New York, The Noguchi Museum

Sunday, February 12, 2012, 3 pm

In times of climate change and global warming individuals as well as communities are confronted with fragmented, confusing and often overwhelming news and data about these themes. In order to make sense of these facts the largely disconnected linking between art, research and the public has to find a way to spark new relationships and thus make a difference.

Artists and scientists need to partner up and combine science with interpretive media. In a Noguchi Museum event co-sponsored by positive Feedback, artists as well as scientists are invited to initiate new and meaningful relationships regarding climate change.

The event will provide stimulating discussion and time for exchanging with fellow artists, scientists, and community members active in climate change issues in New York City.

For further information see http://www.positivefeedbackusa.org/schedule-of-events/

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

- Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
- Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
- Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
- Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Video Still: Richard Jochum: Halt, 2007 (one of the finalists for COOL STORIES II in 2009)

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

The third edition of an international art video competition on Global Warming by ARTPORT_making waves deadline for submissions May 9th, 2011.

After two successful editions, launched at Scope Basel in 2007 and repeated at Focus Basel in 2009, ARTPORT_making waves for the third edition collaborates with CINEMA PLANETA, the award-winning International Environmental Film Festival in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

We invite video artists worldwide to participate with works that explore Global Warming, focusing on forests in honor of the United Nations International Year of Forests 2011. Artists are encouraged to tell us their stories about deforestation or tree planting and its positive effects; they may also opt to approach the topic from symbolic, psychological or socio-political significances of forests. Our aim is to present a convincing survey of the current artistic exploration of this topic worldwide with 20 established and emerging artists, edited into a visually and conceptually coherent compilation by ARTPORT_making waves.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.

Go to EcoArtScotland

Richard Jochum: Halt (video still), 2007 (finalist COOL STORIES II)

ARTPORT_making waves, an international art project which raises awareness of current social and political issues worldwide through theme-oriented exhibitions, residency programs and artists collaborations, proudly presents the third edition of its video contest “Cool Stories For When The Planet Gets Hot” on global warming.

After two successful editions, for the third edition ARTPORT collaborates with CINEMA PLANETA, the award-winning International Environmental Film Festival in Cuernavaca, Mexico. We invite video artists worldwide to participate with works that explore global warming, focusing on forests in honor of the United Nations International Year of Forests 2011. Artists are encouraged to tell us their stories about deforestation or tree planting and its positive effects; they may also opt to approach the topic of symbolic, psychological or socio-political significances of forests. Our aim is to present a convincing survey of the current artistic exploration of this topic worldwide with 20 etablished and emerging artists, edited into a visually and conceptually coherent compilation by ARTPORT_making waves. The final winner will be awarded an artist residency.

Deadline for submitting proposals is May 9, 2011.

For more information: www.artport-project.org

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

- Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)

- Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)

- Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)

- Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

International Action

Please share with us any work that creatively addresses global issues in sustainability.  We are particularly interested in projects happening outside of the United States that pay attention to global dilemmas including global warming, rising sea levels, disappearing cultures, and economic divides.  A special section will be dedicated to work at the UN’s Conference of the Parties, summit on climate change in Cancun in December.

International Action Deadline for Submission:  January 10, 2011

Invisible Visibility

For this issue, we are interested in art projects, installations, and performances that visualize invisible threats to our environmental, economic, or cultural sustainability.  How can our creative industries call public attention to major issues that are easy to ignore because they are ‘out of sight, out of mind?’

Invisible Visibility Deadline for Submission:  February 1, 2011.

The CSPA Quarterly explores sustainable arts practices in all genres, and views sustainability in the arts through environmentalism, economic stability, and cultural infrastructure.  The periodical provides a formal terrain for discussion, and seeks to elevate diverse points of view.

Please send your opinion articles, project case studies, researched essays, and photos to: Miranda@SustainablePractice.org.

To view past issues, along with our current issue on digital work, please visit:  http://www.magcloud.com/browse/Magazine/38626

David Buckland is an artist with an international reputation. In 2000 he created and now directs the Cape Farewell project, which brings artists, scientists and educators together to collectively address and raise awareness about climate change. This highly successful artistic intervention has spurred worldwide activity and underlines the power of artistic engagement to stimulate and vision the necessary cultural shift to build a sustainable and exciting society.

