, The Washington Post said that it, “looks terrific, with lots of breathtaking footage of the natural world, from the tiniest pteropod (the fluttery, planktonic sea snail that is most threatened by acidification) to the most majestic Norwegian scenery.” It also returns again and again to Huseby’s relationship with his grandson—a leitmotif that lends both a sense of scale and urgency to the filmmakers’ message.
A Sea Change follows the quest of Huseby, a retired history teacher, to discover what is happening to the world’s oceans. After reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Darkening Sea,” he travels to Alaska, California, Washington, and Norway to find out about the rising acidity of the oceans and what this “sea change” bodes for the world. He speaks with oceanographers, marine biologists, climatologists, and artists and discovers that excess carbon dioxide is dissolving in our oceans, changing sea water chemistry and making it difficult for tiny creatures at the bottom of the food web to form their shells. The effects could work their way up to the fish a billion people depend upon for their source of protein.
The screening will be followed by a discussion with Huseby and Ettinger.
A Sea Change: Imagine a World Without Fish Screening
Chatham Real Food Market Co-op
15 Church Street, Chatham, NY; 518.392.3353
Admission free; reservations essential.
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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 02/10/10 at 07:04 PM • Permalink
