Following his Academy Award® nominated film The Theory of Everything, James Marsh directs the incredible true story of Donald Crowhurst (Colin Firth), an amateur sailor who competed in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race in the hope of becoming the first person in history to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe without stopping.
With an unfinished boat and his business and house on the line, Donald leaves his wife, Clare (Rachel Weisz) and their children behind, hesitantly embarking on an adventure on his boat the Teignmouth Electron.
The story of Crowhurst's dangerous solo voyage and the struggles he confronted on the epic journey while his wife Clare and their family awaited his return is one of the most enduring mysteries of recent times.
The somewhat dispiriting real-life story of Donald Crowhurst, the amateur sailor who in 1968-9 lost his pride, his mind and then his life in a single-handed yacht race to circumnavigate the world, has long exerted a fascination for film-makers.
Nicolas Roeg once tried to film the story.
In 2006, the documentary Deep Water explored the tragedy.
And this big-budget take on the tale, buoyed up by the star power of Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz, was made at the same time as a smaller rival project, Crowhurst by Simon Rumley.
Deep Water is a documentary film, directed by Jerry Rothwell and Louise Osmond, produced by Jonny Persey.
It is based on the true story of Donald Crowhurst and the 1969 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race round the world alone in a yacht.
'"We are all human beings and we all have dreams."
Deep Water, beautifully narrated by Tilda Swinton, is a moving and totally absorbing account of one man who gets in over his head both physically and morally.
The small boat becomes a microcosm for life where a person has to find their own rules.
Crowhurst's journey is not the journey of Sunday Times heroes, but of a man.
His dilemma is dangerously easy to identify with.
This is an incredibly moving story - if you don't already know the historical details, do see the film first.
One can see the attraction of the story to director James Marsh: Crowhurst (Firth) has a similar maverick eccentricity and forceful self-belief to that of high-wire walker Philippe Petit, the subject of his documentary Man on Wire.
But for all its technical prowess – the sound design, all groaning metal and hectoring waves, is particularly effective – this account of inexorably crushed dreams is kind of a downer.
Unlike the steely resilience in the face of disaster of Robert Redford’s character in All Is Lost, watching Crowhurst slowly crack is the cinema equivalent of filling your pockets with pebbles and chucking yourself into the Solent.
The story of Nigel, a seabird who lived and died among concrete decoys on a rocky New Zealand island, flew around the world last week.
It was widely received as a tragedy.
Here was a beautiful gannet bird who had been lured to a strange place by humans.
In the face of solitude, he directed his mating instincts toward a false love interest: a painted decoy, still and stone-hearted, eternally oblivious to his wooing.
Years passed, no other gannets arrived, and there Nigel died, alone in the nest he built his cement princess.
But conservationists are not mourning his fate.
Nigel, they say, was a hero among gannets — a tragic hero, maybe, but a hero nonetheless.
Nigel the gannet and two concrete friends.
(New Zealand Department of Conservation)
“He was a pioneering spirit,” said Stephen Kress, vice president of bird conservation at the National Audubon Society.
“Was he a brave pioneer or a foolish pioneer? I would think of him as a brave pioneer, because it isn’t easy to live on the edge like that.”
Kress knows something about being a pioneer.
In the early 1970s, he came up with the idea of using decoys and recorded bird calls to attract seabirds to islands.
He was trying to reestablish a colony of Atlantic puffins on Eastern Egg Rock, a Maine island where hunters had wiped out the birds a century before.
But the method he was using — moving chicks to the island and hoping they’d come back to nest there — was not working.
They weren’t returning.
Then Kress had a revelation.
“It kind of hit me one day that the thing that was missing for this highly social bird, that always nests in colonies, was others of its kind,” Kress said.
“I put out some decoys, and almost immediately puffins started appearing.”
A photo of Nigel’s favorite spot, taken a few days after his death.
(New Zealand Department of Conservation)
He also broadcast puffin calls, because puffins are vocal.
And he put out mirrors, because although the birds were savvy enough to lose interest in an immobile model, they seemed “fooled” into believing their own reflections were peers, Kress said.
As of last summer, Eastern Egg Rock was home to 172 puffin breeding pairs.
