Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

So far, the winter of 2011-2012 ranks as the fifth-warmest on record. And if temperatures continue to hover around the 40s through February, we’re set to break that record. For some, winter is as full throttle as it always has been. In fact, in some parts of the world, winter is even more hellish than it’s ever been. For those of you craving that white stuff, here’s some pretty reminders of what you could have if you were in the right place.

(above) Utah, USA

Vail, Colorado

Füssen, Germany

Nozawa, Japan

Wallpack Center, New Jersey, USA

Boulder, Colorado

Madrid, Spain

Jura, France

New York, New York, USA

Styrsö, Sweden

Pingree Grove, Illinois, USA

Yukon Territory, Canada

Guildford, England

Berks County, Pennsylvania, USA

Stockholm, Sweden

Languedoc-Roussillon, France

Asselt, The Netherlands

Hamburg, Germany

Lake Louise Park, Alberta, Canada

Skipaskagi, Iceland

Boulder, Colorado

Bern, Switzerland

Aussois, France

Stockholm, Sweden

Mauna Kea, Hawaii, USA

Transalpina, Romania

Bariloche, Argentina

Grut, Switzerland

Chamonix, France

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

SEE ALSO:

40 Gorgeous Photos of Europe

40 Gorgeous Photos of North America

40 Gorgeous Photos of Latin America

40 Gorgeous Photos of Asia

40 Gorgeous Photos of Africa

25 Photos of Islands Threatened by Climate Change

25 Images of Female Adrenaline Seekers

40 Photos from Flea Markets Around the World

25 breathtaking places threatened by us.

Some may try to deny it, but by now there’s next to no doubt that global warming is having real, profound effects on the world we live in. Perhaps one of the most alarming changes is occurring in the world’s oceans and endangering islands with diverse ecosystems, rich cultures, and breathtaking, beautiful landscapes. Pacific island nations like Kiribati and the Marshall Islands have already come to terms with the irreversible nature of the crisis and are formulating long-term relocation strategies for their residents.

The islands pictured below have been identified as being highly at risk for the devastating consequences of climate change. Their beauty is a reminder that global action is needed now.

(above) Palau

Tuvalu

Antigua

St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands

Kiribati

Fernandina Island, Galapagos

St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands

Nevis

Bartholomew Island, Galapagos

Northwestern Hawaiian Islands

Solomon Islands

Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia

Papua New Guinea

Maldives

Guam

Pohnpei, Federated States of Micronesia

Fiji

Nauru

Majuro, Marshall Islands

Tonga

Rabaul, Papua New Guinea

Lord Howe Island, Australia

Kauai, Hawaii

Norman Island, British Virgin Islands

Aitutaki, Cook Islands

SEE ALSO:

40 Gorgeous Photos of Europe

40 Gorgeous Photos of North America

40 Gorgeous Photos of Latin America

40 Gorgeous Photos of Asia

10 global events we were all intrinsically part of.

What makes an event memorable? How does a “happening” sear into our collective mindset and take up permanent residence in our hearts and in our souls? Most often, of course, we are not personally there to witness or directly experience occurrences of global importance.

How many of us were in Cairo’s Tahrir square as protests raged earlier this year?

Who among us lost a loved one or ate radioactive food in Japan, or suffered pangs of hunger in East Africa?

In our media-saturated world, memorable events – indeed memories themselves – are delivered to us via an increasingly wide range of words and pictures, bits and bytes, accounts that stream to our attention, some touching us for a moment, some for a lifetime. Here’s a look at our Top 10 (in no particular order), with links to the stories and accounts that made them indelible to us.

1. March of Horrors: Japan’s Suffering

A tsunami generated by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the coast of northeast Japan killed nearly 20,000, caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and triggered a nuclear power plant disaster that unleashed radiation into the environment. Within hours, videos of the unimaginable waves crushing the Japanese shoreline flooded world consciousness via YouTube and other Internet outlets.

