World Trade Center Hub by Santiago Calatrava. Photo by Craig Nevill Manning Curbed. (see story below)

This week’s Friday Roundup features: Illegal logging and loss of forest habitat, two important film festivals (Rio and Washington DC), opening of the Met Breuer in NYC, and a critique of the Oculus, the just-opened $4-billion transportation hub in New York City, designed by Santiago Calatrava.

These illegal logs were seized in transit and are stored at district police offices, Riau, Indonesia.

Stop illegal logging: Does the flooring in your new house or renovated condo come from Russia, Peru or Indonesia ? Do you know ? Take time to listen to a powerful hour of radio, an NPR broadcast of the Diane Rehm show (Feb 29) with four experts on all of the implications of global deforestation and illegal logging activity. The illicit wood products trade– should we call it  “blood timber”? – has brought millions of board feet of illegally harvested hardwoods into European and U.S. homes,  and involves well-known companies.  One of the world’s most biodiverse forests in Russia is being cut for millions of board feet of lumber/flooring.

Amur Tiger (Panthera tigris altaica)

Millions of feet of illegally cut timber from Peru’s Amazon rainforest are sitting in a warehouse, awaiting a U.S. legal decision. While southern forests (i.e. tropical) are known to have greater carbon sink capacity, the loss of northern forests undermines biodiversity and threatens endangered species such as the Amur Tiger in Russia. The radio panel: Alexander “Sascha” von Bismarck executive director, EIA (Environmental Investigation Agency);Cindy Squires executive director, the International Wood Products Association; Brad Kahn communications director, Forest Stewardship Council U.S.;  Linda Walker director, Responsible Forestry and Trade, World Wildlife Fund. This is a topic that Green News Update will continue to cover in 2016. Listen to the show.

Documentary Film Festivals: Don’t Miss

Logo of the Uranium Film Festival

March 11: International Uranium Film Festival, Berlin and Rio, films on Fukushima. The lineup

March 16-23 Environmental Film Festival, Washington DC

May 20-29 International Uranium Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro Modern Art Museum (MAM Rio) cinema

RemaIns of a life from the once-bustling town of Pripyat which exploded on April 26 1986. Copyright Caters News Agency

The Uranium Film Festival sheds light on nuclear power and the risks of radioactivity – from uranium mining and weapons to accidents and nuclear waste—with documentaries, movies and animations. The first festival was held in May 2010 in Santa Teresa, an artists’ quarter in the center of Rio. This year’s event at MAM Rio features  41 films selected on the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters. The Festival’s philosophy: “Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Goiânia or now Fukushima should never be forgotten – nor repeated. “  Learn more and see the lineup

Ghost town The scientists workers and military personnel that staffed the power plant in Chernobyl Copyright Caters News Agency

Washington DC’s Environmental Film Festival now in its 24^th year, will feature 145 films from 33 countries–including 70 US, DC and world premieres. Many of the screenings are free of charge at venues throughout the area – museums, embassies, and NGO headquarters. This year’s theme  Parks: Protecting Wild, salutes the U.S. National Park Service’s 2016 Centennial and its stewardship of national parks. Documentary, narrative, animated, archival and children’s films selected to provide fresh perspectives on a variety of environmental issues facing the Earth.

Here’s a smattering from the Environmental Filmfest lineup: An American Ascent documents the first African-American expedition to tackle Denali. The Babushkas of Chernobyl depicts a defiant community of women who live on some of the most toxic land on Earth.The documentary E.O. Wilson: Of Ants and Men, is the winner of Conservation Hero, Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival; Blood Lions: Breeding facilities in South Africa raise lions in captivity to be shot at close range by the highest bidder, using loopholes and “wildlife sanctuary” fronts. Learn more about the festival, venues, lectures

The Marcel Breuer-designed Whitney Museum is now the “Met Breuer” center of contemporary art. Photo by Ezra Stoller/Esto

New York Met Breuer opens May 18 in New York:  In a brilliant example of building recycling the Metropolitan Museum of Art has leased the former  home of the Whitney Museum of American Art at 75^th and Madison to display its contemporary art holdings and mount contemporary shows.

Marcel Breuer at the Whitney. Photo by Ezra Stoller/Esto

The building is named for Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian-born modernist, architect and furniture designer. (Remember the 1970s Mid Century Marcel Breuer Cesca Caned Chair? Endlessly reproduced and something of a household fixture from the ’70’s. I have two!) Architectural writer Karrie Jacobs wrote in 2014: “That [Breuer] designed such a thing—an inverted ziggurat clad in granite and concrete—and deposited it on Madison Avenue seems, today, like a miracle.” Learn more about the Breuer-design building 

Santiago Calatrava’s new World Trade Center Transit  Hub –newly opened in lower Manhattan – is the home of  multiple subway and train lines that bring people into the city. The sun-catching Oculus is a marvel in the morning: “Curved, steel-ribbed walls rise 160 feet like a pair of immense clamshells toward a ribbon of glass that is the giant hall’s skylight. “  Eventually it will feature hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail. The $4-billion project is being hailed as beautiful, wasteful, over budget and deadlines, and not yet complete! Read the March 3 New York Times review and see the photo gallery.