Emerson College Library: Teach-In on Sustainability Fall 2024: Ecocinema Screening and Discussions: Deep Rising

Ecocinema Screening and Discussion: Deep Rising

Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour: Talking Compassionately About Suffering and Life’s End

Thursday, November 21, 5:30 pm-8:00 pm EST
5:30 to 6:00 p.m. - Refreshments and hors d'oeuvres
6:00 to 8:00 p.m. - Screening and Discussion

Presenters:

Hunter Vaughan, Visual and Media Arts

Description:

Join the MFA students of the Environmental Media Studies graduate seminar for a screening and discussion of the Deep Rising (2023), a documentary feature about the race to mine the deep sea floor for the rare metals necessary to many 21st-century technologies, including renewable energy storage. Capturing the conflict between oceanic ecosystem stability and green energy futures, the film (narrated by Jason Mamoa) offers visual representation to the complex splendor of a rarely seen biome, casts light on the struggles between corporate power and the UN's International Seabed Authority, and illuminates crucial contradictions in current climate crisis solutions.

LocationSustainable Development Goal

Bright Family Screening Room, Paramount Center
559 Washington St., Boston, MA 02116

Sustainable Development Goal

Sustainable Development Goal 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
Sustainable Development Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.
Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
Sustainable Development Goal 14: Conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resources.

Watch Deep Rising

Deep Rising
Matthieu Rytz returns to Sundance (Anote's Ark, 2018) with this up-to-the-minute tale of geopolitical, scientific, and corporate intrigue that exposes the machinations of a secretive organization empowered to green light massive extraction of metals from the deep seafloor that are deemed essential to the electric battery revolution.

Resources at Emerson

Signal Traffic by Lisa Parks (Editor); Nicole Starosielski (Editor)
The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure--transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like--intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus.
The Undersea Network by Nicole Starosielski
In The Undersea Network Nicole Starosielski follows these cables from the ocean depths to their landing zones on the sandy beaches of the South Pacific, bringing them to the surface of media scholarship and making visible the materiality of the wired network. Accompanying the book is an interactive digital mapping project, where readers can trace cable routes, view photographs and archival materials, and read stories about the island cable hubs.

Sustainable Development Goal 7: Affordable and Clean Energy

The United Nations describes this goal as "about ensuring access to clean and affordable energy, which is key to the development of agriculture, business, communications, education, healthcare and transportation. The lack of access to energy hinders economic and human development. Achieving energy and climate goals will require continued policy support and a massive mobilization of public and private capital for clean and renewable energy, especially in developing countries."

Sustainable Development Goal 9: Industries, Innovation and Infrastructure

The United Nations states the purpose of this goal is "to build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation. Economic growth, social development and climate action are heavily dependent on investments in infrastructure, sustainable industrial development and technological progress. In the face of a rapidly changing global economic landscape and increasing inequalities, sustained growth must include industrialization that first of all, makes opportunities accessible to all people, and second, is supported by innovation and resilient infrastructure."

Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action

The United Nations highlights the importance of this goal, stating "The global temperature has already risen 1.1ºC above the pre-industrial level, with glaciers melting and the sea level rising. Impacts of climate change also includes flooding and drought, displacing millions of people, sinking them into poverty and hunger, denying them access to basic services, such as health and education, expanding inequalities, stifling economic growth and even causing conflict. By 2030, an estimated 700 million people will be at risk of displacement by drought alone."

Sustainable Development Goal 14: Life Below Water

The United Nations describes the purpose of this goal is "conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resources. Healthy oceans and seas are essential to human existence and life on Earth. [...] Careful management of this essential global resource is a key feature of a sustainable future. This includes increasing funding for ocean science, intensifying conservation efforts, and urgently turning the tide on climate change to safeguard the planet’s largest ecosystem. Current efforts to protect are not yet meeting the urgent need to safeguard this vast, yet fragile, resource."