Maya Lin’s Green Memorial. What Is Missing? focuses on extinct and vanishing species, and incorporates sculpture, video, sound, hand-held electronics, printed material and an interactive website. More at Maya Lin’s Studio.
Go slow, expect restarts, and expect bad weather. From the Long Now Foundation, established to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
In the future, will we be able to control the weather? Do we already?
Owning The Weather: We’ve always wanted to control the weather. Now we may have to. OWNING THE WEATHER is a film about weather modification and climate engineering. The desire to modify the weather has been around forever; but with the threat of catastrophic climate change, water wars, and intensifying hurricanes, a new breed of weather control called “geoengineering” has emerged.
A really great documentary. Illuminating and a bit unnerving. In the face of runaway climate change, the need to keep Earth happy for humans may very well lead to some highly unusual solutions. And consequences.
Owning the Weather trailer from prewarcinema on Vimeo.
From WBUR and NPR
How do we power the future? What do we do now that the Climate Change bill in Congress is not moving forward? What happens when we finally run out of fossil fuels? How much do we cutback on our energy lifestyle? How do we get clean, renewable energy forever? From one of the best news radio shows around, On Point with Tom Ashbrook looks at the ideas from the outer edge of our energy future.
Let’s just get this out there. I think Al Gore kicks ass. Straight up. And his newest book that came out last year does as well. Our Choice is a plan to solve the climate crisis with all sorts of information about our energy sources, living systems, how we use energy, how we can go far quickly and the obstacles we need to overcome.
Obstacles meaning how we think and behave now, and what we need to do to change. We can start with putting a price on carbon. Thinking not about short-term profits but long-run investment. Moving past that overly simplistic idea we call GDP and focusing on our genuine progress which includes benefits like volunteering or costs like air pollution. Understanding that fossil fuel companies spend millions every year to trick people into not believing in a very strong scientific consensus. To be done with the market fundamentalism and realize that for our system to work, we need both markets and democracy.
We can overcome those obstacles. It’s our choice. We’ve got maybe a 2-3 year window to make up our minds. Then we’re moving forward, whether we’re ready or not. Hopefully we pick the blue side.
The Great Oil Leak of 2010 Poster Project: We’re graphic designers, illustrators, web designers and artists from all around the world who’ve come together to do what they can to provide support to the Gulf Coast Fishermen. A nice little poster project from John Gibby and Jeff Lush. In partnership with Gulf Aid of Acadiana to use art to bring aid to the local fisherman affected by this disaster.
Some very nice posters here:
Rowboat - by Erin Olcsvary
Stuck - by Alyssa Rose
Save the Gulf - by David Vogin
Addicted - by Jude Landry
Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer | Soil Not Oil by Vandana Shiva
Yesterday Democracy Now! hosted a little debate between Indian environmentalist, scientist, philosopher and eco-feminist, Vandana Shiva, and geopolitical analyst and columnist, Gwynne Dyer. They talked Geoengineering in the face of runaway Climate Change.
On one side you have a very ecologically-focused, democratically-led effort at getting our emissions down in a way that is in harmony with the planet and its web of life. The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth that shifts us to an earth centered paradigm.
And on the other, there’s not enough time. So we’ve got to geoengineer ourselves out of this crisis that’s coming so fast the scientific community is scared and desperate. Temporary intervention is needed so we have more time to get emissions down, then we don’t have megadeaths starting in the tropics and subtropics in 30-50 years.
Very interesting. If a decision had to be made today, which side should we choose?
There’s just something about how Naomi Klein sees a situation. Her point of view is a powerful take on our world. Author of NO LOGO and the Shock Doctrine, her most recent article covers the oil spill in the gulf. Not one to hold back, she certainly captures the mood and adds appropriate context to the situation. Knowing she’s out there, beyond the filter of the mainstream, is certainly comforting. Her honesty helps us to catch ourselves and pulls us out of complacency, often shaking the foundations of our worldview or what we deem to be acceptable in our reality.
The article is powerful. Infuriating. A little sad and hopeless. And yet an important alarm sounding. Calling on us to correct course. Following are some choice paragraphs (Full article via the Guardian):
If Katrina pulled back the curtain on the reality of racism in America, the BP disaster pulls back the curtain on something far more hidden: how little control even the most ingenious among us have over the awesome, intricately interconnected natural forces with which we so casually meddle. BP cannot plug the hole in the Earth that it made. Obama cannot order fish species to survive, or brown pelicans not to go extinct (no matter whose ass he kicks).
This Gulf coast crisis is about many things – corruption, deregulation, the addiction to fossil fuels. But underneath it all, it’s about this: our culture’s excruciatingly dangerous claim to have such complete understanding and command over nature that we can radically manipulate and re-engineer it with minimal risk to the natural systems that sustain us.
None of this sloppiness would have been possible, however, had BP not been making its predictions to a political class eager to believe that nature had indeed been mastered. Some, like Republican Lisa Murkowski, were more eager than others. The Alaskan senator was so awe-struck by the industry’s four-dimensional seismic imaging that she proclaimed deep-sea drilling to have reached the very height of controlled artificiality. “It’s better than Disneyland in terms of how you can take technologies and go after a resource that is thousands of years old and do so in an environmentally sound way,” she told the Senate energy committee just seven months ago.
With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that’s when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” – with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich’s telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be – locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore – was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once.
Human limitation has been the one constant of this catastrophe. After two months, we still have no idea how much oil is flowing, nor when it will stop.
And this is surely the strangest twist in the Gulf coast saga: it seems to be waking us up to the reality that the Earth never was a machine. After 400 years of being declared dead, and in the middle of so much death, the Earth is coming alive.
Virtually all indigenous cultures have myths about gods and spirits living in the natural world – in rocks, mountains, glaciers, forests – as did European culture before the scientific revolution. Katja Neves, an anthropologist at Concordia University, points out that the practice serves a practical purpose. Calling the Earth “sacred” is another way of expressing humility in the face of forces we do not fully comprehend.
A collective call to action.
Washington, DC on June 28th, 2010
TEDxOilSpill will explore new ideas for our energy future, and how we can mitigate the current crisis in the Gulf. TEDxOilSpill will tackle the tough questions raised by the recent and ongoing environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Topics will include mitigation of the spill and the impending cleanup efforts; energy alternatives; policy and economics; as well as new technology that can help us build a self-reliant culture.
Certainly an impressive group of speakers from EarthEcho, Carbon War Room, Rocky Mountain Institute and much, much more.
More boom, a protesting poster and an island that is shaped like a seahorse.
SPUR's Agenda for Change
Included in the Meeting of the Minds 2010 conference was a presentation by Gabriel Metcalf from SPUR. Focusing on the innovations we need for more sustainable cities, the conference was a gathering of leading thinkers, architects, designers, political officials, policy experts, environmental advocates, urban planners, leading foundations, community activists, and on and on. There was a lot covered in two days that I’ll write more on this week. But one of the most engaging presentations was from Gabriel on the work of SPUR. Their Agenda for Change includes Community Planning, Disaster Planning, Economic Development, Good Government, Housing, Regional Planning, Sustainable Development and Transportation. It’s really worth exploring further.
TMF started out as a place for doers, dreamers, sketchers, crafters and mess-makers to congregate, get inspired and create. This current incarnation is a simple extension of that intent. A pathway from what is now, to what could be tomorrow. Onward!
