Entries by Sarah Haughn

Water is the trope at Traverse City Film Festival’s showing of Idiocracy

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TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan – A funky dystopian comedy, Idiocracy heralds water as the common-sense solution to crop failure in a highly-privatized futuristic world. The film presents what the L.A. Times calls a “brutal satire in the trappings of low comedy” that culls “heroes out of ordinary people whose humanity makes them suspect in a world […]

Op-ed: Though the Compact is Signed, Great Lakes are Still at Risk

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TOLEDO, Ohio — What seems like a near-perfect deal to protect the Great Lakes watershed deserves further thought, suggests Dave Dempsey in and editorial published in the Toledo Blade: The Great Lakes Compact took 10 years to write and pass, generated a thousand adoring news releases, and now goes off to Washington for what the […]

Herzog film captures life atop planet’s largest freshwater preserve

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TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan – In Werner Herzog’s filmic journey to Antarctica, he engages a geographically marginalized society of marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, and truck drivers to understand the nuanced drama of their lives atop, within, and beneath the South Pole’s vast freshwater freeze. The Philadelphia Inquirer calls Encounters at the End of the World “a […]

Water shortage puts libido in limbo in film, Absurdistan

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TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan – This year’s Traverse City Film Festival will show the lighter side of the water crisis with the film Absurdistan. The comedy, set in a fictional village of the former Eastern bloc, explores what happens when virile village men decide a broken pipeline can wait and women boycott in protest. A classic […]

Uranium-riddled Groundwater Reported in Holy City of Varanasi

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VARANASI, India – While India’s magical state of Jharkhand usually monopolizes headlines regarding radioactive groundwater content, a team of researchers recently made national newspaper The Hindu when they conducted a study that found a high presence of Uranium in Varanasi’s underground supply. Varanasi, a holy city on the banks of Ganges, was first cited to […]

Sleep Dealer: Border control, mind control, and privatized water

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TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan – Sleep Dealer, director Alex Rivera’s first film, explores a dystopian future of corporate-controlled water where Americans indenture the nervous systems of would-be Mexican immigrants to operate robots across the border. Labeled as a low-budget science fiction film, Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter applauds Sleep Dreamer, claiming that it “takes many […]

Once upon a time there was capitalism

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LONDON-The International Herald Tribune publishes a futuristic satire on current economic, social, and environmental crises facing the globe. In the satire Grandfather Benny — a caveman caricature of Ben Shalom Bernanke, incumbent Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve — narrates the fall of capitalism to his curious grandson. The narration cites […]

Docked or docketed: Proposed California water bond heavily criticized

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SACRAMENTO-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and senator Dianne Feinstein have made public their plan for a $9.3 million bond, reports SignOnSanDiego. They believe the bond would alleviate the state’s water worries through the construction of new dams, increased water storage, grants to local agencies, restoration of watersheds, cleanup of contaminated underground reservoirs, as well as general […]