Below is a guest blog from our friends who helped make the documentary film SHORED UP.
What do surfers in New Jersey, the Army Corps of Engineers, and sea level rise have to do with each other?
What are barrier islands and what do they tell us about the future of our coasts? The documentary SHORED UP weaves these threads together and shows us how urgently we must act. Here’s a peek at the trailer for some of SHORED UP’s answers:
Shored Up Trailer from Mangrove Media on Vimeo.
Buried in the usual headlines this week was the release of one of the most data-rich studies yet on global warming, produced by an independent group called the Berkeley Earth Project.
What made this report remarkable was not its further confirmation that the planet is warming (it is) but that the study was funded in large part by climate change skeptics who’d expected the study would disprove global warming. So much for getting what you pay for.
Click the link below to read on….
So what does this have to do with SHORED UP, a documentary about surfing, barrier islands and beach engineering in New Jersey and other low-lying coastal communities? As it turns out sea level rise is one of the most reliably predictable results of this warming, and with more than 50% of Americans living in coastal communities we’re right in harms way. As the Berkeley Earth Project once again verifies, we’re on a collision course with nature. With warming planet and rising seas, we need to start getting serious about how we develop, protect, and live in our coastal communities where we’re going to come face-to-face with what it means to live on a changing planet.
What will global warming and sea level rise mean for the towns and cities of our coasts, and how will we all adapt? These aren’t the types of questions most of us entertain while we’re sitting on a beach chair under an umbrella. They’re big and messy and complex and there are no painless solutions. But it turns out that these beaches where we escape to as a break from our reality are under a lot of stress themselves. There isn’t enough sand in the sea to save them if we don’t drastically cut our emissions and bend the curve for sea level rise. It’s time to put that romance novel down and take a long look out towards the horizon.
Ben Kalina is a filmmaker based in Philadelphia, whose work explores the intersection of science, culture and the environment. He’s in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign to finish his current film, Shored Up and you can learn more about it and how to support the film at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/shoredup/shored-up, or at the film’s official website at www.shoredupmovie.com. Ben is the Creative Director at Evidence Based Media, and the President of Mangrove Media.