In The Art of Climate Change, David explores what happens when artists collaborate with scientists and educators in response to global warming. Cape Farewells highly successful artistic intervention has spurred worldwide activity and underlines the power of artistic engagement to stimulate and envision the necessary cultural shift to build a sustainable society.

Resources:

Twitter: @capefarewell

Facebook Group: Cape Farewell

Cape Farewell: www.capefarewell.com

David Buckland: www.bucklandart.com/

Background:

In October 2009 delegates from across Canada and beyond joined Artscape in Toronto for our third Creative Places + Spaces: The Collaborative City conference. In a packed two-day program inspirational keynote speakers and ground breaking projects made the case for the power of collaboration to solve complex multi dimensional challenges and to fuel innovation. www.creativeplacesandspaces.ca

Over the next few months “The Campaign of Ideas: Video Knowledge Exchange” series will bring you a regular diet of conference highlights focusing on the major themes of the conference and some of the tools for collaboration that were presented.

Respond to Our Current Poll: Visit the Creative Places + Spaces website at www.creativeplacesandspaces.ca and tell us what you think is the most practical and relevant conference learning on the theme of Collaboration Fuels Innovation. The poll is located on the lower right-hand side of the website.

Keep Informed About Creative Places + Spaces:

You can follow us on Twitter @CPandS, use #CPandS″ in your tweets and join in the conversation on Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. The Creative Places + Spaces website will be updated often, so be sure to check back for updates or subscribe to our RSS Feed or Email Updates. www.creativeplacesandspaces.ca

Creative Places + Spaces was presented by Artscape in collaboration with MaRS Discovery District, Martin Prosperity Institute and the City of Toronto: Economic Development, Culture & Tourism.

www.torontoartscape.on.ca

www.marsdd.com

www.martinprosperity.org/

www.toronto.ca/culture/

Think. Create. Collaborate.

The Santa Fe EARTH event, put on by 350.org and the Santa Fe Art Institute, shows how the Santa Fe River could look if there was water running through it. With global warming decreasing snow melt, Santa Fe is running out of water. This river is one of the 10 most endangered in North America. Over a 1,000 people came out and held up blue painted pieces of cardboard or tarps as a satellite passed over.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGExEIYXK58

To answer the obvious question: no, we don’t think these are going to have an immediate political effect, turn Cancun upside down, cause Jim Inhofe to change his mind. But we do think that they are one key part in the work of building a movement big enough to matter. And I hope you enjoy looking at them—I sure do.We’ve got more allies, of more types, out there than we sometimes remember.

– Bill McKibben

Read McKibben’s guest Blog on this event at Climeprogress.org

If you’re in New York city, you have a month left to view it at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. That exhibition closes in early January.

If you are in Washington DC, please visit the temporary exhibit on the the First Floor of the Sant Ocean Hall, OCean Focus Gallery at the National Museum of Natural History. It is on display through April 24th of next year 2011.

Margaret Wetheim’s TED Talk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGEDHMF4rLI

At The Science Gallery in Dublin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsKhi0x4Ni4

A recent interview with Margaret Wertheim

View the video at Smithsonian.com

More information

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef
The Institute for Figuring

Libertarian blogger Stephen Kinsella argues here that it underscores his viewpoint that the movie demonstrates that property rights are the only way to protect the environment. Interestingly this is the logic of the UN’s REDD carbon trading scheme or to give it its long name, the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. This is based – in theory at least – of forests having assigned carbon values and of local people having property rights over those resources. The “owners” are then rewarded for not chopping down trees.

Such solutions aren’t without their problems though. Aside for the more obvious problems of carbon credits – that they allow the industralised world to delay reducing their own emissions -  Global Witness point out in this report [PDF] that was published last October, this is an untested scheme that may well benefit Africa and South America’s kleptocrat rulers more than it does the environment, or the locals to whom this property has been assigned. Assigning property rights, suggests Global Witness, is part of the process of moving from an environment protected from logging, to a “sustainably managed” forest which allows logging to go ahead.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

We’re not there… yet?

