FanFare

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come. [more inside]
posted by quatsch on Feb 10, 2023 - 4 comments

In the arid Bolivian highlands, an elderly Quechua couple has been living a tranquil life for years. While he takes their small herd of llamas out to graze, she keeps house and walks for miles with the other local women to fetch precious water. When an uncommonly long drought threatens everything they know, Virginio and Sisa must decide whether to stay and maintain their traditional way of life or admit defeat and move in with family members in the city. Their dilemma is precipitated by the arrival of their grandson Clever, who comes to visit with news. The three of them must face, each in their own way, the effects of a changing environment, the importance of tradition, and the meaning of life itself. [more inside]
posted by aniola on Feb 6, 2023 - 0 comments

With "sealfies" and social media, a new tech-savvy generation of Inuit is wading into the world of activism, using humor and reason to confront aggressive animal rights vitriol and defend their traditional hunting practices. Director Alethea Arnaquq-Baril joins her fellow Inuit activists as they challenge outdated perceptions of Inuit and present themselves to the world as a modern people in dire need of a sustainable economy. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown on Nov 10, 2022 - 2 comments

During a perilous 24-hour mission on the moon, space explorers try to retrieve samples from an abandoned research facility steeped in classified secrets. (Netflix) [more inside]
posted by oh yeah! on Dec 27, 2021 - 9 comments

This week... electorial problems for Democrats in last Tuesday's election, and, at the COP26 climate summit nations promised to limit emissions to stall global warming but are unlikely to actually do it. And Now: People On TV Saying Things Wrong. Main story (22 minutes): the power grid, a little-regarded engineering marvel, yet one beset by many threats, from squirrels to balloons to age to climate change, but its biggest problem is the push to renewable sources, and transporting that power from the places where it is generated over long distances to where it is needed. [more inside]
posted by JHarris on Nov 8, 2021 - 3 comments

After contact with an ancient space probe, Picard becomes one of the settlers of Kataan. [more inside]
posted by CheesesOfBrazil on Jun 10, 2021 - 25 comments

A fictional future history of solving climate change over the next thirty years, from classic science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. Recently the subject of discussion on the blue: Imagining the End of Capitalism. [more inside]
posted by Rainbo Vagrant on Nov 30, 2020 - 10 comments

Documentary follows teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg on her international crusade to get people to listen to scientists about the world's environmental problems. [more inside]
posted by DirtyOldTown on Nov 17, 2020 - 1 comment

Our world has ended five times: it has been broiled, frozen, poison-gassed, smothered, and pelted by asteroids. In The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen dives into deep time, exploring Earth’s past dead ends, and in the process, offers us a glimpse of our possible future. Many scientists now believe that the climate shifts of the twenty-first century have analogs in these five extinctions. Using the visible clues these devastations have left behind in the fossil record, The Ends of the World takes us inside “scenes of the crime,” from South Africa to the New York Palisades, to tell the story of each extinction. Brannen examines the fossil record—which is rife with creatures like dragonflies the size of sea gulls and guillotine-mouthed fish—and introduces us to the researchers on the front lines who, using the forensic tools of modern science, are piecing together what really happened at the crime scenes of the Earth’s biggest whodunits. Part road trip, part history, and part cautionary tale, The Ends of the World takes us on a tour of the ways that our planet has clawed itself back from the grave, and casts our future in a completely new light.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Feb 17, 2020 - 1 comment

Jellyfish have been swimming in our oceans for well over half a billion years, longer than any other animal that lives on the planet. They make a venom so toxic it can kill a human in three minutes. Their sting—microscopic spears that pierce with five million times the acceleration of gravity—is the fastest known motion in the animal kingdom. Made of roughly 95 percent water, some jellies are barely perceptible virtuosos of disguise, while others glow with a luminescence that has revolutionized biotechnology. Yet until recently, jellyfish were largely ignored by science, and they remain among the most poorly understood of ocean dwellers. More than a decade ago, Juli Berwald left a career in ocean science to raise a family in landlocked Austin, Texas, but jellyfish drew her back to the sea. Recent, massive blooms of billions of jellyfish have clogged power plants, decimated fisheries, and caused millions of dollars of damage. Driven by questions about how overfishing, coastal development, and climate change were contributing to a jellyfish population explosion, Juli embarked on a scientific odyssey. She traveled the globe to meet the biologists who devote their careers to jellies, hitched rides on Japanese fishing boats to see giant jellyfish in the wild, raised jellyfish in her dining room, and throughout it all marveled at the complexity of these alluring and ominous biological wonders. Gracefully blending personal memoir with crystal-clear distillations of science, Spineless is the story of how Juli learned to navigate and ultimately embrace her ambition, her curiosity, and her passion for the natural world. She discovers that jellyfish science is more than just a quest for answers. It’s a call to realize our collective responsibility for the planet we share.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Jan 14, 2020 - 1 comment

