GREEN PATRIOT POSTERS (Project Green/NOMAD Films) is being made into a documentary short film. And you can help Kickstart it!

Green Patriot Posters the book edited by Dmitri Siegel & Edward Morris

IMAGES FOR A NEW ACTIVISM

Green Patriot Posters the book was released at the end of 2010, a year tied for the warmest on record with 1998 and 2005. The book brings together the strongest contemporary graphic design currently promoting sustainability and the fight against climate change at a time when one of America’s political parties is looking to rewrite the Clean Air Act so that it can’t be used to fight that very same climate change.

The book showcases 50 posters selected from the project Website in detachable, ready to hang format. It’s edited by Edward Morris and Dmitri Siegel and includes text by Michael Bierut, Thomas L. Friedman, Steven Heller, Edward Morris, Dmitri Siegel and Morgan Clendaniel. In addition to the site and the book, Cleveland saw bus adverts by Michael Beirut, Dorchester was home to a public art campaign and San Francisco had bus shelter placement thanks to some successful crowdfunding.

Green Patriot Posters {dot} ORG

Bierut Bus in Cleveland

Bike Your City Bus Shelter by Jason Hardy in San Francisco

Green Patriot Posters Reinvigorate Environmental Message at Wired and the Destroy This Book excerpt can be found at Design Observer. Most People just don’t get climate change. Few grasp the need and more important, the opportunity to transform our society. So the people who do get it need to be louder, more insistent and more effective at getting the message across. Certainly a very true statement. (more…)

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.

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.

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?

Union Pacific and Climate Change

Bill McKibben has a new book out called Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Founder of 350.org, McKibben is part of the movement to start transforming our communities from the ground up. He recently did an interview about the changes we’re currently living through on Democracy Now! He will lead a protest over the use of coal energy on Thursday morning June 17 in downtown Omaha. The 11:00 a.m. protest will be held in front of Union Pacific’s corporate headquarters to spotlight Nebraska’s leading role in the transport of this dirty and deadly energy. 

As the planet changes and energy extraction becomes more problematic, from oil spills to coal mine explosions, where we decide to get our energy from will be one of the most important decisions our society will make in the coming years. More dirty, “cheap” stuff? Or we will shift and really get on the path to clean renewables? 

Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale.

Eaarth by Bill McKibben