“Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth”
Monday July 29, 02013 at the Marines’ Memorial Theater, San Francisco
When thinking about the planet, climate change, and our environmental future, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers and lose track of what things actually look like on the ground. Enter Craig Childs, one of the world’s great intrepid travelers and story-tellers. Childs has written over a dozen critically-acclaimed books, as well as being a regular contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition and many other publications.
Childs finds the places on Earth that are most geologically or climatically dangerous and hangs out, observing closely, giving personal as well as scientific perspective. There are places across the planet that give hints as to what life would look like with a radical environmental upheaval– landscapes of ice, lava, salt-water, dust, and rock.
These ecosystems stay at the margins of our inhabited landscapes, waiting for the right combination of conditions that allow them to expand once again. At different points in Earth’s history the planet has been dominated by each of these landscapes–and yet very few people visit these historic ecosystems.
Craig Childs’ stories alternate between scientific narrative and dream-like vision, stark warning and poetic celebration. The landscapes he documents are often some of the most remote and desolate on the planet, and yet Childs always manages to find the few life-forms that manage to survive these climates. His stories from the edges of the world allow us a glimpse into our planet’s past and–very likely– much of its future.
To learn more about the ecological systems that dominated our planet for millions of years, come see Craig Childs at the Marine Memorial Theatre on Monday, July 29th.
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