Last Wednesday, I joined a large group of Rose Scholars and watched the documentary Fragile Legacy. It talked mainly about the Blaschka glass models of invertebrates in the ocean, but also touched on the sustainability of marine ecosystems. While it was a powerful combination of art, science and conservation, I do think that the movie could have been a little bit longer and gone into even more depth about the sustainability aspect of it all. It clearly states that things have changed dramatically in the ocean, but it gives quite a gentle push toward change and does not give as lucid directions as to how this change could come about. But maybe that was never the intention with this documentary? Maybe its purpose was instead to stay away from causing people guilt, and to be an eye-opener that might appeal to people who are not completely comfortable about having the knowledge of climate change. And the documentary does deal with exactly those feelings. There is a clip when a man (I believe the director) sits on a rock and talks about the enormous feelings that climate change produces in the people who choose not to look away from the issue. And I do think that this movie’s purpose was maybe not to educate fully, but to serve more as a push for people to educate themselves.

After the documentary was shown, we talked to Professor Drew Harvell about the process of making the movie and her role in it. We also discussed the loss of the starfish along the western coast. She explained for those who did not know, what a keystone species is; namely a species that regulates the abundance of a lot of other species. She however hesitated to draw too strong of a line between global warming and the deaths of the starfish, choosing instead to settle on the fact that while we do not know for sure, we can know that the process of disease spreading was sped up by the increasing temperatures in the oceans.

Overall, I thought this was a good and thought-provoking movie, and I wish that more people would see it- especially people who are hesitant to take on those enormous feelings of fear related to climate change- because it does a good job of explaining the issue at hand in a clear manner without being too harsh.