The Sustainable Tucson August Film Festival features five top-rated sustainability films covering timely subjects from the financial crisis to climate change to

Sustainable Tucson will show 5 top-rated sustainability films
covering critical sustainability topics:

* The U.S. financial crisis erupted in 2008 and still looms on the horizon.
* Resource depletion including non-renewable fossil fuels and clean water threatens further economic growth.
* Global warming and climate change threaten most life-forms including people and future food.
* Social disruption following economic dislocation and government contraction can threaten our capacity to solve-problems and build a more sustainable culture.
* Many solutions are being identified but most require abandoning “business as usual.”

Sunday, August 12th.

1) 11th Hour    1:00 – 2:30pm, is a comprehensive presentation of the sustainability crisis and a pathway out of our predicament. Many sustainability leaders are interviewed including  Wes Jackson, Paul Hawken, David Suzuki, Kenny Ausubel, David Orr, Janine Benyus,, Stuart Pimm, Richard Heinberg, Paolo Soleri, Thom Hartmann, Lester Brown, James Hillman, Joseph Tainter, James Woolsey, Stephen Schneider, Stephen Hawking, Sandra Postel,  Bill McKibbon, James Hansen, Dr. Andy Weil, Ray Anderson, Andy Lipkis, Tom Linzey, Herman Daly, Peter Warshall, Jerry Mander, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bruce Mau, William McDonough, John Todd, and Gloria Flora among others.

2) Inside Job     2:30 – 4:15pm, is an award-winning documentary describing the financial crisis which erupted in 2008 and continues to play out today as the global economy is beginning to contract. Financial experts help tell the story of how the largest financial bubble in history grew and finally burst. These include Simon Johnson, George Soros, Satyajit Das, Paul Volker, Nouriel Roubini, U. S. Rep. Barney Frank, Kenneth Rogoff, Raghuram Rajan, Martin Wolf, Christine Lagarde, and among others.

3) Power of Community    4:15 – 5:00pm, is a special film describing how the island nation of Cuba became more self- sufficient and resilient after the food and energy subsidies ended from the Soviet Union which collapsed in 1991.

Monday, August 13th,

1)  Taken For A Ride 5:00 – 6:00pm, is a documentary about how the many electric street car systems in U.S towns and cities were intentionally scrapped by a group of automobile-related corporations. The result is that the U.S. is the only industrial country in the world without electric rail systems within and between most cities.

2) Blind Spot   6:15 – 7:45pm, is a comprehensive presentation of the sustainability crisis and the need to find a pathway out of our predicament. Many sustainability leaders are interviewed including Richard Heinberg, Lester Brown, U. S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, Albert Bartlett, Joseph Tainter, David Pimental, Terry Tamminen, Bill McKibben, James Hansen, David Korten, Derrick Jensen, and William R. Catton, Jr. among others.

Sustainable Tucson August Film Festival  – August 12th and 13th

Joel D. Valdez Main Downtown Library, Large Lower Level Meeting Room,
101 N. Stone, Tucson, AZ

Free lower level parking off Alameda St.

Doors open at 1:00 pm on Sunday, August 12th.
Doors open at 4:45 pm on Monday, August 13th.

Two talks this week from a leading climatologist and climate modeler at the University of Arizona this week. From the UA Institute of the Environment:

Ronald Stouffer, one of the world’s leading climate modelers will give two talks at the University of Arizona this week.

On Nov. 2 he will discuss climate change, the reliability of climate models, and how certain climate scientists are in their findings during his talk, “What You Need to Know about Climate Change,” from 7 to 8 p.m. in the Harvill Building, room 150.

On Nov. 3 he will present “An Analysis of Past Carbon Changes and an Assessment of Certainties Associated with Future Changes” from 4 to 5 p.m. in the Haury Building, room 129, as part of the Geosciences colloquium series.

From Wired.com this piece on the recent megafires devouring the southwest and how they may change the ecology in the area forever:

Megafires May Change the Southwest Forever

By Brandon Keim

The plants and animals of the southwestern United States are adapted to fire, but not to the sort of super-sized, super-intense fires now raging in Arizona.

The product of drought and human mismanagement, these so-called megafires may change the southwest’s ecology. Mountainside Ponderosa forests could be erased, possibly forever. Fire may become the latest way in which people are profoundly altering modern landscapes.

“If a few acres burn, a forest can recover. But at really large scales, the opportunity to recover is limited,” said forest ecologist Dan Binkley of Colorado State University. “The large-scale devastation has taken away the ecological future.”

Fire itself is not rare in the southwest. It’s a constant feature, not at all distressing, a fact obscured by the tendency of local news stations to seize upon dramatic footage of every flame-encroached house.

But fires like the ongoing Wallow fire, already the largest in Arizona’s recorded history, and the record fires seen in Texas in April, are fairly unusual. They used to happen every few centuries, but now seem to happen every few years.

That’s partly because of a severe ongoing drought, but also because people have spent the last century trying to protect settled areas by putting out every small fire. That allows shrubs to grow, needles and twigs to gather on the ground, and low-hanging branches to spread. The southwestern region known as the Sky Islands, where tree-covered mountain ranges rise from desert valleys, has become a series of tinderboxes.

A burn map of the Miller fire, with severe areas in red. (Google Maps/USDA/DigitalGlobe)

To show how fire traditionally behaved, fire ecologist Don Falk of the University of Arizona pointed to the Miller fire, a blaze that started in May in the Gila National Forest. Because the region is so sparsely settled, forest managers have historically allowed burns to run their course. The latest fire covered 90,000 acres, but it wasn’t intense. Animals could escape and completely defoliated areas were small.

“Ecologically, this is the way fire almost always used to behave in the U.S. southwest,” said Falk. “It never looked like Horseshoe.”

A burn map of the Horseshoe fire, with severe areas in red. (Google Maps/USDA/DigitalGlobe)

The Horseshoe fire also started in May, in the Coronado National Forest. With more people living nearby, forest managers there have historically contained and prevented fires. This time it couldn’t be controlled. The character of the fire was evident not just in size, but intensity: Burn maps show many areas of bright red severity.

At very high elevations, that’s not a problem, said Falk. Because a cooler, wetter climate makes it hard for small fires to start in those areas, history shows that rare but serious fires are the norm. At lower and middle elevations, however, large areas of severe burning are an aberration.

“We can use old tree ring analyses to see when fires started. We don’t see tens or hundreds of thousands of acres of high-severity burns,” said Falk. “The patches are bigger now. And patch size matters because large patches are immediately prone to erosion.”

A small burned patch will soon regrow, as seeds arrive via breeze and bird. But if severely burned patch is thousands of acres across, it can take years for seeds to reach the center, said Falk. In the meantime, soil will blow away. Drought conditions also affect the type of plants that will regrow.

“The sorts of plants that thrive during droughts are different than those that survive in normal times,” said Falk. For at least the next few centuries, if not millenniums, towering Ponderosa forests will not come back. Instead there will be pine and Gambel oak and New Mexico locust trees. “It will convert to a more shrubby ecosystem. The system will have gone past the tipping point.”

To prevent all this, people need to strike a balance with fire, said Falk. “We have to let fire back into the system. Right now, we’re excluding an essential part of how these ecosystems work,” he said. “Fire is not something that happens to ecosystems. It’s not like a hurricane or tornado or earthquake. It’s something they do. When you exclude it from the system, you’ll pay the price later.”

Image: Colorized satellite photograph of the Wallow fire. Fire areas are in red. The town of Eagar, Arizona is in the upper-center. (NASA/USGS)