That is perhaps one of the most bizarrely intended phrases I’ve ever written. Did we get a deal? Sort of. Did we get the deal we wanted (and mind you I’ll refer to everyone with this use of “we”)? No, no one got what they wanted. Is there hope that there might be a future for political action on this issue? I think so, but we must match that with our feelings of failure.

Sigh… Failure.

That’s a bit of what we’re left with. This failure has been attributed to the strong arm tactics of the United States and our president, Mr. Obama. But, I don’t think it looks like our fault. I do think it looks like our (I’m speaking as a citizen of the United States) political system: big, unwieldy, dispersed and slow.

And so it should be to some extent. If we were to railroad it through as a 350 ppm agreement, would everyone suddenly have been happy? No. Sadly, of course, very sadly, no. It is what is ecologically necessary, if not, as I would hope could be pointed out, almost generous as a target. But, I’m on the environmental side. I work in the realm of the arts and typically non-profits/NGOs (Or a hybrid like the CSPA). I could probably get pigeon holed as a leftist activist and you wouldn’t be far off. But, there are other people, who are not like me, in the world. And, despite my spite, I need to respect them and what they want/need (Or, what I, in my bias, will say is what they think they need, but only actually, acutely, want).

Do I give credence to the Rushes of the world who claim that global climate change is a hoax? No, and you may have noticed that to diffuse that, I refer to it as ‘climate change’ and not ‘global warming’. In that early morning recess I listened to some clip talking about how climate change is a great world-wide conspiracy against capitalism and the United States. Which of course is like saying that the peace movement is un-american. No, it’s not, it’s ultimately without nationality. But as McLuhan said, all violence is about threats to identity.

Rush Limbaugh’s Right-Wing America-centric identity is threatened by  taking a worldwide view. The Danish Police, ordered to keep order, have their identity threatened by dis-order, the masses of people coming towards them together. Demonstrators (predominately, but not exclusively peaceful ones) see the locked doors of the Bella Center and the police surrounding it as a threat to their identities. Developing nations see their unequal share of the climate change issue as a threat to their (developing) identity. Low-lying countries see rising tides as a threat to their identity perhaps most drastically.

If we act on the violence, if we don’t seek balance, we’re lost. And trying to get a lot of people to agree on something that is balanced, though rarely entirely fair, is not only hard and time consuming, but very American. The conflicted American attitude that oscillates between leadership and isolation consumes more than 300,000,000 people.

More than 50 times as many people, through unequal representation (favoring the big, rich nations on financial backing of political will and favoring the small, poor nations on per capita representation), are conflicted right now between self-interest and common identity, both reinforced and condemned by their peers. If anything, this isn’t an anti-american conspiracy, it’s an americanization of global politics. Our experiment in democracy, in which we’ve tied everyone’s hands to move forward quickly is binding the world together. And it follows, that people will be angry with us, as we’re a threat to their identity and individual will. Not through our strong arming, but our entropic nature. And if you think about it that way, Obama showed up to do what we hired him to do at home, set an agenda and get things moving. He is a powerfully positioned political man, with very little ability to make unilateral change anywhere. I’ve found myself explaining this to many people here, Obama doesn’t do much directly. No president of the USA does, no individual leader in a democracy does.

Anyway, it was dizzying to me to think we could negotiate anything that works for anyone in 2 weeks when we’re trying to protect billions of lives. And we didn’t. We failed. We failed in trying to get the entire planet to move together. It’s a 6 Billion + 2 legged (a second one on either end) race with ourselves. We’re all lined up at the starting line together. And the, pardon the stereotypes, Kenyan marathon runner is tied to the next contestant on “The Bigger Loser”, who is tied to somebody on crutches.

If we want to get anywhere, we need to figure out how to move together. We didn’t do that in Copenhagen. Instead we sort of figured out how to figure out working together. And there were so many people ready to go, we’ve got some forward momentum. We’re getting closer and closer to critical mass, where it’s not about what’s preventing us from getting go, but what if anything could prevent us from stopping. We’re over coming (and I do mean to say we are doing, not trying) a whole lot of inertia. COP15 failed, but Copenhagen succeeded in bring more and more of the world together, even if we are extremely disappointed (let us not at all downplay this) that this wasn’t enough to tip things in our (unfortunately that refers to everyone, even the climate deniers) direction. We’ll only feel we were successful when the COP comes with us.

