#michael benson

Michael Benson

Michael Benson’s recent New York Times opinion column offered a poignant photo, video, and prose commentary about how the Earth appears from space when huge parts of it are burning. Here are some excerpts:

“I have a pastime, one that used to give me considerable pleasure, but lately it has morphed into a source of anxiety, even horror: earth-watching. [....]

“[Earth’s] a stage, the only one we’ve ever known. All the individuals who’ve strutted and fretted here for millenniums, or for that matter fled and trembled, producing what we call history, are merely players. But even by the standards of that problematic legacy, this latest period seems different. It’s more worrisome, more global, and with increasing frequency, more terrifying.”

AUSTRALIA BURNING FROM SPACE

“Last winter, for example, Australia experienced one of the worst brushfire seasons in its history....A plume of smoke extended outward from the continent’s southeastern quarter, a region twice the size of Texas....carrying the color of the land it came from, that noxious exhalation bore the residue of a billion or more incinerated animals and innumerable plants, baked into tinder from decades of ever-hotter summers.” 

SOUTH AMERICA BURNING FROM SPACE

“South America’s fires were the result of a willful slash-and-burn assault on the world’s largest remaining tropical forests and wetlands.... By late September the already hellish 2019 escalation in deliberately set forest fires had been exceeded by 28 percent, with more than 44,000 outbreaks recorded in the Amazon and Pantanal this year.

“Seen from space, the resulting haze spanned approximately six million square miles. It’s unnerving to witness such enveloping madness. The Amazon rainforest is home to some 200 Indigenous tribes. It’s a priceless reservoir of biodiversity....It is also the world’s largest remaining carbon sink, capable of mitigating global warming by absorbing vast quantities of atmospheric carbon dioxide. But you can’t ask it to absorb the results of its own incineration.”

THE U.S. WEST COAST BURNING FROM SPACE

“Meanwhile, North America’s Pacific Coast was choking under successive waves of fume and ash. As with Australia, the forests, chaparral and grasslands of California, Oregon and Washington State had been rendered explosive by a chain of summers so searing that by mid-August this year, Death Valley’s temperature spiked to 130 degrees Fahrenheit — probably the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth. [....]

“At its source, soot, ash and dust made the air quality of the continent’s western quarter the worst in the world. The intensity of the flames pumped smoke to an altitude four miles higher than a cruising jumbo jet. [....]

“By September’s end, nearly six million acres had burned on the coast, directly killing more than two dozen people, not counting the strokes, asthma attacks and heart attacks triggered by the smoke. Stanford University researchers estimated those deaths at between 1,000 and 3,000.”

[See more under the cut.]

A pesar de todo, continuamos amando; y ese «a pesar de todo» cubre un infinito.                                                                                         E. M. Cioran

Michael Benson

Michael Benson

Este livro é uma imersão visual e analítica no processo criativo por trás de ‘2001: Uma Odisseia no Espaço’, o icônico filme de Stanley Kubrick. Michael Benson desvenda os bastidores da produção, os debates filosóficos e científicos que moldaram a narrativa e o impacto cultural que a obra teve no imaginário da ficção científica. Ricamente ilustrado, o volume é um tributo ao gênio cinematográfico…

Neste fascinante relato, Michael Benson reconstrói a odisseia da missão espacial mais icônica da história do cinema e da ciência: ‘2001: Uma odisseia no espaço’. A obra narra os bastidores da colaboração entre Stanley Kubrick e Arthur C. Clarke, explorando como arte e ciência se fundiram para criar uma visão do futuro que ainda hoje ecoa no imaginário coletivo. Benson investiga arquivos,…