Film

Film Script:

Here is a podcast of a potential film script:

https://soundcloud.com/misha-kleider/the-ocean-is-eating-vancouver

Here is a word document of the same film script:

Vancouver is feeling the wrath of a hungry ocean. Large parts of Vancouver are being swallowed by the sea.

Why has the ocean become so hungry?! The answer is climate change. The ocean is being heated… which causes it to expand. And when the ocean expands it eats up the land through erosion. By 2100, large sections of Vancouver city will be eaten by the ocean. Vancouver is being eaten as we speak. Every year, the sea rises 1cm… That seems like just a nibble, but in 100 years, all those nibbles will add up to 1 full meter of sea level rise–which is a huge bite out of the city. Large sections of Vancouver will be submerged under water! Jericho, Kits, False Creek, The sea-wall… under water!

The oceans appetite for our city is nothing new. The ocean has been eating Vancouver for 12,000 years. All this land eating would have gone back even further, but 12,000 years ago Vancouver and the rest of Canada was smothers by a huge ice sheet that separating the ocean from the land. This thick icey hug of ice prevented the ocean from eating Vancouver–and the rest of Canada for that matter. Hello Canada 12,000 years ago! You look… icey. That’s right. There was not a single tree in Canada 12,000 years ago. There was only ice. This massive glacier covered Vancouver under 2kms of ice! 

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11,000 years ago the glacier on top of Vancouver began to recede, leaving a rock scared landscape in its wake.

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When the glacier receded, the water came back into Vancouver and carved out habitat for all kinds of sea life. False Creek used to be 3 times larger than it is now! It was so big that huge humpback whales would hang out here.

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Then modern humans happened. We colonized Vancouver 150 years ago and declared war on the ocean.  We killed off the humpback whales and shrank False Creek to a small fraction of it’s previous size by filling it in with a concrete city that looks part glass termite mound and part computer chip.

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But the ocean isn’t happy about what the we have done. And now that its getting bigger it wants it’s land back. So it’s gobbling up our city.

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Let’s look at False Creek in particular. Here is an image of Vancouver that shows where the ocean will be in 100 years. All that light blue that you see on the map is where the ocean will rise too.

screen-shot-2016-11-25-at-1-15-03-pmThis is an image of Vancouver with the original coast line coloured in to show where it used to be in pre-colonial times:

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The image of Vancouver’s coast line 100 years in the future and Vancouver’s coastline a 150 years in the past looks the same! Essentially the ocean is reclaiming the land that we took from her.

Left to itself, the ocean will eat up the land. But humans flip the script. With our help, the land eats the ocean. Modern humans shift ten times as much material on the Earth’s surface as all natural geological processes put together: including erosion. We’re good at shifting land around. That’s what we do… Just look at the amount of land that we have shifted around in Vancouver over the last 20 years:

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For the estimated cost of 10 billion, we could shift some more land around and build dikes that protect Vancouver from sea level rise for the next 100 years.

The question is, do we want to?  

Few of us will live to see Vancouver in 100 years. Fewer still will live in this habitat their entire lives. Most of Vancouver’s population rents. So in the wake of skyrocketing prices, it’s unclear who will be living in Vancouver in 20 years. But chances are that if you don’t have a lot of money, it probably won’t be you. And that’s just the next 20 years, never mind 100. So the next question is, do we want to preserve Vancouver for the wealthy humans who will probably live here in 100 years? Or do we want to let the ocean take the land back…giving it to the free living organisms of the sea who are dying to have their habitat back.

What do you think?