Communicating
rolson | July 29, 2008Here we have it now, pretty much formalized. We spotted the pattern last November in our first test screenings of non-science friends in Hollywood vs. scientist friends. As the Sizzle Tuesday reviews popped up, Chad Orzel noted it among the Science Bloggers. Then Chris Mooney identified the pattern and editorialized on it. Now we can look at the reviews of the most authoritative voice in the science world, Nature, versus the most authoritative voice in the entertainment world, Variety. The divide is almost exactly the same. The former says the "comedy falls flat," the latter raves about…
josh donlan | July 27, 2008Will Stolzenburg is one of the better science journalists I have crossed paths with. His new book is bound to make big impacts. Where the wild things were came out last week and people are talking alot about it (including in my inbox). Will takes us around the world answering the "So what?" to the fact that we now live in a world without predators. Required reading for every citizen in my view. Below is a book summary, and visit the book's website for more information.
It wasn't so long ago that wolves and great cats, monstrous fish and flying raptors ruled the peak of nature's food pyramid…
josh donlan | July 18, 2008SB's Randy Olson joins a conversation on NPR's Talk of the Nation to discuss his new movie Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy. Randy and folks from The Martin Group discuss how to break through "the green fog" and fight green fatigue.
jjacquet | July 14, 2008Given that Randy Olson is not only a director but also the founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project as well as my co-blogger, you might expect that I have favorable things to say about his latest film--and I do. It was a delight to watch Sizzle and equally delightful to be privy to the evolution of the film from an idea to interview clips to a full-length feature...comedy?
Sizzle is indeed funny. But it is so much more that it becomes difficult to categorize, which is part of its strength. From serious statements by scientists to dazzling polar bear shots, from Olson's mother…
rolson | July 14, 2008We're in the middle of the Outfest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. I've been to four of their parties now. I have to say, these are the nicest, most supportive, most polite, most fun, most open, most down home, most un-pretentious filmmakers I have ever met in nearly 20 years of going to film festivals. I had no idea. I'm thinking of all the posers and phonies I've sat and talked to at the probably 50 film festivals I've been to over the years. All the full-of-themselves, dressed in black, name dropping, insecure, snotty vacuous filmmakers I've had to stand around and chat with at film…
jjacquet | July 10, 2008There is a great interview with Randy Olson about his new film Sizzle published today by Erik Hoffner at Grist. Check it out here.
rolson | July 9, 2008The world has changed. Sometimes its hard to notice. This is what "shifting baselines" is about. And this is also what an excellent article this month's Atlantic Monthly titled Is Google Making Us Stupid is about. Much more than just the idea of getting lazy and using Google to remember things for you, the article talks about the entire shift of ability to focus and experience deep emotions that has taken place. I love this article.
For over twenty years I have felt what this article has to say. Since way back in the eighties when Beavis and Butthead introduced a new way of maintaining…
josh donlan | July 8, 2008As presidential politics ramp up and the environment becomes part of the rhetoric, it reminded me of a essay I wrote a couple of years ago as part of book project entitled Thirty-five Years Since Earth Day: Visions of a New Generation. The editor ended up dropping the ball on the book, but my essay is still lingering. So I thought I would share it here. My essay addresses the state of biodiversity and reads much like a open letter to the president and voters.
Perhaps some of you will enjoy some or all of it here: History, our gardens, and the future of biodiversity: Why we should care and…
rolson | July 6, 2008As far as anyone that I've spoken with in Hollywood knows, this has never been done before. No one has ever organized 50 bloggers to post their reviews of a small movie all on the same day, which is what will happen next Tuesday, July 15, for my new film Sizzle. Turns out it's an interesting idea. The reason it's so interesting: Independent film distribution is in absolute chaos. I've been hearing this for the past year, but last month it came to a head when Mark Gill, the former president of Miramax, gave a very important speech at the L.A. Film Festival titled, "Yes, the Sky Really is…
rolson | July 3, 2008They're making progress. Check out the map. They're halfway down Baja and a couple hundred miles out to sea. As you're reading this right now, Dr. Marcus Ericksen and Joel Paschal are bobbing on the surface, eating their beans, corn and fish, and calling attention to the sad situation of plastics in the sea. It's been a month since they left Long Beach harbor, however, they spent more than the first week hiding out at San Nicholas Island waiting for a storm to blow by. Now they're well on their way. As Marcus keeps emphasizing, quoting Captain Charles Moore, sailboats don't have ETAs,…
jjacquet | June 30, 2008I spoke with my sometimes co-blogger Randy Olson this morning. He's up to his neck in Sizzle hustling (though he did have time last week to host a dinner with Carl Zimmer, Chris Mooney and friends as Carl was in L.A. promoting his new book). The Sizzle folks have come up with a rather novel idea which will play out here on ScienceBlogs in a couple weeks. They put out an invitation to Science Bloggers to review the movie, got 40 replies, added on a few major environmental bloggers, and now have over 50 bloggers who will all be posting their reviews of the movie on SIZZLE TUESDAY, July 15.…
rolson | June 25, 2008My phone rang at 8 this morning and the caller I.D. said, "Out of Area." That was an understatement. It was Marcus Eriksen, calling on the satellite phone on board Junk Raft, from 5 miles south of Guadalupe Island, which is about halfway down the Baja Penninsula. We talked for about 15 minutes. They're doing great!
