Now can someone do a mashup of Ke$ha’s “Blah, Blah, Blah” with BP’s Tony Hayward?
Here’s the backstory on the video:
Somewhere Over the Gulf Coast: A “Glee” and BP Oil Disaster Mashup
by David Yarnold, executive director of Environmental Defense Fund
From a comfortable distance the BP oil disaster is depressing and horrific. But up close, it’s worse.
Two days in the Gulf of Mexico left me enraged – and deeply resolved. Both the widespread damage and the inadequacy of the response effort exceeded my worst fears. I’d spent a full day on the Gulf and we ended up soaked in oily water and seared by the journey.
By Tuesday night, I was home. My throat burned and my head was foggy and dizzy as I showed my pictures and video to my wife, Fran, and my 13-year-old daughter, Nicole, on the TV in the family room.
Images of the gooey peanut-butter colored oil and the blackened wetlands flashed by. Pictures of dolphins diving into our oily wake and brown pelicans futilely trying to pick oil off their backs popped on the screen. And, out of nowhere, Nicole put on the music from the season finale of Glee.
With all these horrific images on the screen, she had turned on the show’s final song of the year, “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” The song, a slow, sweet, ukulele and guitar-driven version, couldn’t have added a deeper sense of tragic irony.
I choked up. And then that resolve kicked in: I wanted anyone/everyone to see what our addiction to oil had done to the Gulf and to contrast that with the sense of hope and possibility that “Somewhere” exudes.
Long story short, last weekend, Peter Rice, Chairman of Fox Networks Entertainment, gave Environmental Defense Fund the green light to use the song. The pictures you’ll see were shot by two incredibly talented EDF staffers, Yuki Kokubo and Patrick Brown – and a few are mine.
The inspiration was Nicole’s. This is for her, and for all of our kids – and theirs to come.
Kudos.
Now can someone do a mashup of Ke$ha’s “Blah, Blah, Blah” with BP’s Tony Hayward?
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Very effective. I’m still crying. We may have mortally wounded the Gulf. It’s really big, so it’ll only die a little bit every day. We can’t win a war against nature.
Thanks for posting! We’ll get right on that Ke$ha/Hayward mashup :)
Obama made two astonishing claims (or pledges) in his speech:
1) that BP would pay, and
2) that we would restore the Gulf.
On the first, there seems to be a $20 billion deal — we’ll see how that plays out and whether it’s enough.
But on restoring the Gulf, is that even possible in our lifetimes?
Whether we can or not, we and Obama can use that pledge to push for clean energy. It’s a talking point that will last for our lifetimes.
i agree with you guys posting, sometimes people forget what will be the bad effect of the thing they did.
Will it recover? Probably not, but not because the environmental damage caused by oil spills is final, i.e. unrecoverable. But rather because this disaster only adds to the ongoing, slow motion calamity that is unfolding out of the public’s eye. The permanent loss of wetlands in Louisiana and east Texas caused by their drowning from subsidence (onshore oil production) and sediment loss (navigation) dwarfs the environmental losses from this spill. 30 to 40 square miles of marsh each and every year for over 40 years now. That is at least a million acres.
What if someone built a reservoir that flooded two-thirds of Everglades National Park? Would anyone be ticked off? That’s essentially what’s happened in Louisiana only the marsh has been lost to the sea.
Habitat loss doesn’t kill birds and fish outright so it doesn’t evoke the immediate sense of loss and outrage that these photos do.
But it assures the next generation of animals, birds and fish are never born.
Or as Alan Weisman states in his book The World Without Us – “We don’t have to actually shoot songbirds to remove them from the sky. Take away enough of their home or sustenance, and they fall dead on their own.”
Hopefully this disaster will spur some radical thinking and get Louisiana to finally step out of the way of significant coastal marsh restoration.
Didn’t see Glee but this is a cover of the way Israel Kamakawiwo’ole arranged this tune. I remember his funeral procession which filled tens of miles of highway from Honolulu out towards Makua.
Thanks, Chris Dudley. I knew that Glee was a cover. But they did a good job. And thanks to Fox for letting them use it. But I’m sure Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s estate would have allowed them to use his voice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bFr2SWP1I&feature=fvst
Great video, David, very moving. This is exactly the kind of artistry we need, from as many artists as can be inspired to do this kind of work in all mediums.
