Communicating
jjacquet | November 12, 2007This past weekend I attended the UBC Future in Science Journalism conference. It was a very well-organized (thanks Eric), cozy potpourri of scientists, journalists, editors, and authors (and I burned zero carbon to attend). I wanted to share a few things from BBC environmental correspondent Richard Black that might interest sciblings and their readers most. First off: the least trusted of all media sources is blogs. Have a look at this graph as well as the poll behind it:
Blogs are, unsurprisingly, the least trusted media outlet. That said, ScienceBlogs was repeatedly singled out at…
jjacquet | November 11, 2007On November 7, 2007 (i.e. last Wednesday) a container ship knocked into a tower of the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled 58,000 gallons of oil. On November 10, 2007 (i.e. three days later) the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival announced a competition for the best short video clips related to the spill for their festival in February, 2008.
Unlike the cast of Monty Python's Life of Brian who assembled a committee to discuss the idea of assembling a committee to look into the possibility of the Romans attacking, the folks at the SFOFF simply acted, immediately, to encourage rapid communication…
jjacquet | November 2, 2007There is some unfinished business worth mentioning and stories quickly aging, so I want to get those out there:
1) Just when you thought another vacuous museum exhibit would go unnoticed, comes a refreshingly critical review in the New York Times of the American Museum of Natural History's newest exhibit on water. The review and the exhibit (if you're in the area) are probably both worth a visit (as is this article on the recent water shortage in Tennessee).
2) Maureen Dowd handed over her column at the New York Times to Steven Colbert a couple weeks ago and what he wrote just keeps getting…
jjacquet | November 2, 2007Since Watson did not have authority, he made use of what he did have: publicity. For those of you who know Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, you won't be surprised to see this photo and long profile landed a cover story in this week's New Yorker.
Not that Paul Watson is not worthy of a long profile. Without a doubt, Paul Watson is one of the (if not the) most energetic and outspoken advocates against the wholesale destruction of the oceans, accompanied by some radical gestures. I first heard Watson speak a decade ago and his dynamism attracted me to his cause. I…
jjacquet | October 30, 2007Today Randy Olson took the Shifting Baselines phenomenon to the radio waves. The crew of Skepticality, the podcast of Skeptic magazine, spent almost an hour with Olson discussing shifting baselines, boredom, The Daily Show, and "Dodos on Global Warming". The show is full of insights the interface between communication, science, and the public. "Film is not an education medium, this is one of the great misconceptions in our society," says Olson. "Film is a motivational medium." Find out more about Olson's films past, films present, and, of course, shifting baselines at Skepticality.
jjacquet | October 29, 2007Stand on the shoulders of giants. Or stomp on them. That seemed to be the only way Canadian filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine were going to make a film suited for the big screen. So they made Manufacturing Dissent about documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, which I just saw in London.
The film explores Michael Moore's background and incendiary nature (being fired from Mother Jones after working as Editor for only five months, for instance). And of course, there is the dull irony that the pair (represented onscreen by Debbie Melnyk) was never able to land Moore for an interview (not…
jjacquet | October 27, 2007Africa, as we all know, is a wild continent that tugs at our existence. The people are wonderful and warm. The art is stunning. But I can't help closing my trip to Africa, which this time consisted of meetings, meetings, meetings, with a passage from Doug Adams about his visit to the Congo documented in Last Chance to See. I fear Adams' sentiments are still relevant--not to me so much as to the researchers operating in those countries who face daily challenges to their work and its advancement.
Like most colonies, Zaire had imposed on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function on which…
jjacquet | October 26, 2007People are always warning environmentalists about the risks of "crying wolf" too much with their alarmism. But why doesn't anybody point out the more serious risk -- the fear that so many BORING films about a problem get produced that by the time the problem finally arrives, nobody wants to hear about it.
This is happening for global warming. The actual environmental problem is now here. So is the movie problem.
I don't want to name any specific titles of recent movies, but only say that a month ago at a party I heard a knowledgeable friend say, "the official word in the film distribution…
jjacquet | October 24, 2007So much of environmentalism these days has come down to people asking, "How can we change the public's behavior?" When this topic crops up, there is always a group of hard core cynics who say, "The ONLY way you'll ever get anyone to change their behavior is if there's a profit incentive." Ugh. I hate listening to that.
Here's an op-ed today in the NY Times that plays like music to my ears. In literal terms it's about baseball, but more generally, it's about everything, as indicated by the last paragraph of the piece.
