OutdoorAfro's Rue Mapp Goes to Camp

This Friday, OutdoorAfro.com founder Rue Mapp will head to California's Sierra Nevada foothills to document a weekend of outdoor adventures with her nephew and three children. Blogging and tweeting from a trailer provided by American River Sales and Rentals, Mapp hopes to change the way people think about camping.

Mapp founded OutdoorAfro in 2009 to get African-Americans excited about getting outdoors. The website lists outdoor events and lets readers connect with each another to schedule nature-based activities. It also displays photos, videos, and stories from excursions.

For this weekend's adventure, Mapp will try something new. A longtime tent devotee, she'll document her first experience in a trailer. "People tend to think of camping as a minimal-comfort experience: sleeping on the ground or in a tent in the backcountry," said Mapp. " Using a trailer as a base camp, you can enjoy nature and be comfortable too."

Movie Review Friday: A Fall From Freedom

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film with an environmental theme. Seen a good eco-flick lately? Send us a short review and look for it in the next Movie Review Friday.

A Fall From Freedom (2011)

Available on DVD, or online for free

If you’re a child of the '90s, you probably watched Free Willy and felt connected to its anthropomorphized protagonist. Maybe you started to question the holding tanks and sideshows that have been penting up sea mammals for entertainment purposes since the '60s. After Willy, though, there were plenty of exposés of the inhumane world of captive cetaceans, targeted especially at outfits like SeaWorld.

If the arguments put forth by such activists moved you, so will A Fall From Freedom. A sugar-free swan song of its producers, much of its footage is from the '80s and '90s. After all, the anti-captivity movement has quieted since then. It isn’t a movie made to convince nonbelievers. The images of dolphins being slaughtered by the hundreds and orcas being piled into a small, dingy tank are compelling and grotesque, but polarizing in their extremeness. In this film, the captors (read: SeaWorld execs) are cruel liars, and each point they make is almost immediately rebuked by a scientist or activist. One man claims never to have met Japanese dolphin hunters; two seconds later, another man drops his name as their former liaison. Too lopsided a portrayal?

Book Review Wednesday: Life on Rivers

Every Wednesday, we review a selection of new and upcoming books addressing a specific aspect of environmentalism. Today we're recommending books about rivers.

Up on the River: People and Wildlife of the Upper Mississippi (by John Madson, $20, University of Iowa Press, 2011): Drawing on a lifetime of experience along the banks of the Mississippi, Madson shares a multifaceted and engaging depth of insight about the river's interacting parts. Up on the River shifts between personal and historical anecdotes, conservational concerns, and fish-wrangling trips down the river. From the "civilization" of Harper's Ferry to the decimation of sturgeon and shellfish populations, Madson depicts a river that has changed significantly but not lost its soul. His witty, critical tone colors him a native and true scholar of the river. This reissue is a brisk read despite the specificity of its subject.

Once Upon a River (by Bonnie Jo Campbell, W.W. Norton & Co., $26, 2011): Margo Crane's story is the story of life on Michigan's Stark and Kalamazoo rivers. After a series of violent calamities strip the alluring 16-year-old protagonist of her innocence, she turns to the only thing she can trust: the river. Campbell's portrait of a silent beauty who prefers to see the world through iron sights comes through with blunt prose that suits his resilient characters and stark surroundings. This style is most effective in descriptions of tense moments of survival (much of the novel), with Margo training her .22 on a regal ten-point buck or treading lightly on frost-covered ground. Once Upon a River succeeds thanks to Margo's depth. Like a more seductive Huck Finn, her outward simplicity belies her actual complexity.

Captain Planet Aiming for the Silver Screen

Earth! Fire! Wind! Water! Heart! By your powers combined, I am . . . Captain Planet!

By which we mean, a Captain Planet movie is in the works. Resurrected by Transformers producer Don Murphy, the film will be a live-action, feature-length take on the classic cartoon.

The show, a brainchild of Ted Turner, came before its time. The series ran from 1990 to 1992, just as environmentalism was beginning to enter the mainstream consciousness. And while its take on environmentalism was a little strange ("Heart?"), it helped catalyze a generation's passion for protecting the earth. It made green activism cool, and the nonprofit that came after it continues to do good work today. Now that green thinking is so much more widespread, we hope the film version will be a huge hit. 

Protecting the Stars of Shark Week

This Sunday, the Discovery Channel dives into the 24th season of Shark Week, which is only getting more popular: Last year netted a record 30.8 million viewers. To inform every shark fan about the creatures' dramatically declining populations and inspire action, Oceana and  Discovery teamed up this year to air a nightly "Save the Sharks" public-service announcement.

So while we're comfy on the couch watching "Top Five Eaten Alive" or “Killer Sharks,” the PSA is there to remind us that sharks are really the ones in danger, not humans. They may be powerful predators, but they're also incredibly intelligent creatures and lynchpins of our oceans' ecosystems. And they're in dire straits.

Sharks have been around for 400 million years, having survived mass extinctions. But they're faltering under the weight of human exploitation. Since they're long-lived and give birth to few young, they're particularly affected by overfishing and bycatch. Currently, 50 shark species are listed as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered, but only three of those are internationally protected.

