New Aquarium Film Showcases Climate Solutions
November 1, 2017
The Aquarium’s new film The Time is Now, The Future is Here is designed to inspire viewers to take action in response to climate change. The film uses examples of people of all ages and various backgrounds around the world developing sustainable solutions in the face of a changing climate, from high school students who learned to make biodiesel from algae to farmers in Bangladesh growing different crops to adapt to sea level rise. It plays daily in the Aquarium’s Ocean Theater and is included with admission.
While the film acknowledges the dramatic impacts of climate change and the urgent need to act to address its impacts, it emphasizes that humanity has the ingenuity and rapidly evolving technologies to be effective in helping communities become resilient to climate change. The Time is Now features interviews with Richard Somerville, a leading climate scientist based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Per Espen Stoknes, a psychologist and economist from the Norwegian Business School in Norway; and Francisco Ayala, professor of biological sciences, philosophy, and logic and the philosophy of science at University of California, Irvine.
The film, produced in-house by the Aquarium with funding from Charlotte and Allen Ginsburg and narrated by Aquarium President and CEO Jerry Schubel, is one of the outputs from a forum cosponsored by the Aquarium and American Honda Motor Company. The forum gathered climate scientists and social scientists from across the country to develop strategies to get the public to act on climate change. The strategies developed by the forum participants, including the film, will be tested at the Aquarium with its visitors.