The more society embraces the idea that nobody will do anything right unless…
jjacquet | October 17, 2007Our home video version of Flock of Dodos came out a month ago. I've been following the sales and customer reviews on Amazon. The hilarious thing about Amazon is that if you end up with a bunch of great customer reviews, everyone says, "Ha, those were all written by the filmmaker using fake names," (as a friend said to me yesterday), but if you end up with rotten reviews, everyone says, "Ah-ha, the truth comes out!"
jjacquet | October 17, 2007What if you live in a neighborhood where you've got a lot better chance of getting killed by a passing shooter than a melting glacier? Then you're going to get nowhere with the alarmist messaging commonly adopted by many environmental groups. "And without bringing America's underclass into the green movement, it's going to get nowhere, too," as Thomas Friedman explains in his excellent Op-Ed/profile of social activist Van Jones in today's New York Times article The Green Collar Solution.
Using his little center in Oakland, Mr. Jones has been on a crusade to help underprivileged African-…
jjacquet | October 15, 2007One of the more amusing/annoying things to observe in film school was all the anxiety of very bright students who just wanted to know "the rules" for making good movies. When it came to editing class, they would literally ask things like, "just tell us the rules for how to edit a montage." And over and over again USC would bring in famous editors who would explain that there are no hard fast rules. Yes, there are some general rules of thumb, like cutting on action, but as soon as you look at the work of truly brilliant editors, the first thing you see is them throwing out all the…
jjacquet | October 11, 2007Speaking of awards...Though Daniel Pauly has recently won so many awards I had to recommend to him The Economy of Prestige (which he read and enjoyed), this latest award was a particular honor as he received it alongside Al Gore. Last Friday, in Santa Monica, California, Pauly received the Ocean Hero Award, given to those who make contributions through their professional work to improve the health of our oceans (previous recipients include Jean-Michel Coustea and Julie Packard), while Gore received the Partners Award. Both awards are sponsored by Oceana. Their awards were designed by one of…
jjacquet | October 10, 2007I have a few thousand complaints against the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth and yet, there's no denying it was the right movie at the right time. And if the criteria for the Nobel Peace Prize is to have "made a difference," then he is solidly deserving. The announcement comes on Friday. Here's to hoping he gets to add it to his trophy shelf.
And after watching a very vacuous environmental movie recently, I walked out with three times more respect for Al for his having had the guts to put real data in a movie. He showed, once again, there are no rules when it comes to making movies,…
jjacquet | October 9, 2007Last week I attended the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival and had the chance to see a sneak preview of the film about E.O. Wilson titled The Naturalist. Though the film had a few technical issues (I thought the sound mixing and camera work was at times poor), it was overall a wonderful depiction of E.O. Wilson's life and contributions to the field of biology and sociobiology.
The film began comparing E.O. Wilson, eminent Harvard ant biologist, to Charles Darwin, which at first I considered a stretch. By the end of the film, I was thoroughly convinced because the film ultimately showed the…
jjacquet | October 8, 2007For the past five years my good friend and film school classmate Jason Ensler has been a loyal team member of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. He's attended all our events, helped recruit celebrities, and generally taken a genuine interest in the plight of the oceans. Just last month, while directing a television show in Vancouver, he entertained Jennifer with tales of our hard times in Hollywood.
And now tonight he is the director of the third episode of NBC's, "Chuck" which has been critically praised and sounds like much fun. Here's a little background for you in case you haven'…
jjacquet | October 5, 2007Planet Ocean: Photo Stories from the 'Defending Our Oceans' Voyage by Sara Holden was recently released. It's a coffee table book that brings together beautiful imagery as well as the human impacts imperiling that beauty and, in this case, what Greenpeace is doing about it,including scenes from their most recent expedition. On behalf of Greenpeace, Holden argues that 40% of the oceans should be set aside as marine reserve, which would cost an estimated $12 billion per year. If this seems like a lot, Holden is quick to point out that we spend $20 billion each year in the U.S. on ice cream…
jjacquet | October 3, 2007When I was a photo-id intern at the Florida Marine Research Institute, I got my hands on some footage from a program on manatees. One scene featured a blonde presenter in the necropsy lab saying, "This manatee is so badly decomposed, it's actually hissing from the gases." Just then, the surgeon made his first incision. Using that footage, Ty Carlisle and Randy Olson of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project and I cut this little video. It's a dire time politically for manatees. Have a look.
jjacquet | September 30, 2007Because this is Shifting Baselines, where we recognize the need for a historical perspective to understand the 'baseline' and what is deemed 'pristine', it seems fitting to give a brief history of Carnival of the Blue. The brainchild of Mark Powell at Blogfish, Carnival of the Blue is an ocean version to parallel Carnival of the Green, which travels from blog to blog each Monday as a summary of the best 'green' blogging over the last week. In this spirit, each month a different blog hosts Carnival of the Blue as a synthesis of the best ocean-related blogging over the previous month. Without…
jjacquet | September 26, 2007Anyone out there wondering what Randy Olson, Head Dodo was up to in 1991? Before his debut on Showtime, Dr. Olson was making rock videos about barnacles. Sheril Kirshenbaurm at the Intersection recently persuaded Randy to put his vintage work on YouTube...