And Kress’s method, known as “social attraction,” is now used worldwide to start seabird colonies on islands.
That includes in New Zealand, where gannets are not endangered but are clustered in just a few places.
Wildlife officials would like them to be “more geographically diverse,” said Chris Bell, a conservation ranger who is the sole human inhabitant of Mana Island, where Nigel made his home.
Mana was deemed a good site for a gannet social attraction project because invasive predators have been eradicated and because the birds, with their fertilizing guano, could help “restore the kind of ecosystem [the island] had before humans arrived,” he said in an email.
Mana island with the GeoGarage platform (Linz nautical chart)
Yet such projects depend on birds that defy their deep instinct to return to their birthplace — a tendency known as philopatry.
In other words, success depends on Nigels.
“Without birds like Nigel, there wouldn’t be any new colonies.
The species would be locked into this philopatric pattern,” leaving it vulnerable to wipeouts caused by introduced predators or sea-level rise or illness, Kress said.
“He’s a hero! He gave it all for the species. He tried.”
The Mana project began in the late 1990s, when schoolchildren first painted gannet decoys, but it was not until 2015 that a real one — Nigel — showed up.
By staying, Bell said, Nigel acted as a living, breathing advertisement for the spot.
In recent months, after Bell and colleagues moved the speakers playing gannet calls closer to the decoy colony, three more gannets showed up.
Gannets “like to see that other birds have gone there before they trust a place,” he said.
“The three regular birds we currently have are Nigel’s legacy.”
Chris Bell, a conservation ranger on Mana Island, and some of the 80 concrete gannet decoys used to attract real gannets.
(New Zealand Department of Conservation)
Despite the bird’s isolation, Bell said New Zealand conservation officials never considered relocating Nigel.
Gannets are known to fly thousands of miles between Australia and New Zealand; Mana Island is located just two miles from New Zealand’s North Island.
“Nigel was a free agent,” said Bell, who added that officials are performing a necropsy to confirm the bird’s cause of death, which they suspect was old age.
His infatuation with a decoy “was odd behavior for a gannet, but every group has their individuals.”
Many seabirds attracted to islands by decoys leave early on, Kress said.
Nigel may simply have seen advantages in Mana that his fellow gannets did not: a sense of peace, a lack of crowds, a strife-free relationship.
“Either they’re going to attract other members of their kind, or they’ll give up and they’ll leave,” Kress said.
“Nigel could have done either of those things.
But time caught up with him.”
Steve Leonard and a group of conservationists attach tiny gadgets to the feathers of a Gannet
to learn how they eat and fly out in the deep oceans.
It was welcome news when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada will use its year-long G7 presidency to turn the global spotlight on ocean plastics and pollution.
Environment Minister Catherine McKenna has said plastics will be a main theme of June’s summit when leaders from Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States join Trudeau in Charlevoix, Quebec.
But can Canada move these nations to establish enforceable rules?
The G7 has raised the plastics issue before.
The Germans launched an action plan to combat marine litter in 2015 and Japan reaffirmed the commitment to address the problem in 2016.
During the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos later that year, headlines blared “More Plastic than Fish in the Sea by 2050” after the release of a report on global plastic waste.
In 2017, Italy held a workshop on marine litter during its G7 presidency.
Promises proliferate while plastic waste piles up
But despite these promises, plastic production and waste continues to grow.
Globally, millions of metric tonnes of plastic waste enter the ocean each year.
In 2010, for example, between 4.8 million and 12.7 million metric tonnes of plastic hit the water. That’s equivalent to dumping a garbage truck of plastic into marine waters every minute.
Alarmingly, production of single-use plastic, like grocery bags, contributed nearly 40 per cent of total plastic production in 2015.
Many end up in our oceans.
Boris Worm, a marine scientist at the Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, has warned that if current trends continue, we’ll face a new “Silent Spring” of the seas.
Today, close to 90 per cent of seabirds have plastics in their guts, similar to the ubiquitous presence of the toxic chemical DDT in the 1960s, the focus of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring.
These voluntary international pledges are failing to stem the plastic tide.
Controlling plastic pollution on land could limit what ends up in the sea.
Most of the plastic in the sea comes from land.
