Mediacology

P. 1

Pt. 2

Erik Assadourian from the World Watch Institute introduces the 2010 edition of the State of the World (you can download some chapters for free here, or purchase PDF of the whole book for less than $10). The presentation style may not zing like TED, but I think it’s worth cribbing some notes, especially [...]

How’s this for media ecology: Ecosia is a green search engine that restores rain forests. Watch the above video to see how. According to them, if 1% of Internet users search on Ecosia, an area of rainforest the size of Switzerland will be saved every year. On the surface this seems like a preposterous solution [...]

Apparently we have a new “eco-vernacular.”

Looks like Environmental Defense Fund has it’s rebuttal to Annie Leonard’s Cap and Trade presentation, but cribbed the Story of Stuff’s presentation style (both aesthetically and style of address). I couldn’t find credits to see if Free Range Studios (FRS) also made the EDF video.

(Speaking of which, Jonah Sachs and [...]

This news clip and video of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s Ady Gil being struck by Japanese whalers will be of interest to anyone who has read Kevin Michael DeLuca’s Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. In it he reflects on the success of Greenpeace’s anti-whaling image war in the 1970s in which [...]

Former Vikings, contemporary Danish are better known now for windmills, bicycles and excellent rain gear. Like many of the social democracies of Europe’s northern frontier, to some the Danes are actually Europe’s modern hippies, which they hoped to leverage with the “Hopenhagen” brand. History, it was hoped, would show that Copenhagen and its COP-15 UN [...]

Best sound bites from the conference so far.

Once again Annie Leanard and Free Range Studios simplifies the fine print for the rest of us. No matter what you think of “cap and trade,” you should watch this. With Goldman Sachs and Enron folks involved, you should be worried. Not surprisingly, I just found out that in Italy the Mafia’s new business ventures [...]

From Grist.

You can thank PT Barnum (quoted in the header) for viral video’s secret formula: videotape some kind of stupid human/animal trick (the more extreme the better) and draw a crowd. Enter Plane Stupid, a group that wants to reduce air travel by using freaky video to draw awareness to its cause. Problem is, the the [...]

Actually, not. If you watch until the end, this video promotes a new green industrial revolution, which looks nice on paper, but ultimately doesn’t represent a fundamental shift in our relationship with Gaia. Yes, it’s a kindler form of capitalism, but does it really respond in a way the situation is calling for? I admit [...]

OK, I realize my header is a bit of a stretch, but after reading an interesting overview of some recent articles about Greenwashing as a first step in the evolution of change, I though, why not? If it’s true that Greenwashing is an effort to appease a changing consumer base, could this also be a [...]

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Blog Action Day’s Intro video

This years’s Blog Action Day theme is “climate change.” I’d like to focus on language.

So what’s in a word? Not much and a lot. Words don’t actually carry any meaning. Our belief in this comes from a fallacious cultural understanding of language based on the “conduit metaphor,” which views communicate [...]

For a shorter version of this video, click here.

I’m still working out whether or not I agree with Al Gore’s politics in response to global climate catastrophe (see Vandana Shiva’s Soil Not Oil for a critique of “global” (i.e. corporate as opposed to local) solutions being proposed). I question, for example, Gore’s uncritical use of [...]

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c

Sadly the poor Star Wars geeks at BoingBoing got duped by Derrick Jensen’s unfortunate parody video, which slams all environmental strategies that don’t advocate violent resistance. Apparently he cannot differentiate the cartoon world of Star Wars with his own vision of the world, which seems to be a 19th Century caricature of far more complex [...]

(watch the videos in order)

Do you want to frak this car?

One of the key themes of Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature is the loss of a cultural restraining ethic in our dominant global paradigm, one that limits “progress” and prohibits the over-exploitation of land. Up to the Renaissance it was commonly held in European [...]

Evolution: Has Human Culture Replaced Biology?:

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the planet. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving [...]

Adorno said “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” The updated version could have been, “marketing after 9/11 is uncivilized,” but alas, the American response to 9/11 was more advertising and to shop as much as possible (at least this was Bush’s command). But in some cases the dictum still stands; thus a major dustup over [...]

Portals (Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc.) have enabled guided Internet experiences, but Disney now takes it one step further. Its new Netpal notebook computer is entirely a computerized Disney environment. From ZDNet:

Developed with parents and kids in mind, the Disney Netpal has a reinforced mechanical design and, naturally, a Disney user interface. In addition to “more [...]