They've been at sea for about two weeks now (while they left Long Beach on June 1, they ended up spending over a week at San Nicholas Island waiting out a storm). The raft is performing perfectly. They had added two smaller sails that enable them to make 90 degrees against…
josh donlan | June 20, 2008John McCain announced his new goal of pushing through 45 nuclear reactors by 2030. Whether you are pro- or anti-nuclear (or somewhere in between), 45 by 2030 will be too late for mitigating climate change. This is an important point that is often overlooked. Calls for carbon reductions from the IPCC and others require major actions pre-2030. The bureaucratic hurdles associated with building nuclear reactors in the US takes them off the table in terms of being a tool in the quiver to abate on-coming climate change in the next two decades. Is including nuclear in our long-term energy strategic…
josh donlan | June 15, 2008While China has now clearly overtaken the United States in carbon emissions, carbon regulation appears to be finally coming to DC. While legislation failed last week in the Senate, 54 Senators were in favor of the bill - demonstrating bi-partisan support for climate change regulation. I was in DC last week for the Katoomba Meeting, an international coalition of environmental organizations, financial instituions, and intergovernmental agencies dedicated to building an infratructure fund for the planet. Senator John Kerry addressed the group, and was confident that Congress will pass climate…
jjacquet | June 9, 2008It's movie time again for my sometimes co-blogger, Dr. Randy Olson, who today opens the website for his new movie, "Sizzle: A global warming comedy." Just the fact that they have been invited to the Outfest Gay and Lesbian Film Festival of Los Angeles for their world premiere tells you that it's something more than your standard dry science documentary. Tickets go on sale June 16 and you can attend the premiere if you're able to get one before it sells out, which it will because it's part of the festival so there's only a limited number available. He says the whole cast and crew will be…
rolson | June 4, 2008Last year Jeremy Jackson went to South Africa to collect a big prize at a conference. While there he met a young nature writer/photographer named Adam Welz. A few weeks ago Adam was ambling down the west coast of the U.S. and stopped by to visit for a day. In addition to breaking the news to me that more than half the plants in my yard are introduced species from South Africa (where the climate is so similar), he also is a great storyteller and amazing nature photographer (see the beavers).
If you have a few minutes and care to read some excellent natural history writing and see some amazing…
rolson | May 25, 2008Okay, I'm going to give this one last shot. Regardless of whether I know what I'm doing as a filmmaker, what I do know is that in the spring of 2006 I spent two weeks at the Tribeca Film Festvial meeting with theatrical and home DVD distributors along with my sales agent, Jeff "The Dude" Dowd, the guy who sold the Coen Brother's first film, "Blood Simple," and they based the Jeff Bridges character, "The Dude," in "The Big Lebowski," on him.
Two things that Jeff said from the outset, over and over again, is that first, "home DVD is your cash cow -- its the biggest revenue stream for most any…
rolson | May 24, 2008For anyone who knows me, you know that's the highest compliment I could ever pay a communicator.
There are two fundamental errors to consider in the mass communication of science: errors of inaccuracy, and errors of boredom. It's a lot like Type I and Type II errors in statistics. And just like with statistics, there's a tendency to focus on one more than the other. With science communication, accuracy is usually held up as the be-all-and-end-all, for good reason. But good communicators know you not only need to get things right, they also need to be readable.
It's obvious PZ gets things…
rolson | May 23, 2008This is such a great article. It's about the gargantuan con job advertisers have pulled on the American public over the past four decades. For those of us who grew up in the sixties and drank water from supposedly dangerous public water fountains (like the author of the essay), it will remain forever baffling how we turned into a society that now prefers to pay for what was once free.
It's such a simple and important essay. To her credit, the author concludes by mentioning the term "shifting baseline," as well as Bill McKibbon's term of "hyper-individualism." And one wonderful additional…
rolson | May 19, 2008A six-week drift to Hawaii will call attention to plastics in the sea
Yesterday Dr. Marcus Eriksen, his expedition partner Joel Paschal, and their land-based support coordinator (and fiancee of Dr. Eriksen) Anna Cummins took the newly built "Junk Raft" on a trial run to Catalina and back. All systems are go, so they're now scaling up for the big departure on Sunday afternoon, June 1, at 3:00 p.m. from the Long Beach Aquarium. If all goes according to plans, about six weeks later they should land on the Big Island of Hawaii. It's a straight shot over, mostly along the 25th parallel, just…