Shame on anyone who says we’re going to get things to change at Cop16. Shame, because it’s not going to happen at COP16, it’s going to happen now. Every diplomat prepared to not let the Copenhagen Accord rest, every reporter, NGO and activist inside and locked out of the Bella Center, every climate action, every tweet with #COP15 trending, they are all going to continue without waiting for a year. We all got a chance to be in the same place, at the same time, break bread and see who was here.  We reified the sheer mass of the movement. I think there is something to be said for that as we pull each other along.

So, we failed. Failed to save the world, failed to stop climate change, failed to create a binding agreement for nations to move forward, failed to find faith in leadership. But we only failed in terms of Friday, December 18th, 2009. But each following day we’ve got more hands on the wheel bring us hard to port.

Some Recap from around the web:

• COP15: (No) Hopenhagen? (BBC)
• World leaders leave their work unfinished in Copenhagen (Green Peace)
• Obama Hits the Reset Button on the Foundations of International Climate Agreements (Climate Progress)
• UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon: An essential beginning (COP15)
• Obama: A binding deal is still our goal (COP15)
• China and India signal progress on transparency (COP15)
• EU: “The only deal available in Copenhagen” (COP15)
• A Copenhagen Accord it is (COP15)
• Non-binding yet somehow “meaningful” agreement reached at Copenhagen (hotair.com)
• WaPo/ABC poll: Obama support plunges on global warming (hotair.com)
• Climate talks end with sketchy deal (CBC)
• Canada tagged as ‘Fossil of the Year’ (CBC)
• China’s tactics threaten climate deal (The Independent, UK)
• UN averts climate collapse by ‘noting’ new deal (The Independent, UK)
• Climate failure 2009-12-19 (CAFOD)
• Climate deal: World leaders fail to live up to responsibility (CAFOD)

If you haven’t found them yet, the people behind RETHINK, Contemporary Art and Climate Change have set up a number of debate pages on their website athttp://www.rethinkclimate.org/.

There is also plenty of extraordinarily rich material on the site to debate. Take this essay fromSøren Pold which starts by namechecking Petko Dourmana’s Post Global Warming Survival Kit (mentioned round these parts earlier this year):

Digital media art like Petko Dourmana’s installation offers the opportunity to experience another, new nature, or at least it gives us a new and up-to-date perspective on nature. In addition to being a crisis for the globe and for humanity, the climate crisis is also an epistemological crisis, and we need to change our perception of our environment in order to better understand and deal with it. In other words it is also a cultural, epistemological challenge.

The nature, the weather, that previously we have regarded as something out there simply beyond our reach, as something that was in opposition to culture when we analysed poetry in high school, this has now turned into yet another structure of signs to be read and interpreted. We cannot see the greenhouse gasses or their effects directly with our senses so our understanding of the climate challenges are very much based on climate models, and we must act on this background in our daily lives as well as, obviously, politically and culturally. The climate crisis introduces us to the fact that our immediate surroundings are being mediated by complex visualisations, interfaces, statistics and carbon quotas – thus an imaginary computer interface lurks in the blue sky, even deep in the country with no computers in sight!

This isn’t the point that Pold is trying to make but there is also an inescapbable sense in which our vision has become polluted by the science we now need to understand it.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

More about the project at the ecoartspace blog and xaviercortada.com.

Go to Eco Art Blog

People and animals at the bank of the Hudson River on the upper west side of Manhattan will gather with artist Aviva Rahmani as part of “350,” the largest global day of climate action ever. On October 24, 2009, Rahmani will alternately walk to the water and sing Puccinis aria “Vissi darte,” a capella, a song “about beauty and betrayal,” and stop at the shore to draw pictures of the waters, reflecting on “how they are rising in some places under the assault of global warming while in other places, fresh clean water is vanishing.” Simultaneously, people worldwide will be taking up to 4,000 similar actions, from climbers with 350 banners high on the melting slopes of Mount Everest to government officials in the Maldive Islands holding an underwater cabinet meeting to demand action on climate change before their nation disappears.

via APInews: Artists Take Part in Global Day of Climate Action .

In her artists’ statement she says:

What is missing? is a wake up call and a call to action, showing what is being done throughout the field of conservation and also what individuals can do in their everyday lives to make a difference in habitat and species protection.

What is missing? will make the critical link between global warming concerns and habitat protection: if 20% of global warming emissions are caused by deforestation then What is missing? will integrally connect these issues, asking the question:

Can we save two birds with one tree?

I’m sorry. It may be that last coy bon mot that pushed me over the line but…  if any piece of work epitomises something Michaela Crimmin was talking about recently when she wrote,“Art is not going to combat climate change by didacticism of preaching”, it’s Lin’s giant speaking tube.

Perhaps the piece doesn’t have the right impact when viewed via YouTube, but to my eyes, Lin’s work does the opposite of  creating connections between environment and global warming, as she claims.  Instead, Lin’s megaphone appears to reduce the natural world to something exotic and far-away at the pointy end of a tube.

I’m right, aren’t I?

www.maylin.com

www.whatismissing.net

EDIT. I’ve just noticed in a review of the work in the SF Chronicle that children can enter the tube – if they take their shoes off. That makes it even worse, somehow.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

After decades of plenty, we are coming to believe we are overburdened by consumption. I’m sure a lot of the world would find this more than a little ironic, but let’s not knock it. A culture of less would be a good thing.

But I started wondering whether it’s not just food and goods we should be thinking about having less of. What if the culture of less were to mean less culture as well? I remember listening to a talk by director Mike Figgis a couple of years ago in which he likened cultural over-production to global warming. The inventions of photography, then magnetic tape and now digitisation means that all culture is now permanent. Nothing is thrown away. New culture constantly pours into the lake at an ever increasing rate, but the lake is now dammed. “Is there too much culture?” asked Figgis. It was an idea that created a few ripples at the time.

If artists are suggesting we could live with less, should we also be living with less art? What if we had cultural rationing books. You might only be allowed five CDs a year, five books, two exhibitions, four films, one orchestral concert and two gigs. Would that make you choose what you consumed more carefully? What would you cut out? And (though the numbers of artists thrown on the dole queue would be huge) would the experience you took away from each encounter stamp itself a little deeper on your mind?

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

• PowerUp the Game by IBM teaches kids how to save the world by bring clean energy to communities.
• CO2FX is a web based multi-user educational game which explores the relationship of global warming to economic, political and science policy decisions.
• Majesco Entertainment’s “Eco-Creatures: Save the Forest” promote awareness of the perils of “…over-industrialization, deforestation, pollution, extinction and global warming.”

Post your favorite environmental video game below.

Go to Eco-Catalysts

EcoLabs, a network of designers and artists who are looking to create what they call “ecological literacy” has an excellent new magazine out EcoMag, which puts their ideas into practice. It’s available via as a low res download or as an online purchase for £10.

It leads off with a feature in which six artists visualise Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees. For anyone who hasn’t read it Six Degrees is about six different climate warming scenarios, each marked by a single degree increase in the earth’s temperature. This is Jody Barton’s rendition of Five Degrees. The accompanying text reads:

With five degrees of global warming, an entirely new planet is coming into being- one largely unrecognisable from the Earth we know today… Humans are herded into shrinking zones of habitability by the twin crises of drought and flood.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

We are in for a season of civil disobedience. The Save Vestas campaign has gone national.Kingsnorth rumbles on, as does the Heathrow protest – which is likely to be the focus of the next Climate Camp at the end of August. Next month also sees Wales‘  and Scotland’s first Climate Camps. As COP15 focusses minds, there are even plans to disrupt the Copenhagen meeting.

A generation of jobless students will now swell numbers. But should those less used to participating in civil action also be getting stuck in?

In a recent newsletter [PDF 147KB], climate scientist/activist James Hansen concludes with a short section titled “Civil Resistance: Is the Sundance Kid a Criminal?”, suggesting the urgent need for what Gandhi called “civil resistance” rather than “civil disobedience”, especially directed towards companies who are guilty of passing the bill for carbon clean up to future generations. Even though his choice of gun-slinging Western hero rather shows which era he’s coming from, I guess he’s qualified to talk, because James Hansen himself was arrested alongside Daryl Hannah last month for his part in the West Virginia coal mining protests.

