Miles Masterson: Climate change’s evil twin
Ocean acidification poses as big a threat as rising temperatures.
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Imagine a world without fish.
Imagine indeed. The other day I watched a movie that expounded on this very threatening premise. Being a surfer, marine conservation is something close to my heart. And having researched and written a couple of features on overfishing in the past couple of years, the subject of the rape of the oceans for capitalist profit is nothing new to me, though ever depressing.
But this is a new demon. The movie A Sea Change is not about overfishing but “the evil twin of climate change”, ocean acidification. It’s a little known and looming environmental disaster that is threatening to alter the pH balance of our oceans forever and in the process destroy millions of sea creatures.
Retired New York teacher Sven Huseby came across the concept when he read about it in an article by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert and couldn’t put it out of his mind. So he made this documentary that covers his quest to find out more about ocean acidification and includes the innocent but astute observations of his five-year-old grandson, Elias.
Basically, the film covers how much of the carbon dioxide emitted by industrialised nations is ending up in the oceans and producing higher levels of carbon dioxide that is killing marine life, specifically small, angelic butterfly shaped organisms called pteropods.
These sensitive creatures, who rely on a specific pH level in the sea, form the bottom tier of the food chain in many parts of the world’s ocean. Their very existence is being threatened by this carbonisation, which is akin to the ocean being shoved into one of those old school soda drink-making machines. It’s a phenomenon that is inexorably altering the state of the oceans and could eliminate creatures such as the pteropods and the myriad of fish and sea life higher in the food chain that depend on them.
Many such documentaries can be quite stark and depressing and in fact as Sven lays out this information early in the movie, one is confronted by a very scary reality. However, the presence of the perspective of children, primarily Elias, is uplifting. Sven also looks at alternatives to petro-chemical plunder and the movie does end with a message of hope, which is something that separates it from a lot of similar flicks in the eco-doccy genre.
Ocean acidification is a very real threat to the survival of the oceans as we know them though and in turn, human beings and the planet we live on. Writing about environmental issues can be a downer and often makes me incredibly angry. But the bottom line is that it’s a good way to pass on the important message that we need raise awareness and to act now and save our ravaged earth before it’s too late. Surfers especially should do more campaigning, I think.
As far as I know, A Sea Change has not yet been screened in the UK (I watched it with a packed out independent theatre in Cape Town, South Africa). True to its grassroots origins, the movie’s producers have created ‘Community Screening Kits’ that basically allow anyone to show the award-winning movie anywhere for a small fee. The film's producer Barbara Ettinger believes the heavily industrialised islands of the UK are an ideal place to show the movie and says they are looking for a venue here, so if you want to get involved please contact them and spread the word.
For more info check out their website or join their Facebook group.
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Climate change’s evil twin (text) by Miles Masterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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