Michael Bloomberg Hands the Sierra Club $50 Million

Early this morning from the waters of the Potomac, Sierra Club director Michael Brune delivered a huge announcement: Michael Bloomberg is donating $50 million to America's largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization.

The gift from New York City's mayor, who's also an ardent environmentalist (and the world's 30th richest person), is going toward the Club's Beyond Coal campaign. In his speech, Bloomberg said that relying on coal is a "self-inflicted public-health risk" and asked Americans to speak out against the devastation that coal wreaks on nature.

Brune called Bloomberg's action a major "game-changer" in the fight against coal-fired power plants. With that money, the Club will amp up its anti-coal work from 15 states to 45, bolster staff size, and aim to enlist a million more members, giving some serious teeth to the Sierra Club’s long and successful crusade to retire one of America's dirtiest energy sources.

News and commentary about the donation, and the difference it'll make, is all over the web today. Here are a few places to start: NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, New Yorker, Time, Rolling Stone, The Nation, The Rebublic, Grist, and TreeHugger.

 --Mimi Dwyer

Facebook for Nature?

Admit it: you’ve got a FarmVille account. You log on to it more than you’d like anyone to know. And you felt disproportionately gleeful when your third-grade friend from camp moved in next door and started watering your corn. It was weird, but hey, someone's gotta do it!

If you feel guilty about wasting hours developing your plot of land into an unsustainable imaginary hacienda empire (note: elephant CAFO), fret not. You can stay online and still make a positive, if small, environmental difference. Other Facebook timewasters abound, some with a nature-themed twist.

Take, for example, Ecotopia. The game's goal is to turn a polluted, sludgy environment into a “green utopia” using real-world techniques. The game also rewards players for sending in photos of themselves doing conservation work. And incentivizing getting offline can be a big step!

What's more, yesterday, Conservation International, Trees for the Future, and Ecotopia's developer, Talkie, announced that they'll plant 25,000 real-life trees in Brazil because users completed a challenge to collectively plant 25,000 game trees in 25 days.

Movie Review Friday: Turtle: The Incredible Journey

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film with an environmental theme. Seen a good eco-flick lately? Send us a short review and look for it in the next Movie Review Friday. 

Turtle: The Incredible Journey (2011)

Limited Screenings

One of the hardest things about making a good documentary is dramatizing real life without crossing the line into fiction. Accomplishing that feat takes hard study, subtlety, and time. Turtle: The Incredible Journey certainly dramatizes the plight of the loggerhead turtle, but it does not do so in the most accurate of ways.

Narrated by Miranda Richardson and expertly shot, Turtle guides the viewer through an underwater dream sequence, drifting along with the turtle and with Richardson’s haiku-like words. The baby turtle happens upon a piece of trash—certain death if swallowed—and the viewer hears, “How shiny it is to a young turtle / How tempting / And if she swallows it / She could die." Poetic and unorthodox for a documentary.

We follow what appears to be one turtle through the first 21 years of her life, from her dangerous first crawl to her first eggs on the same beach. The turtle is graceful, ancient, guided (we are told) by the magnetic forces that cause the Northern Lights. She is otherworldly, but also made weirdly human.

Save the Date: July 16th Bee-a-thon

You've probably heard the buzz about mysterious bee die-offs happening across the country. And while scientists rush to discern the causes of colony collapse disorder (CCD), regular joes can make a difference at home.

If you want to learn more about the bee mystery, mark July 16 on your calendar. It's Bee-a-thon 2011, a twelve-hour “town hall” discussion of CCD among environmentalists, academics, activists and other bee enthusiasts worldwide, hosted by YourGardenShow.com and the Great Sunflower Project. You can tune in from home to ask experts bee-related questions. YourGardenShow suggests that the die-hard bee fans (wannabees? beelievers?) host a backyard or rooftop party for the event, and has even set up a page for you to RSVP to the beenanigans.

Movie Review Friday: Sushi: The Global Catch

Escape to the movies with one of our Movie Review Friday selections. Each week we review a film with an environmental theme. Seen a good eco-flick lately? Send us a short review and look for it in the next Movie Review Friday. 

Sushi: The Global Catch (2011)

Limited screenings; available on DVD

"One thing I am sure of: We will run out of tuna sooner than we will run out of oil,” says Mamoru Sugiyama, the chef of Sushiko, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Tokyo.

His statement gets abundantly proven in Sushi: The Global Catch, an earnest documentary that explores the consequences of the rising global demand for the Japanese delicacy. A sequence of voices — including those of fishermen, restaurateurs, market-watchers, and educators — help build a compelling story.

That sushi is now served from Russia to Australia and beyond means that the tuna supply is rapidly plummeting. Barbara Block, a Stanford professor who’s one of the world's leading experts on bluefin tuna, seeks endangered status for the species.

Another voice in the film is that of activist Casson Trenor, a partner in sustainable sushi restaurants in San Francisco whose conservation work earned him the title of being one of Time magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment.”

“People taking a paycheck from the oceans must be responsible for their actions,” Trenor says in the film, adding, “Corporations follow consumers, and in this case, consumers can choose to learn more and only consume sustainable seafood.”