Jon Shenk had never been to the Maldives when, in the fall of 2008, he read about a young activist named Mohamed Nasheed who had just become the country’s first democratically elected president after 30 years of horrific dictatorship. “When I started paying attention to Nasheed’s presidency, I was struck by his willingness to say these brutally honest things about the global environment. His was a truly unique political story. “A lightbulb went on in my head. Here was a chance to completely shift the conversation about climate change from something a lot of people consider boring or are powerless over—climate change—to a story with both inherent drama and a kind of hero. Weeks later the San Francisco-based filmmaker—who was director of 2004’s ...

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Posted in Climate Change, Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed

“Aliens in Antarctica” is a hard-to-beat, eye-catching headline. And it’s true; they (outsiders!!!) are slowly taking root in a place long considered the most isolated, and pristine, corner of the planet. But it’s not what you think. We’re not talking cellophane-skinned, one-eyed creatures from another universe, but rather much more pedestrian invaders, including bluegrass, springtails, and weeds. By happenstance, I participated in the research that discovered this growing threat to Antarctica. During a 2008 sailing expedition along the Peninsula, my team and I agreed to be sucked by hoses (vacuumed!) on a regular basis. The detritus collected from our clothing, pockets, cuffs, boots, ...

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Posted in Antarctic Treaty, Antarctica

Just a couple of weeks after BP agreed to fork over $7.8 billion to settle 110,000 claims by Gulf Coast residents affected by the Deepwater Horizon spill, another of the so-called supermajor oil companies, Chevron, has been fined and censured due to sizable ongoing spills. Several incidents at Chevron rigs in the Frade oil field (roughly 230 miles northeast of Rio de Janerio) since late last year—and as recently as this week—have oozed more than 3,000 barrels of crude into the Atlantic Ocean. Brazilian prosecutors have filed an $11.2 billion civil suit against both Chevron and, voila, its ...

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Posted in BP, Environment, Gulf Spill, Louisiana, Louisiana Water Stories, Ocean Pollution, Oil spills, Shell Oil

It was a rather uneventful summer in Antarctica, relatively warm and wet along the coast, though much of the Peninsula remained blocked by thick pack ice due to lack of winds. The scientific highlight may have been the Russians’ successful drilling to Lake Vostok, 2.2 miles below the ice. Thankfully, there were no reports of ships run aground. I spent January there, filming a big, new 3D movie about “change” in Antarctica, sailing down on the 74-foot Pelagic Australis. But all of that seeming uneventfulness has gone out the window with an apparent suicide-by-sailboat misadventure that is being ...

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Posted in "Berserk", Antarctic Treaty, Antarctica, Jarle Andhoey

Despite New York’s moratorium on natural-gas drilling imposed in 2008, the threat of hydrofracking looms heavy across the state, where I live. I made a trip last weekend to one of the issues’ ground zeroes, near Ithaca and Binghamton, for a glimpse at how the fight against fracking is going. It was just a 115-mile drive west through softly rolling hills, and while the physical landscape barely changed, man’s footprint did, as rural poverty evidenced itself with each mile of tumbling-down wooden-frame houses and strips of abandoned commercial real estate. Closing in on the college towns of Ithaca and ...

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Posted in Hydrofracking, New York state

There is a growing list of small island leaders fervently scanning the horizon of the flat—and rising—seas that surround them, looking desperately for new homes. The list has included the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, the Maldives and Seychelles. And this week the leader of equator-straddling Kiribati officially let it be known that he is also on the hunt for a new place to settle as lapping waves and eroding beaches become increasingly part of his island nation’s daily worry. Even if the best-case scenario were to come true and all greenhouse gas emissions were braked tomorrow, ocean levels around the ...

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Posted in Climate Change, Kiribati, Rising Sea Levels

It’s become almost an accepted norm that “global environmental summits”—whether focused on carbon emissions or the number of tuna taken from the sea—launch with a great deal of hoopla, produce a lot of paperwork, and then are largely forgotten until four years later when the same gangs convene all over again. But as last week’s World Oceans Summit in Singapore, sponsored by The Economist magazine, wound down, it was on a bit of a positive note, perhaps because the summit made sure to invite not just environmentalists, but bankers and economists too. Like many of the world’s big problems, ...

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Posted in Ocean Pollution