The Little Ice Age tells the fascinating story of the turbulent, unpredictable, and often very cold years of modern European history. Using sources ranging from the dates of long-ago wine harvests and the business records of medieval monasteries to modern chemical analysis of ice cores, renowned archaeologist Brian Fagan reveals how a 500-year cold snap began in the fourteenth century. As Fagan shows, the increasingly cold and stormy weather dramatically altered fishing and farming practices, and it shaped familiar events, from Norse exploration to the settlement of North America, from the French Revolution to the Irish potato famine to the Industrial Revolution. Now updated with a new preface discussing the latest historical climate research, The Little Ice Age offers deeply important context for understanding today's age of global warming. As the Little Ice Age shows, climate change does not come in gentle, easy stages, and its influence on human life is profound.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Jan 3, 2020 - 5 comments

From medieval bestiaries to Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, we’ve long been enchanted by extraordinary animals, be they terrifying three-headed dogs or asps impervious to a snake charmer’s song. But bestiaries are more than just zany zoology—they are artful attempts to convey broader beliefs about human beings and the natural order. Today, we no longer fear sea monsters or banshees. But from the infamous honey badger to the giant squid, animals continue to captivate us with the things they can do and the things they cannot, what we know about them and what we don’t. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Nov 9, 2019 - 1 comment

The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border where the river runs dry. Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more interesting than the headlines let on. The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our future: how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert —and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Sep 20, 2019 - 2 comments

I'm half-way through Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush. It's an essential but harrowing book mainly centred on managed (and unmanaged) retreat from the shore. As Rush is a coastal person this is a deeply personal venture. If planet breakdown is stressing you at this moment this is not a book to read. [more inside]
posted by unearthed on Jul 26, 2019 - 0 comments

"More than 65 million people around the world have been forced from their homes to escape famine, climate change and war, the greatest displacement since World War II. Filmmaker Ai Weiwei examines the staggering scale of the refugee crisis and its profoundly personal human impact. Over the course of one year in 23 countries, Weiwei follows a chain of urgent human stories that stretch across the globe, including Afghanistan, France, Greece, Germany and Iraq." [more inside]
posted by kokaku on Jul 20, 2019 - 3 comments

A ship carrying settlers to a new home in Mars after Earth is rendered uninhabitable is knocked off-course, causing the passengers to consider their place in the universe. [more inside]
posted by Harry Caul on Jun 27, 2019 - 8 comments

A sweeping new history of how climate change and disease helped bring down the Roman Empire Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome is the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome's power, a story of nature's triumph over human ambition. Interweaving a grand historical narrative with cutting-edge climate science and genetic discoveries, Kyle Harper traces how the fate of Rome was decided not just by emperors, soldiers, and barbarians but also by volcanic eruptions, solar cycles, climate instability, and devastating viruses and bacteria. [more inside]
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Mar 20, 2019 - 2 comments

It's the year 2024 and the ozone layer has long been destroyed. To protect mankind, the once-immortal Connor MacLeod helped in the construction of a giant "shield" in 1999. Now he is just an old man, until one day some other immortals from his home planet (did we mention he's from the planet Zeist?) arrive on Earth to kill him (mere weeks before his death by natural causes?) and he becomes immortal again... just in time to save the earth one more time. [more inside]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs on Mar 16, 2019 - 20 comments

When dead citizens start popping up all over town, the boys realize they need Al Gore’s help. The boys are willing to do almost anything to save the town, and themselves, but it may be too late. [more inside]
posted by numaner on Nov 8, 2018 - 2 comments

Naomi Klein comes by to talk shock, climate, resistance, and how smart we are. We then do a reading of Peggy Noonan's column, written while she was high on anesthesia. [more inside]
posted by Space Coyote on Sep 17, 2017 - 2 comments

• Terrorist attacks in London killed 7 and injured more. The American news media is full of stories of London "reeling" and "under siege." Londoners take issue with that description, continue drinking beer and carrying on.
• Vladimir Putin is in many places, from clips to an Oliver Stone series of interview on him to interviewing former Fox host Megyn Kelly, where he admited Russian citizens may have interfered with the US election, while Trump's administraion looks into returning Russian compounds on US soil known to have been used for spying.
• And Now: 60 Minutes Anchors Are Still Prompting People To Give Them The Exact Soundbites They Need.
• Main story: Trump announces that he is pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, a decision with possibly disasterous consequences. YouTube (21m)
• And Now: Still More 60 Minutes Anchors Prompting People To Give Them The Exact Soundbites They Need.

[more inside]
posted by JHarris on Jun 7, 2017 - 5 comments

A decision to shut off Norway's oil/gas production by the ruling environmental party sets off a slow-motion invasion and occupation of Norway by Russia, condoned by the EU and unopposed by the U.S. A show so . . . plausible the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement in protest. [more inside]
posted by longdaysjourney on Dec 25, 2016 - 7 comments

The Guardian arrives to lend a hand when an alien parasite drains Supergirl of her power. Mon-El contemplates his motives when he considers a new career. Alex faces a new reality. Vulture: Supergirl is telling a hell of a coming-out story.
posted by pjsky on Nov 15, 2016 - 14 comments

Tyson shows the result of a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus. The earth has been getting warmer since the industrial revolution — but it's not too late.
posted by DevilsAdvocate on Jun 2, 2014 - 13 comments