A Mini Eco-Film Festival, Part 2

We're pleased to see our Ecolympics registrations coming along (yes, you can still sign up!) and we'll get back to blogging about our events soon. But given that our mission is to raise awareness of the human footprint on the environment and that it's the weekend, it's time for another mini Eco-film festival. Get your coffee or snacks, get comfortable and enjoy.

The first film is a succinct history of 300 years of fossil fuels, with the catchy title, "300 years of Fossil Fuels in 300 seconds." It's from the Post Carbon Institute, which aims to "lead the transition to a more resilient, equitable and sustainable world." They're based in Santa Rosa California, and I have a feeling we're going to be hearing more about this world "resilience" in years to come.


In our second film, which is more a seminar than a narrative but still engrossing, the inimitable Sir David Attenborough delivers the annual Royal Society Lecture.
Here, Sir David comes out swinging against population growth, which he argues is unsustainable. This is the short version, containing just the speech.


Here’s the complete version, with audience questions and answers. In one of the questions, Attenborough makes the point that the future where we have to worry about famines is already here. And given the list of food crises and famines in the last decade and century, it’s easy to see that despite the green revolution the land cannot sustain as many people as now live on it.

Our third film is an impressive Ted talk by biologist Willie Smits about his efforts to regrow a rainforest in Borneo. It shows how, with science, we can repair even the most devastated parts of our planet. And, his "people first" ideology is going to go a long way toward solving many of our problems.


Smits starts off by talking about the plight of the orangutan, whose habitat is being destroyed by our demand for palm oil.

Our 2nd eco-film festival ends there, but if you would like a sobering look at the sad life of at least one orangutan, then you should see the film, Green. It's about a female orangutan who is victimized by deforestation and resource exploitation. From the website, where you can see the whole 48-minute film, "This film is an emotional journey with Green's final days. It is a visual ride presenting the treasures of rainforest biodiversity and the devastating impacts of logging and land clearing for palm oil plantations." The film has won prizes at film festivals.

Thanks for watching! Feel free to leave comments.

Introducing the Arkive

We're going to have some posts about what we're doing and you're doing for the Ecolympics soon, but I wanted to let you know about the Arkive, which is mentioned in the Resources for our Tell-A-Friend event. You should just go to the Arkive and explore or you can view the terrific promo featuring David Attenborough. It aims to be an image and video database of all the world's endangered species.

At left is the Fony Baobab, found only in Madagascar, where it is suffering from habitat loss. It was an IUCN Species of the Day earlier this month. Go to the Arkive and click on the image and you can see a nice slideshow of this exotic tree.

This little critter is called Burrowe's Giant Glass Frog, which doesn't look so giant to me. The Arkive doesn't have conservation status for it, so presumably they are waiting for an expert to fill in the details.







Another recent IUCN Species of the Day was the Humphead Wrasse, one of the largest reef fishes in the world. The Arkive has a nice collection of images and videos of this beauty, which is suffering from exploitation in the live reef-fish trade.
As you can see, the Arkive contains some top nature photography and as a website and archive, it has some other cool features like slideshows and creating your own scrapbook. All for free. Worth checking out!