Environmental Studies Film & Lecture Series

On February 19 at 7PM in the Overby Center Auditorium, acclaimed photographer James Balog‘s award-winning documentary, Chasing Ice, opens the 2014 Environmental Film and Lecture Series.

James Balog was once a skeptic about climate change. But through his Extreme Ice Survey, he discovers undeniable evidence of our changing planet. In Chasing Ice, Balog deploys revolutionary time-lapse cameras to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate.

The second documentary Last Call at the Oasis, about the world water crisis, will screen on March 19 at 7PM in the Overby Center Auditorium. This powerful documentary opens our eyes to the intensifying, world-wide water shortage.

The Earth Day lecture by University of Wisconsin-Madison Rachel Carson Professor of English Rob Nixon examines Slow Violence, Environmental Activism, and the Arts on April 22 at 7PM in the Overby Center Auditorium.

Nixon writes: “Slow violence is a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. How can we create stories and images adequate to the pervasive but elusive environmental violence of delayed effects?” He will link the emergencies of the long term to artistic efforts to infuse such emergencies with dramatic urgency.

The films and lecture are free and open to the public.

Sponsored by the University of Mississippi Environmental Studies Minor, College of Liberal Arts, Southern Documentary Project, Office of Sustainability, Croft Institute for International Studies, Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, and the Departments of English and History.