Llewellyn King's journal: Sad story about the seas; a movie mystery; D.C. lawyers' cold marble

Beach in the Cape Cod National Seashore.

I have not yet been to the beach this year and with the arrival of hot weather, a dip is in order. But the fact is that  the beach is not what it used to be for me. Ever since I started making television programs on the oceans, I have stared out to the waves with a different mindset -- foreboding tinged with sorrow.

Like most of us I thought of the oceans as the last refuge of untrammeled nature, a place where man’s predations could not defeat nature; the last safe place for the world as it was. Then I started doing television interviews about the state of the oceans and found how wrong I was.

The first interview was with Mark Spalding of The Ocean Foundation; the second with Colin Woodard of The Portland Press Herald; the third was with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who is my senator; the fourth with University of Rhode Island oceanographer Sunshine Menezes; and the fifth was another detailed discussion of the state of the oceans with Whitehouse in his office on Capitol Hill.

Whitehouse is a passionate advocate for the oceans and an articulate voice about  their deplorable condition, due to acidification, infestation with plastic, overfishing, and the relentless rise in temperature and sea level -- up there with acidification, and likely in the future to wipe out coastal communities.

It is grim stuff: a horror story of our own making and one that is sometimes lost among other stories of environmental disaster. But this is  one that will get us all in some way.

They say Algernon Charles Swinburne, the 19th Century English poet, would not only write poetry about the ocean, but also would shout his verses into the waves. This summer as we flock to enjoy the beaches in New England and elsewhere, maybe we should shout “sorry” into the sick waves, because they are sick of a disease that can be arrested if we just have the mind to start.

Movie mystery: What gets the distributors' nod?

To me, part of the mystery of the movie business is as much in the distribution as in how particular movies come to be made. I say this because an exceptional film -- one of the few of recent releases -- has got short shrift from the distributors in Rhode Island. I cannot speak for the rest of New England or the country as a whole.

The movie is Norman,, starring Richard Gere -- and starring is the operative word because he is seldom off-screen. It has all of the ingredients which make a movie great to my mind – and for what it is worth, I once reviewed movies for newspapers. The story is,  briefly, the tale of a somewhat sleazy New York fixer who ingratiates himself with an Israeli politician who rises to become prime minister of  that nation. They become durable friends.

The movie, written and directed by Joseph Cedar, an Israeli film director, is taut, dodges heavy sentimentality and yet has flashes of sentimentality. It nails the banal cruelty of politics,  the mischief of gatekeepers and the pain of outsidedness. The craft of filmmaking is on display here at its best. Gere is great and the rest of the cast is also exceptional. I am sure that it will be studied for its technical skill for years to come in film schools.

So why, I ask, was it not on general release in Rhode Island? On Saturday, June 10, it only had an 11:30 a.m. showing in one of the malls. My wife, Linda,  and I ended up seeing it at Cable Car Cinema, a venerable but tiny art house in Providence, where it had a number of showings.

Why such limited release? The film was lavishly reviewed in the press, here and abroad. Curious business, movies – a joy when you see a great one where it was meant to be seen, in my view, in a cinema. and not on a TV screen.

Washington's marble lobbies: Cold, slippery and awful

Back to Washington last week for another speech and some visits.

Washington’s law firms set the pace for office decoration and two things dominate: marble and glass. One thing is eschewed: anywhere to sit.

Building after building, housing the myriad law firms, most of which are lobbying shops as well, have ridiculously obstructive security with rent-a-cops running little fiefs, and acres of cold, people-rejecting marble.

When you get upstairs, everything that can be glass is glass. One lobbyist makes sure that you are escorted at all times because of the number of people who have been hurt walking onto glass walls and doors.

Glass and marble: What does it all mean? What happened to wood and warmth and places to sit in lobbies? Heaven knows, human knees have not been converted to stone and glass.

Llewellyn King (llewellynking1@gmail.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.

Llewellyn King: Our destruction of life in the oceans

Memo to environmental activists: It’s the oceans, stupids.

This summer, hundreds of millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere will flock to beaches to swim, surf, wade, boat, fish, sunbathe, or even fall in love. To these revelers, the oceans are eternal -- as certain as the rising and setting of the sun, and a permanent bounty in an impermanent world.

But there is a rub: The oceans are living entities and they are in trouble. Much more trouble than the sun-seekers of summer can imagine.

Mark Spalding, president of The Ocean Foundation, says, “We are putting too much into the oceans and taking too much out.”

In short, that is what is happening. Whether deliberately or not, we are dumping stuff into the oceans at a horrifying rate and, in places, we are overfishing them.

But the No. 1 enemy of oceans is invisible: carbon.

Carbon is a huge threat, according to ocean champion Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. The oceans are a great carbon sink, he explains, but they are reaching a carbon saturation point, and as so-called “deep carbon” resurfaces, it limits the oxygen in the water and destroys fish and marine life.

There is a 6,474-square-mile “dead zone” -- an area about the size of Connecticut with low to no oxygen -- in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Dead zones are appearing in oceans around the world because of excessive nutrient pollution (especially nitrogen and phosphorous) from agribusiness and sewage. Two great U.S. estuaries are in trouble: the Chesapeake Bay and Long Island Sound.

Warming in the North Atlantic is disturbing fish populations: Maine lobsters are migrating to Canada's cooler waters. Whitehouse and other Atlantic Coast legislators are concerned as they see fish resources disappearing, and other marine life threatened.

Colin Woodard, a reporter at The Portland  (Maine) Press Herald, has detailed the pressures from climate change on fish stocks in the once bountiful Gulf of Maine. He first sounded the alarm 16 years ago in his book, Oceans End: Travels Through Endangered Seas, and now he says that things are worse.

The shallow seas,  such as the Baltic and the Adriatic, are subject to “red tides” -- harmful algal booms, due to nutrient over-enrichment, that kill fish and make shellfish dangerous to consume.

Polluted waterways are a concern for Rio de Janeiro Olympic rowers and other athletes. Apparently, the word is: Don’t follow the girl from Ipanema into the water. The culprit is raw sewage, and the swelling Olympic crowds will only worsen the situation.

My appeal to the environmental community is this: If you are worried about the air, concentrate on the oceans. It is hard to explain greenhouse gases to a public that is distrustful, or fears the economic impact of reducing fossil-fuel consumption. If I lived in a West Virginia hollow, and the only work was coal mining, you bet I would be a climate denier.

The oceans are easier to understand. You can explain that the sea levels are rising; that it is possible for life-sustaining currents, such as the Gulf Stream, to stop or reverse course; and you can point to the ways seemingly innocent actions, or those thought of as virtuous (like hefting around spring water in plastic bottles) have harmful effects.

Plastic is a big problem. Great gyres of plastic, hundreds of miles long, are floating in the Pacific. Flip-flops washed into the ocean in Asia are piling up on beaches in Africa. Fish are ingesting microplastic particles – and you will ingest this plastic when you tuck into your fish and chips. Sea birds and dolphins get tangled in the plastic harnesses we put on six-packs of beer and soft drinks. They die horrible deaths. Sunscreen is lethal to coral.

It is hard to explain how carbon, methane and ozone in the atmosphere cause the Earth to heat up. It is easier, I am telling my environmentalist friends, to understand that we will not be able to swim in the oceans.

I have met climate deniers, but I have never run into an ocean denier. Enjoy the beach this summer. 

Llewellyn King, executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, is a longtime publisher, editor, columnist and international business consultant. This piece first ran on InsideSources.