The excellent climate science blogger Jo Abbess has just raised his arrest in a post which argues that such action by scientists is vital because, as George Marshall of the New Scientisthas been saying, the public as a whole are not changing their behaviour in the way that those scientists know they should be .

This argument implies that scientists, as the people who really understand the bottom line, are now ethically bound to start to do more than produce data. They must join with scientists like Hansen. But if scientists remain hesitant to get start linking arms and chaining themselves to fences, Hansen’s own reputation as a leading climate scientist is an example of why. The man warned Congress back in 1988 about the perils of global warming has been under assault ever since he turned activist. Despite his role as a leading scientist and head of the NASA Gordon Institute for Space Studies, his name has been dragged through the mud by global warming sceptics. His arrest last month prompted the New York Times headline “Does NASA’s James Hansen Still Matter?”

What are the responsibilities of those who know to act? And what are the consequences if they do?

“Well done ThWART” photo by darrangange

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Until now, scientists, journalists and politicians have dominated the debate about the threat of greenhouse warming. Many have fought well and brought a proper sense of urgency to the debate. However, it will be our writers, artists and playwrights who will finally delineate the crisis and explore in human terms what lies ahead. Only then can we hope to come to terms with our endangered world….Thus global warming is as much a cultural problem as a scientific or political one and deserves to be addressed through the activities of those who define our culture: our artists and writers.

These individuals will be the ones who reveal to us the kinds of lives we may lead in the near future – not just in physical, but in moral and social terms – as our planet heats up. In other words, we need an Orwell or a Huxley to help us define the terrible issues that confront us – and to judge from the recent efforts of Waters, McCarthy and McEwan we can have a fair amount of confidence that our artists and writers will deliver. Whether or not we choose to listen to them is a different matter.

“Writers and artists are getting warmer” by Robin McKie

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

The now-classic video Story of Stuff, a basic breakdown of our modern industrial-consumer system, recently came under fire on the now-classic Fox News Channel. Both Mike Maniates, who is on the Story of Stuff advisory board, and Christopher Horner, author of  The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming, took questions from reporter Jane Skinner for a segment called “Happening Now.”

Horner defined the video as “terrorizing children,” (not surprising, since he’s drawn thin parallels between the German head of the Green Party and Hilter) while Maniates defended it as a valid examination of our culture. Some 7,000 schools and churches have ordered copies of Story of Stuff, and though you can barely catch them through all the Fox-newsy shouting, Skinner attempts to make some valid points about conversation and context. Not spouting dogma, as it were.

Dang straight, skulls and crossbones are scary. So are most flame retardants. So is much of modern resource management. So, to many, is Fox News. Whether Story of Stuff is an effective cultural impetus to move us toward a more gorgeous green utopia or not, it’s definitely bringing the conversation into the public sphere. That’s nothing short of awesome.

Go to the Green Museum

GAS ZAPPERS is a series of interactive online art game that tackles climate change. The game’s protagonist is the polar bear—that victimized, yet cuddly symbol of global warming. Players embody the polar bear as it progresses through different climate change scenarios: Venice under water, a forest threatened by bulldozers, and an altercation with vicious oil derricks.

GAS ZAPPERS have different gaming scenarios with custom designed gameplay addressing the various components of global warming. Each scenarios embody a specific environmental identity addressing the causes, problems and possible solutions to the various scientifically proven contributors to elevated global temperatures. The project is made possible by Tribeca Film Institute.

via GAS ZAPPERS an online game about Climate Change » Play.

On the eve of the premiere of Age of Stupid, an email from director Franny Armstrong:

Tabloid Revolution: Three million people will have choked on their cornflakes this morning when they read Pete’s column in the Sun. See attached. “We – that is humanity – have only a couple of years left to act if we are to stop catastrophic climate change causing the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.” In The Sun.

Pete being Pete Postlethwaite. The column is an achievement in itself in a paper that last year published a column by Kelvin MacKenzie  headlined Global Warming Doesn’t Exist.

The Age of Stupid has been an exemplary campaign, from the crowd-funding strategy that raised £450,000 to meet production cost, £130,000 to meet distribution and publicity costs and a further £164,000 for political campaigns running alongside the movie, to an incredibly efficiently run grass-roots internet strategy to get the words out.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology