Online Film Screening and Conversation
May 13, 2020
With every passing day and every record-breaking hurricane, it’s clear that climate change has reached America’s shores. Rising seas are transforming coastline communities and disrupting lives in irrevocable ways. How are these communities and policy-makers dealing with these impacts? What can they teach us about the challenges to come?
Metcalf Institute hosted an online conversation with Pulitzer Prize finalist, author, and journalist Elizabeth Rush about her book, Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, in partnership with Rhode Island Center for the Book, which selected Rising for the 2020 Reading Across Rhode Island program for schools.
Following a film screening of David Welch’s short documentary, Home or High Water, based on Rush’s stories, participants heard the author’s insights on writing the book in a live interview with Ricardo Sandoval-Palos, PBS public editor and Metcalf Institute Advisory Board member.
About Elizabeth Rush
Elizabeth Rush is a journalist, visiting lecturer at Brown University, and the author of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, and Still Lifes from a Vanishing City: Essays and Photographs from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work explores how humans adapt to changes enacted upon them by forces seemingly beyond their control, from ecological transformation to political revolution. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harpers, Granta, Creative Nonfiction, Orion, Guernica and others. Rush is the recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Howard Foundation, Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project, the Society for Environmental Journalism, the National Society of Science Writers and the Metcalf Institute. She is currently at work on a book about motherhood and Antarctica’s diminishing glaciers.
About Ricardo Sandoval-Palos
Ricardo Sandoval-Palos is an award-winning investigative journalist, editor and broadcaster who serves as the public editor for PBS. He is also a member of Metcalf Institute’s Advisory Board. Recently, he has helped organizations like InsideClimate News, 100Reporters and the Fund for Investigative Journalism revamp their journalism and fundraising operations. At National Public Radio he helped manage the network’s flagship Morning Edition show. Previously, he led global teams of investigative reporters for the Center for Public Integrity and edited the science, health and environment reporting teams at the Sacramento Bee. From 1997 to 2006, Ricardo was Latin America correspondent for the Dallas Morning News and Knight-Ridder Newspapers. He wrote extensively about migration, Mexico’s drug cartels, and the rise and fall of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Prior to his work abroad, Ricardo covered agriculture, immigration and energy issues. He is co-author of the biography The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement, published by Harcourt. Ricardo was born in Tijuana, Mexico and raised in San Diego and San Francisco.
Metcalf Institute thanks our donors and the URI Coastal Institute for supporting this program.
