By Will Potter
I tried to resist. I really did. But when I jokingly posted on the Green is the New Red Facebook page that I wanted to make a “Sh*t the FBI Says” video, ya’ll went nuts about the idea. Like the videos that started the trend, it’s pretty goofy. But sadly, it’s all based on statements the FBI has made in court, in the press, or to activists themselves (I’ve heard quite a few of these myself).
On Saturday, June 22, a group of friends will meet at one of the more than 4,000 natural gas wells that have been drilled by hydrofracking in Pennsylvania. Instead of picket signs, however, they'll be carrying a picnic basket. For an event they're calling "Picnic on the Gas," they'll strive to show that it is possible to live with creativity and even joy in gas drilling country.
Once a year people all over the Earth go to places that they love and where they live that have been damaged, and they bring attention, curiosity, a sense of adventure, and beauty there.
In the process we give back to the places that have given so much to us.
"Since the progress of civilization in our country has furnished thousands of convenient places for this Swallow to breed in, safe from storms, snakes, or quadrupeds, it has abandoned, with a judgment worthy of remark, its former abodes in the hollows of trees, and taken possession of the chimneys which emit no smoke in the summer season." John James Audubon, The Chimney Swallow (or American Swift, Chimney Swift, Chaotura Pelasgia), from The O
Sian Ka’an is an extraordinary UNESCO tropical nature reserve along Mexico’s Carribean coastline, but the currents that pass by this area bring garbage from all over the world to the shores of this paradise. Alejandro Duran, an artist working in Brooklyn, NY, collects this trash and arranges it into works of colorful landscape art to examine “the tension between the natural world and an increasingly overdeveloped one.”
By Joe Laur
Members of the creative collective Neozoon, a group of artists based in Paris and Berlin, are staging a protest against using animal furs as fashion by turning fur coats into street art graffiti.
Apparently, they are taking furs and fur garments and reshaping them into animals in action on streets, along alleyways, against walls and even on trees in parks.
"Make a Wave" is a song sung by Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas for Disney's Friends for Change, a charity group formed by Disney for their "Friends for Change" campaign. The song was written by Scott Krippayne and Jeff Peabody, the same team that penned Jordin Sparks' song "This Is My Now" for American Idol. "Make a Wave" was introduced and performed at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.
QUESTION: Year after year, decade after decade, you alert the legal authorities to cruelty violations and suffering animals in peril, yet nothing ever happens. You know for a fact there are thousands of screaming and suffering hens inside a factory farm and you know the authorities will once again turn a blind eye, so what do you do?
Judy Chicago, the pioneering feminist artist who made the iconic 1970s work The Dinner Party, has enjoyed a long and illustrious career rife with critical approval. Now, in anticipation of Earth Day 2020, Chicago is launching a new project called Create Art For Earth, wherein people from all over the world can submit their own creations to the campaign via a corresponding hashtag. “This is no time for abstractions,” the call for art reads.
The Convergence graphic novel series is a science fiction dystopia. It tells the story of a dying earth and the dark covenant that the last civilization acceded to for survival. The social contract is disrupted when a prophecy is triggered which can heal the dying earth. Book 1 was released this past June with 7 more episodic books coming monthly in 2016.
Yes, the Climate is Changing
Video: People around the world show how climate change is already affecting their lives.
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Uncle Sam's Cultural Dissonance looks at the issues facing The United States, including Canada and Mexico. In countries like the United States, where some states are dotted with countless lakes and many people live within easy reach of an ocean, it may be easy to assume that drinking and recreational waters are limitless. This is absurd. This series focuses in on excessive overuse in by agricultural, residential, and industrial sectors.
"Send It On" is a song recorded by American recording artists Miley Cyrus, Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez from charity project Disney's Friends for Change. The track's producers Adam Anders and Peer Åström co-wrote it with Nikki Hassman. The song was released on August 11, 2009 by Walt Disney and Hollywood Records as a charity single in order to benefit international environmental associations.
A grey minivan rattled through São Paulo’s hilly suburbs, loaded with spray cans, paint rollers, buckets and a ladder as five street artists drove to the Atibainha river, rap lyrics blaring from their speakers.
On the sweltering afternoon of 26 February, they painted colourful protest murals on the legs of a bridge that crosses one of São Paulo’s most important water sources, nestled in the Serra da Cantareira mountain range.
Environmental activist Franny Armstrong's brainwave came as she was walking to a debate with the then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband. She had read a report saying that the developed world must cut its carbon emissions by 10% by the end of 2010 to avoid passing the tipping point. Armstrong, 39, dropped her idea to start a campaign into the debate. 10:10 was born.
Today over 40 people gathered at the Ministry for Internal Affairs in the centre of Tirana, the capital of Albania. The issue is Tirana's drinking water, which is not clean, unreliable as it comes out of the tap only a few hours a day and that sewage systems continue to pollute the water sources.
“The real wealth of the Nation,” marine biologist and author Rachel Carson wrote in her courageous 1953 protest letter, “lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife… Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.” Carson’s legacy inspired the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose hard-won environmental regulations are now being undone in the
Cheat Neutral satirizes the carbon offset model by offering people the opportunity to pay someone else not to cheat on their partner in order to neutralize their own infidelity. Cheatneutral allows you to pay £2.50 to carry on cheating while funding “monogamy-boosting offset projects”.
The Grim Reapers stood outside the capital building of the State of Washington as the new Governor Jay Inslee was being inaugurated. We were part of a climate change rally that lasted several hours and included many other groups protesting coal trains and fracking for oil and gas. The same groups also participated in the Seattle action on February 17,2013 when they had a bullet train for people instead of a coal train.
All those who practice surfing know firsthand the serious problem our beaches face: pollution. While some only complain, others do something about it. Two Brazilian surfers decided they could help raise public awareness of the need to protect nature of the proliferation of plastics used in the oceans through a novel idea: create surfboards plastic bottles.
"Featuring giant ocean dice that originally appeared in the booklet "drift" by Max Mulhern, these dice were launched in international waters to create a visually stunning ode to chance and luck. This project can also be found under the title: "the greatest floating craps game on earth"." --AquaDice website
Greenpeace released a video to spread the word that Nestle, the maker of Kit Kat, was using palm oil purchased from companies that are destroying the Indonesian rainforest and pushing orangutans towards extinction. The video, which features a guy opening a Kit Kat at work, pulling out an orangutan finger and taking a bite, shocked hundreds of thousands of viewers. The Greenpeace campaign against Nestle was a success.
The Colors Mountain is a collective intervention project that uses a virtual space dedicated to the observation and investigation of alleged ecological crimes , with the goal of using the concept of "reasonable doubt", not only for possible court acquittal but also cause a formal investigation that could lead to a court complaint.
By Will Potter
Multiple states have considered “Ag Gag” bills that criminalize investigators who document animal welfare abuses on factory farms. Iowa and Utah are the latest to approve them. These bills, lobbied for by Big Ag groups, are part of a long line of attempts to blame activists for exposing abuses, rather than hold corporations accountable.