2. The Harder They Fall: Arab Spring

Beginning with a small demonstration in Tunisia that grew to topple a regime, flames of unrest spread to Egypt, ousting dictator Hosni Mubarak, and then to Bahrain and Yemen. Eventually Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi would be dead, and even today, Syrian protesters remain caught in a bloody battle with dictator Bashar al-Assad. Did social media enable and perhaps even spark these events?

3. European Disunion: Economic Crisis in the E.U.

The global economic downturn wreaked havoc in the European Union where austerity measures in Greece resulted in riots and protest, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi was driven from office, and measures taken by Germany and France exacerbated an ongoing fissure between the E.U. and Britain. Meanwhile, disagreement about how to avoid a catastrophic meltdown flared across the Atlantic, as opinions about what to do remained as numerous as there are pundits and stakeholders.

4. Wanted Dead: American Operation Kills Osama Bin Laden

In May, American helicopters bearing a special operations team raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, whose followers carried out the 9/11 attacks. Within hours his body was buried at sea, and images of the corpse suppressed. Instead, a powerful and now-famous image of White House personnel – including president Barack Obama and Secretary of state Hillary Clinton – remotely watching the mission was made public.

5. The Fruit of Invention: The World Mourns Loss of Apple Founder Steve Jobs

The world lost some great minds to cancer and health issues as 2011 wore on, including writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens and Czech playwright, dissident and politician Vaclav Havel. But, despite the sense that “it was coming,” the loss that seemed to most deeply move our high-tech world was that of innovator, inventor and Apple Founder Steve Jobs. As news of his death spread across the internet in October – in part via millions of his own inventions – biographer Walter Isaccson’s iBio hit the presses, eventually to set new sales records.

6. From Wall Street to Main Street: Occupiers Take a Stand

Beginning with a September protest in a New York City park near Wall Street, what became known as the “Occupy” movement quickly spread to many major American cities and beyond. The “leaderless” protests are said to represent “the 99 percent” against the richest 1 percent of Americans, who benefit from corporate and political corruption and greed at the majority’s expense. In November, images of a campus police officer at the University of California Davis pepper-spraying students went viral over the internet, instantly becoming a rallying point for the movement.

7. Us vs. Them: Obstructionism Paralyzes Washington

Despite being fractured between party traditionalists and Tea Partiers, a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives shackled the hands of Democratic President Barack Obama and the Democratic-led Senate. On issues ranging from the economy to the environment, American leaders reached a seemingly endless stream of stalemates. Most notably, the President unveiled a massive jobs bill that was labeled dead-on-arrival by members of both parties. The New York Times commented on the political gamesmanship, and EcoSalon presented the many rifts dividing America.

8. Weather, Weather Everywhere:  Climate Change Marches On

With drought in Texas, killer cyclones in the Philippines, and monster floods in South America and Thailand, 2011 was another year in what seems like an annual escalation of climate change and severe weather. Perhaps the most wrenching weather-related disaster was the return of drought to the Horn of Africa. Data continues to show the impact humans have on the world’s climate, yet deniers continue their war on science. In October, EcoSalon named names.

9. We are the World: All 7 Billion of Us

As the human population reached the 7 billion mark (with 3 billion more projected by the end of the century), debates about resources and birth control reheated. Can our planet sustain such exponential growth? In its inimitable way, National Geographic gave us the story in pictures.

10. Ask and Tell: End of Anti- Gay Military Policy in the American Armed Forces

After 18 years of controversy, the Pentagon repealed its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in September. After encouraging those who have been expelled under the policy to reenlist, President Barack Obama declared: “We are not a nation that says ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ We are a nation that says ‘out of many, we are one.’” An MSNBC story covered a historic kiss.

Images: TenSafeFrogs, Official U.S. Navy Imagery, S a l e e m – H o m s i, PIAZZA del POPOLO, bkusler, lwpkommunikacio, bogieharmond, Alex Barth, kevin dooley, woodleywonderworks, Beverly & Pack

In the absence of all the conveniences that make America so cozy, Shelter Editor K. Emily Bond ponders life without microwave ovens, HBO and good lighting. 

