Network for Cultural Climate Adaptation

USA

Dive to “Dryland”

In the post-apocalyptic action movie "Waterworld" from 1995, all human settlements have drowned as global warming has melted the ice caps. At the time in 1995, "Waterworld" was the most expensive movie ever made and it was not a huge success. Maybe the prospect of a...

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Atoll Settlement from Waterworld (1995)

Image of the swimming settlement in the movie "Waterworld" from 1995. The settlement is called "Atoll" in the movie but in fact it is a human made swimming construction. There is no natural land left known to the population of waterworld. This sequence from the movie...

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Rear View

An image from the movie "The Wave" from 2015. In "Being Ecological" Tim Morton wonders about the prevalent mode of climate writing, which he calls "information dump", "dumping massive platefuls of facts on to us" over and over again. Morton wonders, why we do that and...

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Atlantis: The Lost Continent (1961)

This movie is certainly not of the greatest to have come out of Hollywood. But made in 1961 it is one of the first movies about Atlantis and has been influential in popularizing the myth in the 20. Century. Made with a lot of stock footage from the movie company MGM,...

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The amphibious communities of Bangkok

Three texts, three authors, three different contexts - all describing the amphibious but perilous life style of the inhabitants of Bangkok, the capital of Thailand: In her essay from 2018 on contemporary flood protection in several metropolises across Asia, researcher...

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Ho Chi Minh City

This impressive photo of the Vietnamese metropolis in the Mekong Delta was taken by Lizzie Yarina, a researcher from the MIT Urban Crisis Lab and it accompanies her insightful article "You're sea wall won't save you".

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Fear of Drowning – Aquaman and the Fate of Atlantis

Last year author Ram V and artist Christian Ward published a new three piece comic book on the DC-superhero Aquaman. (I have commented on the Aquaman movie from the same year here and here.) The story is not really about Atlantis, acording to the DC universe the...

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The gradual flood

The movie "Moonfall" from 2022 might be the worst movie ever done by Roland Emmerich, the movie director a Canadian journal aptly described as a "disaster-porn artist". Emmerich has filmed - or rather digitally created - a whole collection of gigantic flood waves over...

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A very big shark and an underwater habitat for the rich

The action movie Meg was released in 2018 and did surprisingly well at the box offices, considering that the shark-vs-man plot seems so outdated and overdone. Apparently it was two decades in the making and it feels a bit like it too watching it. Nevertheless, there...

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Leaving Planet Terror

The movie by  Robert Rodriguez from 2007 is definitely not a climate narrative. Rather "Planet Terror", a true retro flick, picks up a theme popular in the 1970s: anihilation through some mysterious chemical experiment gone havoc. Still I found the closing images...

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