And there’s a tale of three daughters here, though I’m not sure Joe’s recommended Ke$ha’s “Blah, Blah, Blah” to him (and by the way, in the music video of Ke$ha vamping it up in the bowling alley I think I detected a lane violation).
To celebrate her graduation from high school, my 17-year-old daughter Sarah and I just took a road trip (there was research involved, otherwise we’re doing more backpacking, ski mountaineering, bike touring, ferry, boat and train rather than auto father-daughter trips) around Colorado.
We plugged her I-Pod into the car’s stereo system and I heard her impeccable taste in music – much more diverse and sophisticated than my own.
One of the songs that moved me to tears was Israel Kakawiwo’ole’s “Over the Rainbow” which also including an equally stunning verse from “What a Wonderful World.” The artistry of it was overwhelming. The first notes and words let you know that you’re in the presence of a master – and our common Creator.
This played together with other masterful songs – many referencing the world’s predicament – while we travelled through Summit County’s devastating pine beetle kill, drove through a still-smoldering, wind-and-drought-driven forest fire, and hiked on snowpack decimated by increased soil aridity and winds combining to blow desert dust throughout Colorado’s snowpack, which absorbs much more heat than white snow.
Along the way we talked with the rangers in Mesa Verde about deforestation and drought causing the Anasazi to abandon their outrageously beautiful homes (and discussing what future archeologists will think of our decision to pack millions into Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas); and the fact that Mesa Verde’s worst fires on record have come since 1996.
In Ouray, Colorado the president of the western hemisphere’s largest ice-climbing park told us that their three worst years for ice have all come in the last six years, despite yearly ice-climbing since the mid 1970s.
We discussed green railroading with the railroad historian and engineer of the Durango to Silverton Railroad. With electrified railroads sending power to all wheels, converting half of the freeway system to infinitely more sustainable electric rail could someday be viable, even with 7 and 8 per cent grades in places – the only thing that couldn’t make it are the incredibly heavy, mile-long coal trains that each of our 600 coal power plants burns daily and converts into both electricity and CO2.
Discussing climate change with a group of geologists from Texas A & M, one undergraduate assured me that sea level rise means the ocean will absorb all additional CO2, so there’s no problem. “You know, here are the names of some of your faculty members and those of other Texas atmospheric science professors that might have some additional insight into that” is what I said; when “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard” is what I wanted to say.
Anyway, your video David, all the comments here (and on virtually all CP posts), and even Glee’s coverage of the most beautiful arrangement imaginable of “Over the Rainbow” are all exactly the works of art we need to communicate. The late Israel Kamakawiwo’ole is an artist – and hangman’s word – for the ages.
Richard (#8),
Funny, when I walked into our Wednesday Blues Jam tonight, someone was playing Ka’au Crater Boys “Surf” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JvQwPxtNkw Lot’s of Hawaiian stuff. Might also work in this context.
I’d like to see the video as well – but all I get when I click on it here or search for it directly on YouTube is “This video is not available”. Is this perhaps only available/viewable in the U.S. but cannot be watched from elsewhere (I’m in Germany)?
[JR: Weird. Works fine here.]
Apparently YouTube has no general restrictions analogous to the region codes on DVDs. I searched the forums and found these two comments, which I think explain the matter.
and
Source: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/youtube/thread?tid=3193949229f422f9&hl=en
@Chris Winter
Thanks for digging into the forums – I wasn’t aware that GEMA was having a kind of feud with YouTube and that this might be a fallout of that.
OT but for Joe and Brenne and others with daughters here’s a nice story in today’s Houston Chronicle
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/falkenberg/7057287.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+houstonchronicle%2Fmetropolitanfalkenberg+%28chron.com+–+Lisa+Falkenberg%29
Thanks good job.
Thevideo is fine for me and I’m in the UK.
I think that the sound and images work excellently togetherbut i can’t help notice that the irony of credits for edf.com/cleanenergy is from Electricité De France, which is currently leaving several generations worth of toxic nuclear waste for the grandchildren and theirs and so on of France to deal with over the coming energy depleted century …