My husband, kid and I live in an ancient walled city. We don’t have a basement because, I suspect, someone’s skeletal remains are down there. There are lots of antediluvian dead people underfoot; you can’t dig in Seville, Spain without bumping up against a pile of bones or Roman cutlery, which invariably leads to bureaucratic disaster. As a result, there are few swimming pools within city limits and even fewer basements.

Bones I can live with, permitting they pre-date Columbus. The lack of a basement (despite my storage issues) is something I’ve learned to live with, too.

Here are a few more typically American conveniences that I’ve loved and left, the dearth of which has improved my quality of life tremendously.

A Microwave Oven
Over 90% of American homes have a microwave oven. They’re the ultimate in convenience, and admittedly more energy efficient than conventional ovens. That’s the good part.

Now, I’ll refrain from stating the obvious “but!” that follows (hint: it concerns the nutrients lost to your beloved Black & Decker). Instead, I’d like to direct your attention to the story of Norma Levitt. She was transfused a bag of blood that the nurse made the mistake of zapping in a microwave oven.

Guess what happened?

Norma died.

If the convenience of microwave heating could so dramatically alter the molecular structure of blood, thus killing poor Norma Levitt, imagine what it’s doing to your leftovers.

HBO
Apparently too much television can kill you, this according to an Australian study. The more hours you spend watching TV, the greater your risk of dying at an earlier age. Seriously. Like, by the hour. The study found that each hour spent in front of the TV increases your risk of dying from heart disease by 18 percent.

Is True Blood really worth it? Not if it was like last season.

Central Heating and Air
Air conditioning works by raking air across a thermostatically controlled refrigeration system and directing it back into our living environments. It’s really quite awesome on a hot day, but it also increases energy costs by about 50 percent and puts enormous strain on our environment.

Like it or not, a lot of our electricity is still produced by burning coal, thus contributing to dirty air, acid rain and global warming.

Stan Cox, author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths about Our Air-Conditioned World, writes that, “if people in India, Brazil and Indonesia used as much air-conditioning per capita as we do (and why not, their climates are hotter than ours), they would consume not only their own electricity supplies but also all of the electricity in Mexico, the United Kingdom and Italy – plus all 60 nations of Africa! The air-conditioning of America’s homes, businesses, schools, and vehicles causes the release of greenhouse gases equivalent to 400 million tons of carbon dioxide annually.”

Whole Foods
The joy I feel during a shop at Whole Foods is fettered only at the checkout line. No matter how good, ethical, healthy, organic and “local” Whole Foods makes me feel, when I take an objective step back and really look at the store – the layout, the lighting that makes the produce look like it’s being bathed in late afternoon sunshine – I can’t help but feel that I’m being marketed to and, in fact, kind of duped.

Is it really better to buy organically grown tomatoes flown in from Chile? Am I really helping small, local farmers in my native Maryland if most of the organic produce in this country comes from California? Particularly if “five or six big California farms dominate the whole industry,” as suggested by this article in Slate?

More pressing, do I really need a $10 bag of cherries?

Probably not.

Thankfully, opportunities to buy roadside produce abound in this fine nation of ours, as do hyper-local food co-ops. The lighting might not be as pretty (nor the parking as convenient) but at the very least you’re adding value to the quality of your life and the community.

Images: Walker Art Center; jmv; marlambie; Joe Shlabotnik

Existential angst? That’s for amateurs. True purveyors of panic disorder know that solastalgia is where all the cool kids hang out.

You might know it: that feeling of powerlessness when you see your local nature reserve steamrolled to build a new housing estate, or the helplessness you experience over climate change. The feeling that, as an individual there is so very little you can really do, and worse, there is no escaping it. Move to the wilds of Canada? I don’t think so. Run away to the Australian Outback? Not a chance.

For me, it began after watching The Age of Stupid. I left the screening gasping for breath. That’s it then, said my brain. Humans are too stupid, too selfish, too ignorant. My life, my plans, my hopes will never come to fruition because in 10 years time we’ll be embroiled in all-out global war ending, inevitably, painfully, finally, in a Cormac McCarthy-style denouement of doom and horror. Wonderful.

My form of campaigning – environmental journalism – came to a pretty abrupt stop after that. I couldn’t focus on anything environment related without being sent back into that panic. I didn’t want to read anything or speak to anyone. In a desperate rush to meet a deadline without doing any of the things that are usually required to write an article I used an old interview with a very well known politician, got all my facts wrong, wrote an opinion that was funny round the dinner table but mortifying when I saw it in print, got threatened with the Press Complaints Commission and that, as they say, was pretty much that.

A year and a half later and I’m just about ready to get back on the eco-horse. I’m feeling strong. I’ve got a bucket full of optimism and another of patience. I’ve started speaking to old contacts again, explaining that my absence was largely down to panic and terror and the occasional insanely unprofessional outburst.

Curiously, instead of cocking their heads to one side in faux sympathy with the crazy lady I’ve found people relating.

“Omg,” they say. “I know exactly how you feel.”

“Some days it’s all I can do to keep it together.”

“Some days I have to lie down in a dark room for a very long time.”

“It’s not just the weight of work on my shoulders,” one person told me, “I feel like I’ve got the entire future of humanity on them.”

Environmental campaigners deal with a lot. News about the state of the world is bad enough, but to be interested in conservation or renewable energy or growing your own food or not wasting stuff is also to open yourself up to plenty of abuse: we’re all soap-dodging, tree-hugging, work-shy deluded, good for nothing liberals, not to mention all those secret meetings we have about being power crazy commie socialists who want to control the world through taxes and fear and conspiracies about invisible see-oh-twos.

Because it’s something we’re passionate about or interested in, it doesn’t seem to follow that it can also be stressful. Yet daily, we are surrounded by the loss of things we care deeply about. Daily, we are let down by ineffective laws or politicians. Daily, we are disappointed in humanity. These aren’t the kind of things that fly in gently and kiss you on the forehead and it’s exactly because of that passion and interest that it is stressful.

Porcelain, Kate MacDowell

The existence of solastalgia was first discussed in Philosophy Activism Nature by Professor Glenn Albrecht in 2005. In academic circles, it’s a word that crops up from time to time but it isn’t something we hear in everyday conversation. Perhaps more commonly discussed is ecopsychology, which on a very basic level links psychology and ecology, suggesting that exposure to the natural world can aid, among other things, mental health problems.

The corollary of ecopsychology is that our diminishing natural environment can create or exacerbate mental health problems, or simply lead to a serious freak out. But while ecopsychology has its own eponymous peer-reviewed journal, and there are organizations dedicated to helping those with mental health problems find solace in the great outdoors, those involved in environmentalism are largely unsupported.

It is, of course, entirely possible that there is no support out there because no one is asking for it, but maybe no one is asking because no one else is asking. We can’t keep it quiet forever though, people are starting to notice we’re cracking up. So here goes nothing:

Hi. My name’s Sarah and I find dealing with all this environment stuff pretty stressful. I don’t want to have another conversation about arsing wind turbines or bloody recycling. I just want some action. Climate change scares the living daylights out of me and makes me furious in equal measures. Please be nice to me, and to everyone else out there. In the meantime I’d like to offer some tips for keeping it together when it all seems to be falling apart.

Look for the positive stories
Joy can be found in small places. Every success, no matter how small, is inspiring. Environmentalist and author Paul Hawken said, “If you just look at the data, and you’re optimistic then you’re not looking at the data. However, if you look at the people, and you see what’s happening in the world and you’re not optimistic then you don’t have a heart.”

Tell people you’re not prepared to discuss it
If you want to use reusable nappies, it’s no one else’s business. Tell them it’s not up for discussion. If you want to sell your car, it’s no one else’s business. Save your energy, save your sanity.

Don’t read the comments
Just say no to comments, unless they are on a particularly supportive and positive website (I heard about this great one called Ecosalon). Put the internet down and walk away.

Spend time with people who get it
Is there a Green Drinks in your area? If not, set one up. You don’t even have to talk green, but you know if you do it probably won’t make your head explode.

Celebrate life
That’s what it’s all about after all. Hug some trees, call your mom, smile at a stranger, spread a bit of joy. Feeling really enthused? You could even hug a climate change denier.

Image: Spanner Films, An Artist’s Journal, Tigr

World Oceans Day is today and we celebrate that which sustains us.

Welcome to World Oceans Day 2011. Since 2008, the United Nations has recognized June 8th as a day to celebrate, learn about, and take action on behalf of the oceans that cover three quarters of our planet and sustain all life on Earth – what author Julia Whitty calls our Deep Blue Home.

Last year at this time, oil was still spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the mangled riser pipe of BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig. All told, more than 4 million barrels of oil were spilled, and nearly 800,000 gallons of the chemical dispersant Correxit were injected deep into the Gulf. On the one-year anniversary of the explosion that killed eleven men and started what President Obama called “the greatest environmental disaster of its kind,” oil spill researcher Chris Reddy told me it was still too soon to know how much oil and dispersant remains in the Gulf and what the long-term ecological impacts will be.

This year, as we recognize World Oceans Day, we wait for news of another environmental disaster – the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan. Yesterday, Japan’s nuclear agency doubled their estimate of how much radioactive material has been released from the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant that was crippled by the March 11th earthquake and tsunami. In the weeks immediately following the disaster, levels of radioactivity in surrounding ocean waters skyrocketed. Now Bloomberg has reported that radioactive water may once again begin flowing into the ocean as it overflows service trenches. The announcement adds to the urgency of a research expedition now underway to map the location, type, and levels of radioactive contamination in the Pacific Ocean.

And yet, despite their devastating effects, these dramatic environmental disasters are not the greatest threats to our ocean.

Studies released in the past year have trumpeted dire news: nearly 60% of the world’s coral reefs are at risk of being lost in the next three decades, 85% of natural oyster reefs have already been lost, and it’s estimated that large fish have declined by two-thirds in the past century. These declines are largely the result of five human-driven processes that slowly but surely chip away at ocean ecosystems.

1. Climate Change: The ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Rising water temperatures are driving commercially important fish species offshore and toward the poles in search of cooler climes – bad news for fishermen and seafood lovers alike. Warmer water also holds less oxygen, and that spells trouble for marine animals who – like us – breathe oxygen. Scientists recently warned that low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ are expanding, and that we could be in for a repeat of the mass extinctions triggered by prehistoric warming events.

 

Carbon dioxide emissions pose a double threat to the ocean, raising water temperatures and increasing acidity.

2. Ocean Acidification: Carbon dioxide doesn’t just build up in the atmosphere; about a third of it gets absorbed by the ocean. The inevitable chemical result is the production of carbonic acid that, in sufficient quantities, disrupts the acid-base balance of the ocean (thus, the term ‘acidification’). That, in turn, throws off a whole host of other chemical processes. Corals and shellfish can’t get the calcium carbonate they need for their skeletons and shells. And the microscopic marine plants upon which the entire ocean food chain depends may not be able to get the nutrients they need to grow. Scientists have generally considered ocean acidification to be a problem of the future, but a study published last fall forced a revision of that thinking by demonstrating that scallops and quahogs are already feeling the burn.

3. Pollution: Plastic, nutrients, pesticides, hormones, oil. The list of things we dump into the oceans is disconcertingly long. Last summer, a team of researchers from Woods Hole, MA, confirmed what many had long suspected – that plastic debris is accumulating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, just as we’ve known for decades that it does in the Pacific. Another recent study confirmed that the vast majority of plastic releases estrogenic chemicals when soaked in saltwater and exposed to sunlight.

But not all pollutants are chemicals. Some experts include ‘biological pollution’, or invasive species – plants and animals that are introduced by human activities, like global shipping, into areas they have never been before. These species often out-compete or outright kill native species. This year, we learned that rising water temperatures may be making a bad situation worse, giving invasive species a competitive edge over their native counterparts.

