Forever Landfill

Article Photo Heavy Trash is at it again. The anonymous crew of Los Angeles-based interventionist artists, architects and urban planners just made a biting public criticism of LA’s waste and waste management problems in the form of a conceptual service company called Forever Landfill. With Los Angeles’ consumptive culture showing no sign of slowing, the city’s current landfill supply falls short of demand. Forever Landfill provides an essential service to meet the lifestyle needs of L.A.’s luxury community by giving residents the opportunity to purchase their own personal landfill plot, complete with discrete daily pick-ups, signature refuse bins, and platinum customer care. Rather than asking Angelenos to make personal sacrifices, or requiring commercial producers to take responsibility for the waste they create, Forever Landfill allows residents to send their toxic e-waste, unsightly plastics, and excess packaging to a remote location where all trash can rest in peace. Heavy Trash designed an extensive corporate website for Forever Landfill, complete with sample patterns for landfill bins (like the Burberry one pictured above), images of their ads on public benches, and a lengthy FAQ. The corporate copy is relentlessly sardonic and never breaks character. They point to a recent initiative proposed by a city… (more)

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Movement Building and Activism at 2:39 PM)

Weekly DIY: Rain Barrels

Photo Credit: Elizabeth Redmond

I've been wanting to put in a couple of rain barrels at my house this year. We put in some garden plants this weekend, and they are going to need to be watered….

Greening the Screen

Article Photoby Francesca Birks Most of us can recall an awe-inspiring natural landscape from a blockbuster or independent movie that made us wish we could project ourselves from our seats to the other side of the screen. What we might not realize as distant viewers is the environmental impact and degradation that the film may have caused in the process of its production. In recognition of the film production industry’s reliance on the beauty of dramatic, unspoiled natural landscapes, the New Zealand film industry responded by establishing the Greening the Screen project, which was funded by the Ministry for the Environment, Landcare Research and Waitakere City Council, and developed in association with South Pacific Pictures and the Screen Production and Development Association of New Zealand. Project Greening the Screen involved the creation of an environmental toolkit in the belief that “there should be credible and defensible environmentally responsible practices at all levels of the industry, starting with top management commitment and including practices behind the screen as well as on and off the screen and in the public eye”. The toolkit takes a thorough look at the entire film production process from start to finish and stresses taking action by identifying… (more)

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Media at 11:52 AM)

Letter from Visby: Linnaeus, the Encyclopedia of Life and the Metaverse

I write this from the medieval town of Visby, in the shadow of the ruined church of Saint Clement, on Sweden’s Gotland island. I’ve stayed here for a few days on my way to the Tällberg Forum, hoping for a chance to catch my breath. It’s a beautiful place, Visby, a UNESCO World Heritage site of old buildings, tiles roofs, cobblestones, ancient churches and a huge stone wall circling the city, and I’ve spent the last few days wandering the narrow winding streets, sitting in cafes overlooking the ocean, reading and relaxing and trying to catch up with the flow of ideas and information that rolls through my life in what sometimes seems an unstoppable flood. There’s something wonderful about contemplating the future while bathing in history. To read about emerging technologies, new scientific research, innovative social programs — the whole cacophony of change — while standing on ground where Vikings raided, where Hanseatic merchants sold goods, where the piratical Victual Brothers made their base in the 14th Century; it gives one a sense of the long view. Tones things down. Carl Linnaeus spent time here as well. Locals proudly claim that the field research he did on Gotland in… (more)

(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 7:35 PM)