I attended the BLUE OCEAN Festival in St. Petersburg on
Sunday, November 13. The presentations I saw was the release of the movies Before the Flood with Leonardo DiCaprio,
The Forgotten Coast with Carlton Ward
Jr., Tampa Bay Water Story with professors
from USF, and a Q&A session with Carlton Ward Jr., Mallory Dimmit, Joe
Guthrie, and Dr. Silvia Earle on how citizen science can make a difference.
Before the Flood follows Leonardo
DiCaprio from his appointment by the United Nations as their Messenger of Peace
for the Climate as he goes on a two year journey to understand climate change,
global warming and how the different countries are dealing with the issue. We
start in 2014 at the Climate Leaders’ Summit in New York where he address the
world leaders on climate change and what he has seen in his travels. The movie
goes through the various locations and interviews he’s done, starting in
Alberta, Canada where he visited tar sands and saw how much boreal forests have
been clear cut to allow companies like Shell and Exxon to go in and pump water
into the sand to get oil cheaply. He then visits the Arctic where he is shown
how 30 feet of solid ice has melted in just the past two decades and learns
that if the Greenland Ice Sheet were to melt completely, it would raise the
world’s oceans nearly twenty feet. This rise leads him to Miami, where the city
already has to use pumps to keep their streets clear of flooding water during
high tides, and then on to the island nations of Kiribati and Palau, who have
had to find alternative locations for their citizens to live due to rising sea
levels.
China, India, and Indonesia are
visited to show how energy and resource consumption in those countries has led
to massive changes. In China, the pollution is so bad that the people must wear
masks to be able to breathe properly. However, there are some positive changes
on the horizon. The Chinese government is moving rapidly to implement changes
in its solar and wind power sectors, which would bring energy to its populace
and limit the dangerous chemicals coming out of its power plants. In India, 30%
of the populace still cook with biomass (cow dung). Few have reliable
electricity, so they are trying desperately to implement changes, but they are
looking toward us as role models and we are failing them. In Indonesia,
thousands of acres of forest have been cleared for Palm Oil Plantations. The
forests are burnt, which releases massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere,
to grow a cheap oil that is used in most of our processed food stuffs.
Finally they visit dead coral reefs
and the Vatican, where Pope Francis has been stressing the need for us to start
caring for the planet before it is too late. He ends by addressing the same
Summit and reminding them that there is no ‘later’, this is it, and we have to
step up and do something now, or there will be no tomorrow.
The
Forgotten Coast follows expedition leader Mallory Dimmitt, nature
photographer Carlton Ward Jr., and black bear biologist Joe Guthrie as they
follow in the tracks of a Florida Black Bear named M34 who traveled 500 miles
from Green Swamp up to the Alabama Border. The travel by bike, foot, kayak and
paddleboard as they move from one portion of the Florida Wildlife Corridor to
another, bypassing over public and private lands, dangerous stretches of
highway (I-4and HWY 27), and miles of waist deep black water. Through the movie
they spotlight several animals: the Black Bear, the Manatee, the Alligator Gar,
the Oyster, and the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker.
In the Green Swamp they start out
with a warning: “Don’t pick up a log ‘til you kick it,” which is great advice
as they come in contact with alligators, water moccasins, and pigmy rattlers in
the dark water. As they move through the state, they come to find how the
swamps have moved inland, the marshes and bays following them. With the
increase in salinity levels and pollution, the diversification of species have
dropped, which in turn changes how people relate to the environment. Some things
that surprised me was that Chassahowitzka is actually one of the largest
freshwater springs in the world, that long leaf pine forests are one of the
most diverse forests in regards to species diversity, that the longleaf pine
forest in the South East US have gone from 90 million acres to 3 million acres,
and that our population in Florida has gone from 2 million people in the 1940s
to 20 million today. The video is shot in a very positive light, which the main
idea being that we need to increase the safe areas that animals can travel
around the state.
In the last video, a short entitled
Tampa Bay Water Story, professors from USF and Oceanographers and Civil
Engineers discuss how the Tampa Bay estuary is unique as it is spring fed and
that it has taken years of collaborative efforts to make it as clean and
protected as it currently is. The items I took away from this video is that, as
USF Optical Oceanographer Frank Muller-Karger says in the movie, “We can only
manage people, not nature.”
During the Question & Answer
portion Mallory Dimmitt, Carlton Ward Jr., and Joe Guthrie were joined by
Biologist Dr. Silvia Earle. The four took questions from the audience which
covered several topics, below are two that I thought encapsulated the video and
talk:
Q-Do
you expect to see changes with the new administration on environmentalism?
A-If we take a stand and be a
leader and start speaking up as well as putting our money where it will do the
most good, then we will be able to effect change. -Joe Guthrie.
A-We won’t go backwards, because
the laws are already in place, but we need to finish and increase the Florida
Wildlife Corridor. -Mallory Dimmitt.
Q-What
surprised you the most about the trip?
A-Just how broken the corridor is.
I-4 and Hwy 27 is exceptionally dangerous to three people on bikes, let alone
animals.-Carlton Ward, Jr.
A-“How much we could fall in love
with a dinosaur fish,” Joe Guthrie.
A-How expansive Florida is.-Mallory
Dimmit.
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