Most of it is not abandoned fishing gear, but plastic bags, milk and water bottles, and consumer goods like flip-flops dumped into waterways and washed out to sea.
We’ve recognized this for years — more than 100 countries have endorsed efforts to reduce the impacts of marine litter worldwide since 1995.
But that was also a non-binding agreement.
Since then, promises to cut ocean plastics have proliferated, including the 2011 Honolulu Strategy and “The Future We Want” agreement at the 2012 Rio+20 conference.
The 2015 Oceans Goal, one of the UN’s 20 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), repeats the target of significant marine pollution reduction.
And last year, the United Nations Environmental Programme launched its “war on plastic” with the Clean Seas campaign, which aims to eliminate microplastics in cosmetics and the wasteful usage of single-use plastic by the year 2022. Law rules
What we lack are binding rules for land-based sources of plastic pollution that apply to countries around the world.
As the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) noted: “Current initiatives to tackle plastic pollution focus on the symptoms but not the root of the problem.”
At home, Trudeau can support the development of a coordinated national strategy to combat plastics pollution, backed up by law.
There’s plenty of evidence that voluntary actions aren’t enough.
In 2000, Canada was the first country to act with a National Plan of Action on land-based sources of marine pollution.
But with no legal mechanism to compel action, the national plan to keep plastic pollution from entering the sea has languished.
It would be a step forward even if the G7 only acknowledged the need for binding laws.
G7 to the rescue?
Still more can be done. Canada can start a race to the top to see who can put the best laws in place, and who can reap the gains from a new plastic economy.
Trudeau can convince his fellow G7 leaders to emulate Canada’s new regulations that prohibit the manufacture, import and sale of personal toiletry products that contain plastic microbeads.
The G7 leaders can share their experiences on what’s worked well for them, whether it’s the European Union’s new Plastics Strategy and legislative initiative on single-use plastics, France’s ban on plastic cups and plates, or the U.S. initiative called Save Our Seas Act.
Canada could plan a “Plastic-Free Day” during the meeting, or host an ocean plastics art competition at the Charlevoix venue with entries from all G7 nations.
It could help to bring industry on side by showcasing promising initiatives like the New Plastics Economy, focused on increasing recapture, reuse and recycling of plastics.
And it could screen a heart-wrenching film like Blue for the world leaders.
A bold step forward would be a G7 agreement to fast-track an international plastics treaty.
Plastic waste is increasing in the supposedly pristine wilderness of the Arctic.
Scientists say almost everywhere they have looked in the Arctic Ocean, they’ve found plastic pollution.
In the northern fjords of Norway, one man is on a mission to pick up as much plastic as he can.
Video journalist: Charlotte Pamment
End game: A plastic pollution treaty
Canada can build on its past leadership on environmental treaties, such as the Montreal Protocol that eliminated more than 99 per cent of ozone-depleting substances globally, to tackle marine plastic pollution.
During the G7 presidency, Trudeau can take the lead to initiate an international treaty that sets global reduction targets for the production and consumption of plastics, and regulates their production, consumption, disposal and clean-up.
At the U.N. Environment Assembly in December, nations failed to include any reductions targets or a timetable in their resolution on marine litter and microplastics.
They did, however, establish a group to “further examine the barriers to, and options for, combating marine plastic litter and microplastics from all sources, especially land-based sources.”
This group can recommend the formation of a treaty.
If the G7 were to endorse this idea, it might get the international treaty-making machinery moving even more quickly.
There are many proposals at hand.
One based on the Montreal Protocol — widely regarded as one of the world’s most successful environmental agreements — would impose caps on plastics production and trade bans.
Another points to the climate treaty, with countries setting a binding plastics goal and then developing national action plans.
Alternatively, others call for an agreement that institutes a waste hierarchy, where plastics are first reduced, then reused, re-purposed and finally recycled, and creates a global fund to help pay for better waste management practices and infrastructure.
But successful treaties need industry involvement — and commitment to change.
A recent CIEL report traces industry awareness of the ocean plastics problem back to the 1970s.
There is no time for the kind of industry denial we’ve seen regarding climate change.
It’s an opportune time for Canada to use its G7 leadership to avert another Silent Spring and begin tackling the problem of plastics in the oceans. Links :
