What else ails the world?: The A.V. Club's Tales From Planet Earth Film Festival preview

Climate change and social injustice are quickly bringing our world to hell in a handbasket, but we already knew that, didn't we? Fortunately, Madison's environmentally themed Tales From Planet Earth Film Festival—finally returning this weekend after its 2007 debut—boasts a variety of documentaries and features that tackle the big issues but may wake audiences up from impending-doom fatigue. In fact, the dozens-strong roster does a particularly good job of exploring the less-talked-about problems humanity has caused across the globe. Ahead of the festival, which takes place Nov. 6-8 at multiple venues downtown, The A.V. Club scoured its roster for problems we didn't even know this old ball of dirt had.

Water, water, not quite everywhere
Lest we forget that we're mostly made of water, and the planet's mostly covered in it, the problem of having too much or too little of it is a major thread throughout the festival. In the documentaries-in-progress Sun Come Up and Easy Like Water (both Sunday, 4 p.m., Madison Museum Of Contemporary Art), people in the South Pacific's Carteret Islands and Bangladesh, respectively, live in constant fear of rising sea levels and the displacement of millions of people that water threatens to bring. The devastation that can result is played out in Trouble The Water (Friday, 8 p.m., Wisconsin Union Theater), which shows the terror of people trapped in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Too much water is not a problem in Shalini Kantayya's short sci-fi drama "A Drop Of Life" (Sunday, 4:45 p.m., Frederic March Play Circle), in which two women struggle for control of a precious water supply in rural India. Lack of water also contributed to the infamous Dust Bowl of the Great Depression, vividly depicted in the '30s documentary The Plow That Broke The Plains (Saturday, 1 p.m., MMOCA) and John Ford's adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes Of Wrath (Saturday, 8:30 p.m., MMOCA).

Shark and dolphin devastation
In the post-Jaws age, it’s hard to get worked up about the killing of bloodthirsty man-eaters, but Rob Stewart's documentary Sharkwater (Saturday, 10 a.m., Union Theater) argues that the catastrophic poaching of sharks for their fins (to make shark fin soup) could upset the entire oceanic ecosystem. Another sea animal, the dolphin, inspires much more sympathy with its cuddly snout and squeaky noises, but it, too, is under attack from Japanese fishermen. The Cove (Saturday, 7 p.m., MMOCA), however, is much more complex than your traditional “save the dolphins” movie. Instead, the documentary offers a challenge to our moral sense asking viewers to consider why killing dolphins stirs so much more anger than the everyday slaughter of the animals we eat.

Ivory-billed Bigfoot?
If a bird goes extinct but is seen once by a lone kayaker, is it still extinct? That’s the question explored in Ghost Bird (Saturday, 2 p.m., Vilas Hall), a film about the giant ivory-billed woodpecker specimen spotted in Arkansas more than 50 years after the species was declared extinct. Since the initial sighting, science has spent more than $10 million—money that could've been spent on other endangered-species projects—in a fruitless attempt to conclusively document the bird. The film raises questions about the commoditization of endangered species and how far we’ll go (and how much money we’ll spend) trying to save something that may not even be real.

Throw it out and start over
Now that we’ve managed to mess up our own planet so much, some have suggested that humans may need to abandon Earth for new artificially created environments on other planets. Near Oracle: A Film About Biosphere 2 (Saturday, 7pm, Vilas) tracks eight men and women through the two years they spent sealed inside an artificial environment in the Arizona desert. The squabbling, rivalries, intensely challenging diets, and risk of suffocation will make some viewers wonder if humans really are capable of not fucking up the world, but in that, Near Oracle gives the festival some extra bite.