Grist

The Planet Gets Funnier.

Hooray for making planet-saving funnier. The American University just closed an Eco-Comedy Contest together with the Environmental Film Festival. Bless them for hunting down the funny in this sea of green seriousness. They received over 70 entries, and while the finalists included hardcore bikers, suggestive trash and some lewd vegetarian lyrics, the judges finally went with Green My House by Neeru Productions in Ireland (nobody likes sarcastic redheads).

Green My House is a look at some of the incredibly baller ways you can pimp your house green. Have you ever, for instance, tried the ever-sexy “swapping out your light bulbs”? Okay, so maybe we’re not ready to start a green SNL (or Whitest Kids, or The State, or Big Gay Sketch Show, or some other sketch comedy show you think is funny), but at least we’re moving past Artic Circle. Into creative endeavors that are actually amusing.

grist.org, for instance, has finally decided to let professional comedians, like Eugene Mirman and Aziz Ansari, donate some funny to their cause. Thank you, grist– you were killing us. Other semi-hopeful glimpses of a Sustainably Funny Future include the chuckle-inducing Green Shaman, or the “funny ’cause it’s true” work from Annie Leonard. She just finished a new video, the Story of Bottled Water, that will have you tearing up. With laughter. Okay, so maybe it will be the laughter of a deep and tortured pain. But funny is funny . . . right?

Go to the Green Museum

In Case You’re Wondering what it means #COP15

Here is a good summary of points from Grist.com

The Copenhagen Accord contains these provisions that President Obama called a start to global action to solve climate change:

1) A commitment by developed nations to invest $30 billion over the next three years to help developing nations adapt to climate change and pursue clean energy development.

2) A provisional commitment by developed nations to develop a long-term $100 billion global fund by 2020 to assist developing nations in responding to climate change and become part of the clean energy economic transition.

3) A goal to pursue emissions reductions that are sufficient to keep the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius.

4) Pledges by nations to commit to concrete emissions reductions, though the specific levels of reduction were not set.

5) A general goal to subject participating countries to international review of their progress under the accord.

6) Diplomatic space for the United States and China to work together to solve climate change. A commitment to complete an assessment of the effectiveness of the accord in reducing emissions by the end of 2015.

Full Article HERE

Bill McKibben on the “torrent of art” about climate change

Bill McKibben wrote recently on Grist.org about how, over the last few years, art has been shouting increasingly stridently about climate:

That torrent of art has been, often, deeply disturbing—it should be deeply disturbing, given what we’re doing to the earth. (And none of it has quite matched the performance work that nature itself is providing. Check out, for instance, James Balog’s time-lapse photography of glaciers crashing into the sea—if we could somehow crowd that thrashing sheet of ice into the Guggenheim for a week, people would truly get it.) But for me, it’s been more comforting than disturbing, because it means that the immune system of the planet is finally kicking in.

Artists, in a sense, are the antibodies of the cultural bloodstream. They sense trouble early, and rally to isolate and expose and defeat it, to bring to bear the human power for love and beauty and meaning against the worst results of carelessness and greed and stupidity. So when art both of great worth, and in great quantities, begins to cluster around an issue, it means that civilization has identified it finally as a threat. Artists and scientists perform this function most reliably; politicians are a lagging indicator.

I wonder, how true is this? Is identifying artists as the “antibodies of the cultural bloodstream” a hopelessly romantic idea, part of McKibben’s relentless optimism, an optimism that has sustained him for twenty years and more as a campaigner? Or will the next few years prove him right in his faith that, not only are artists making work of “great worth, and in great quantities” about the issue , but that art still has a privileged role in how society concieves of itself.

It’s certainly a role that many established artists would feel extremely uncomfortable with; but maybe this isn’t the time for such niceities.

Read Bill McKibben’s article in Grist.org

Bill McKibben’s 350.org campaign

Bill McKibben talks to RSA Arts & Ecology about his call for artists to lead on 350.org

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology