2009-2010 Series: Adaptology: Natural Selections on Humans and the Environment

With 2009 marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his On the Origin of Species, the Townsend Center’s Depth of Field series will feature three films that look at the issue of human and environmental change from a variety of perspectives. Ranging from the dusty deserts of Texas through the mountainous rivers of China to the icy plains of Antarctica, Adaptology offers three peculiarly local accounts of human adaptation and their global implications. Please join us in exploring a human and planetary evolution that Darwin himself could never have dreamed of.

Read more about the Adaptology Series.

Fall Program

Up the Yangtze (2007)
Directed by Yung Chang

Monday, September 21, 2009
7:00 pm | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Even as China’s explosive growth has made it synonymous with superlatives of size and scale, few projects have been bigger than the construction of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze. But in the midst of adapting to the dam’s modern energy demands, ancient ways of life along the river are disappearing behind its rising tides. Chinese-Canadian director Yung Chang follows the impact of the dam’s construction on local inhabitants by focusing on Yu Shui, a young woman who works on a cruise ship ferrying tourists through the doomed areas, and whose family will be displaced when the project is complete. Up the Yangtze captures the stunning natural landscape that will soon be underwater while documenting the people whose way of life will disappear with it.

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The Unforeseen (2007)
Directed by Laura Dunn

Monday, October 12, 2009
7:00 pm | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

Despite the recent economic meltdown of real estate development, Laura Dunn’s film reminds us that the true cost of unchecked land development has yet to be paid, at least in environmental terms. The film follows a land use dispute in Austin, Texas, quickly spinning a local confrontation between business and resident into a global issue. Featuring gorgeous shots of natural landscapes alongside interviews with Robert Redford, Willie Nelson, Wendell Berry and Ann Richards, The Unforeseen is at once meditative, poetic, thoughtful and rigorous.

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Encounters at the End of the World (2008)
Directed by Werner Herzog

Monday, November 16, 2009
7:00 pm | Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall

In the wake of a career spent chronicling the extreme lengths humans must undergo to adapt to a capricious and uncaring nature, Werner Herzog’s latest film travels to his most inhospitable environment yet—the barren depths of the Antarctic. The film documents the bizarre community of scientists living on the South Pole and the icy, fiery depths to which their work takes them. Nominated for an Academy Award, Encounters shows us that even as humans venture beneath glaciers and inside volcanoes, finally making truly inhospitable areas reachable, the landscape they study is quickly disappearing.

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