Business & Politics

If you needed another reason to hit up Citysol, New York's free sustainability-themed art and music event, here it is: Dan Deacon, the inimitable surrealist trash-synth community-building music man is playing tonight. He punctuates a weekend of concerts, comedians, green art installations and panel discussions.

For instance, at 6 tonight, there's a discussion on sustainable design with the chief of design for NYC parks; tomorrow, two discussions will will turn toward solar and the meeting of grassroots advocacy and interactive design. Sitting on that panel will be artist Eve Mosher, whose work Insert _Here, along with other artists' eco-minded art, will be appearing at the event all weekend. Mosher's work asks participants to use small yellow signs to identify sites in need of a bit of greening ("insert solar here," "insert a garden here," etc), and upload photos of the place to the web. From there, Mosher or another artist renders the photo in order to show how the site might look if re-mediated. The idea is to capitalize "on community awareness of place/environment and optimism in the face of climate challenges.”

Also lighting your compact-florescent fire this weekend in NYC: Figment, a multidisciplinary Burning Man-ish party at Governor's Island, the Buckminster Fuller retrospective at the Whitney Museum, and Olafur Eliasson's awesome Waterfalls.

Citysol: Stuyvesant Cove Park, near the East River and 23rd Street. Map and directions here. via Papermag

Business & Politics

J.R. Watkins’ new line of natural home care products brings the fresh-scented carefully crafted quality of their natural body care line to your spring cleaning routine. You might be wondering: “A body-care line that also makes natural home cleansers?” But once you think over it a bit – the concept makes perfect sense.

Both types of products are coming under greater scrutiny as we learn about the risks we take by applying toxic ingredients to our skin and using caustic chemicals to clean our homes. For too long we’ve made a Faustian bargain with the products we use in our personal and home care – accepting that to be effective they must also be a bit (or a lot) dangerous.

Business & Politics

Is it art or is it leftovers? This picture is made entirely of food: broccoli trees with added peas, bread mountains with a white sugar waterfall, cauliflower clouds, a vanilla pod ladder, herb foliage and a path of cumin. The artist (?) Carl Warner was inspired by healthy eating campaigns. He assembles these foodscapes from fresh fruit and vegetables and photographs them. He shoots them in separate stages to stop the food from going bad, and puts them together digitally. For those who want to try it, he visualises the scene as a regular landscape, then he works on substituting food for the components. That's the fun part. An Italian scene has pasta fields, mozzarella clouds and a lasagna cart.

To give a realistic three-dimensional feel to the photographs, each still life is composed on a table measuring 8ft by 4ft. The foreground is only about 2ft across. There is no word whether he uses organic vegetables but the broccoli forest (pictured) is his favourite. A tip: salmon makes a very good sea. :: Daily Mail

Recent Comment by quikboy : "Neat comparison Ross. I agree, I would love to make a little city of food one day...</p..." [read]

Business & Politics

The Globe and Mail reported on news this week from (one of our heroes) David Suzuki and his new partnership with the NHLPA to oftset the players carbon emissions created from their extensive travel by planes, trains, and automobiles - well, actually they said buses and cars. Here are some excerpts from the article:

"We can do as much as we can as environmentalists, but let's face it, kids look up to heroes," Suzuki said yesterday. "My first reaction, as an environmentalist, was, 'Whoa, what a great set of allies.

The program is designed to make players carbon neutral, and the initiative is considered the first of its kind for professional athletes.

Business & Politics

At under five feet, Cun Yanfang doesn’t cut a very imposing figure. But the 31-year-old Chinese villager is proof of the influence that the little people can have on the environment even in the middle of a massive environmental crisis. A member of the Naxi tribe from western China’s Yunnan province, Cun has focused on saving the Yunnan golden monkey, which numbers only around 1,500 and has suffered largely from the illegal logging that continually plagues the region. (The golden monkey happens to love leafy heights -- it lives at the highest altitude of any primate, 10,000 feet.)

With funding from the Nature Conservancy and Rare (and a keen sense of humor and marketing acumen), she travels across the area drumming up support for her campaign, which has installed biogas feeders and solar panels to reduce the local need for firewood.

With visits to schools, village quizzes and prizes for green-themed performances at local festivals, her campaign also seeks to educate locals about the monkey and, more so, to build a sense of responsibility among them, all while appealing to their entrepreneurial instincts. As she tells the Christian Science Monitor this week:

"We want to use people's pride in their hometowns to make them responsible for their own places," explains Cun. "It shouldn't be because of law enforcement."

Business & Politics

The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra must be the only band in the world that buys its instruments fresh and organic before each performance. They must also be the only ones to use DIY instruments such as cucuphones in the wind section. For the uninitiated it's made out of a carrot, cucumber and pepper. Also in the winds is the recorder made out of a carrot with drilled holes, the most difficult instrument to create. If you slice an eggplant horizontally, but not all the way, so that the slices are still attached then you have a castanet. Naturally, a pumpkin is used as a bongo drum and celeriac is a bass and violins are leeks.

The 11 orchestra members prefer to use organic vegetables but it can be hard if they are out of season. There was no confirmation if organic made better instruments. The concerts usually end with soup for the audience, made out of the ingredients. Unfortunately, in health & safety mad England, they won't be allowed to do that. "But no one has ever died at one of our gigs" lamented one of the musicians.

The musicians are for real; they have been performing as a collective, playing avant-garde music for nine years now to larger and larger audiences. Their goal: "we are making avant-garde digestible". :: The Times

Business & Politics

It's not exactly on-message but it's addictive and it's for a good cause. FreeRice is a computer "game" that tests your vocabulary and for every word that you get right, 10 grains of rice are donated through the United Nations to end world hunger.

Curious? It's simple: a word pops up with multiple choice answers. If you click the right one then a harder word comes up and the level of difficulty keeps increasing. For every click 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Programme. Since October 7, 2007 when it began, 164,650,960 grains of rice have been donated.

The site is funded by the advertisers: Macy's, Fujitsu, Timelife, Apple, Office Depot, Reader's Digest and many more whose names pop up as you play the game. The World Food Programme is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. Sounds good, so if you are bored, start playing and help the hungry while you're at it. :: FreeRice Via :: Hippyshopper

Business & Politics

Or as BoingBoing titled it, "Irony, Thy Name is Amazon."

Nothing more need be said, but to fill out this space we can direct you to Mike testing a human powered lawn mower, Jasmin's How to green your gardening, and Bonnie's ten commandments of eco-gardening.