I saw Bill McKibben speak in San Francisco's Unitarian Church on April 7th. One thing he said was that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has now reached 392 parts per million. To put that in perspective, scientists have said that the maximum safe level for the gas is 350 parts per million. I remember hearing alarmed voices a few years ago wringing their hands that carbon dioxide concentrations were at 387 parts per million. The rise is mostly due to the many ways that using the energy from burning fossil fuels makes our lives better.

     

The Island President is a movie about how the President of the Maldives has to talk all of us into cutting our carbon emissions to save his country from going underwater. Literally. They have footage of the guy talking to villagers who are singing the blues about loosing many feet of beach for whatever reason. There was footage of the climate change negotiations leading up to Copenhagen. From that I got a strong sense of what a back row seat the President of the Maldives has compared to China, India, the EU and the USA. The Director was there to talk about it with us afterwards. One thing he said was that since the movie had come out President Nasheed had been deposed in a "right wing coup".

Later, outside the theater the director told a small group of us that there would be some theater distribution later in the summer. People should look for it in the paper or visit the website to find out more. Good audience numbers then could boost it into wider release. After that it will likely be shown on PBS. I told him that I found chanting "Environmental Justice NOW!" along with the protesters outside the negotiations in Copenhagen irresistible. I said I'd ask all my friends to do the same thing when they see it because that gives the climate change negotiations a "here and now" three dimensional "more than just on screen" reality. I'm hoping we can make a movement out of that!

I just finished reading Not One Drop. It talks of life in Cordova, Alaska after the cameras went away. To make a long story short, Exxon kept appealing the jury award and getting another judge to cut its value. Reading it gave me that "justice delayed is justice denied" feeling that makes me angry. Another lowlight is that the herring fishery still hasn't recovered from the oil spill. For sure that book made me never want to buy anything from Exxon again. BOYCOTT GASOLINE!