#michael benson

[psikonauti]

Michael Benson

North Atlantic Clouds, Terra, January 24, 2011, 2016

[contemplatingoutlander]

Opinion | A Year of Watching Earthly Beauty Burn

From orbit, satellites send tragic evidence of climate change’s destructive power. This film covers 10 days, Sept. 7-16, 2020, a period of intense fires activity in North and South America.

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.]

EARTH IS “REAPING THE WHIRLWIND” OF HUMAN FOLLY

“So what are we to make of this yin-yang spectacle, with ourselves at nature’s throat in the south and nature at ours up north? Clearly a tremendous intercontinental drama is underway. Having sown the wind with greenhouse gases for centuries, we’re reaping the whirlwind, sometimes quite literally. Add pestilence to this picture of drought, fire and flood and you have a scene straight out of the Book of Revelation, with the coronavirus, as invisible to the naked eye as it is from space, playing the role of the fourth Horseman, sent by nature to counter our continuing assaults on the natural world.”

SO HOW CAN WE STOP FURTHER DESTRUCTION?

“If the war has started and we’re losing, what can we do about it? Or to put it another way, what would I like to see happen over the next year, even if I won’t yet be able to observe it directly from my Olympian perch among the satellites? [....]

“We need an all-hands-on-deck fusion of the Manhattan Project and the Marshall Plan, only this time funded by all of the world’s major economies and led by the largest: the United States, the European Union and China.

“It’s a hallmark of the more successful viruses that they eventually stop killing their hosts, adapt and live on in symbiosis. Otherwise they risk reaching an evolutionary dead end. For myself, I’m sick of watching our home world, the birthplace of all known life, in horror and disgust at what we’re doing to it. The earth turns in steady sunlight, its temperature rising inexorably. It’s on us to reverse that fever. After all, we produced it.”

___________

Gifs were made from segments of videos in the article; frame speed was modified; photos & captions were modified to increase clarity.

[recovecosyrefrotes]

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

Ph: Michael Benson, North Atlantic Clouds, Terra

[universitybookstore]

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is widely considered to be cinema’s greatest achievement in the science fiction genre. Celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the film’s release, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson is the definitive story of the film’s creation, now available from Simon & Schuster.

[psikonauti]

Michael Benson

Mars and the Milky Way, Rosetta, December 3, 2006

[psikonauti]

Michael Benson

Night Side of Saturn, Cassini, October 28, 2006 

[conatus]

"2001: Uma odisseia no espaço", 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…

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[conatus]

"2001: Uma odisseia no espaço", Michael Benson

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,…

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