Provocative Global Warming Rug Creates a Stir in the Blogosphere
by Leonora Oppenheim, London, UK 
on 01.27.09
Images: NEL.com.mx
This little boy looks like he might be blogging over spilled milk, in fact he's concerned about the future of his environment. The Global Warming Rug by Mexican design cooperative NEL, featuring Emiliano Godoy, has created quite a stir in the blogosphere over the last few months after it was shown at the Valencia furniture fair in August last year. The evocative imagery of a young boy with a laptop in front a rug depicting a lone polar bear on a ever shrinking ice floe has prompted various reactions...
TreeHugger picked this design up briefly in August via Hugg, but since then many others have weighed in with their opinions:
While Dezeen stuck to the PR release, Inhabitots thought it was "a great conversation piece" for a child's room, GreenUpgrader described it as "a creative reminder of the polar bears plight", but Green Daily found the rug qualified as "depressing decor" that "evokes images of the apocalypse".
Our favourite however was Josh Spear who said he'd chose this rug for a children's nursery themed "Animals Our Children Will Never See”. Spear then goes off on a tangent that somehow involves the Coen Brothers:
"They surely intended this to be a Big Lebowski environmental metaphor: you see, the carbon-spewing corporations, those are the “carpet pissers.” Society is like the Dude, who just wanted his rug back. And Al Gore? We’d like him to be Walter, but see him as more of a Donny." Ha ha....
What TreeHugger loves most about this carpet, produced for Spanish carpet company Nanimarquina, is that it is provocative. Graphically it's beautifully simple, but conceptually it evokes many connotations, from the traditional bear rug to the child's cuddly toy via an endangered species. And we can't help but enjoy the perverse paradoxical imagery of a polar bear on a melting ice floe in the middle of the sea keeping you warm as you sit by your living room fire.
More on Rugs
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