4. Overfishing: Ecosystems are like jigsaw puzzles: remove one piece and you can’t complete the puzzle. Remove several, and the puzzle may not hold together or form a recognizable image. In this way, overfishing and its cousin, by-catch, wreak havoc on ocean ecosystems. Of course, collapsed fisheries take a human toll as well, causing economic hardship and threatening food supplies.

Counting fish is no easy matter, and there is always controversy about the status of fish populations. This year was no different. A high-profile presentation at a high-profile scientific conference set off a renewed debate, with one side claiming that large, predatory fish could be virtually extinct by 2050 and the other arguing that the reductions in large fish are exactly what would be expected of well-managed fisheries. But scientists on both sides of the overfishing debate have agreed that more than half of fish populations worldwide need rebuilding.

Still, there’s some good news on the overfishing front today. Federal officials are optimistic that the 2010 fishing season may go down in history as the year U.S. fisheries set – and stayed within – science-based, sustainable fishing limits. The U.S. is just one country, but this is evidence that we have the tools necessary to end overfishing. The challenge is putting them to work in the places – like Asia – that need them most.

5. Ignorance: Less than 10% of the ocean has been explored by humans. We have better maps of Mars than the seafloor, and some oceanographers have compared their research to shining a flashlight into an immense, dark cavern. Last fall, scientists announced the completion of the Census of Marine Life – a decade-long, global effort to shine a light on the amazing diversity of life that inhabits the ocean. The efforts of more than 2,000 scientists raised the total number of known marine species to almost a quarter of a million. Still, they estimate that’s less than a quarter of what’s out there; the vast majority of ocean life remains unknown to science. That means that, even for the ocean scientists who know the most, the ocean is largely a big blue bag of mysteries. Susan Avery – Director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution – says that the greatest threat facing the ocean is our limited ability to see what’s beneath the surface, to truly grasp our impact on the vast expanses of ocean.

Lest you think this doom and gloom doesn’t affect you, let me remind you of a few key facts.

It is no exaggeration to say that the ocean sustains all life on Earth. To quote W.H. Auden: “Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.” The oceans contain 97% of all water on the planet and drives the global water cycle. We’d also be hard-pressed to live without air, and microscopic marine plants produce more than half the oxygen we breathe.

Almost half of the world’s species live in the ocean. That rich biodiversity is not only an ecological wonder, it’s a treasure trove of chemicals that show up in everything from ice cream to toothpaste, and could hold a cure for cancer.

And in the age of globalization, when what you’re wearing, eating, or driving is more likely to be made in China than made in the U.S.A., it’s worth remembering that more than 90% of international trading is conducted via the ocean.

Just as we all benefit from the ocean, we all contribute to the threats facing the ocean, and we can all do something to help.

The greatest threats facing the ocean start in our homes and workplaces, whether we’re five minutes or 500 miles from the beach. While beach clean-ups are a tried and true way to repair some of the damage we inflict, they’re far from the only way.

• Learn more about what the ocean does for us, and what we’re doing to it.

• Tell others what you’re learning.
• Eat fish responsibly: Buy local, if possible, and know how the fish you eat was caught. Look for the Marine Stewardship Council label or check with a consumer guide, like Seafood Watch or the Smart Seafood Guide. None of the guides or labels are perfect, but they’re better than nothing.
• Ditch disposable plastic: We may only use it once, but it stays in the ocean forever. Plastic shopping bags and water bottles are particularly egregious offenders. Invest in a reusable water bottle and some canvas shopping bags.
• Reduce your carbon footprint: Don’t know where to start? Try an online carbon footprint calculator or a home energy audit to pinpoint areas where you can reduce.

This story was originally published in Climatide.

Image: Nasa Goddard Photo, Mike Baird, rkraemer, laszlo photo

Dramatic downsizing is forcing us to consider a psychological shift.

I’ve lived in a New York City shoebox apartment, the kind where the bathroom is in the kitchen and the bed is above the refrigerator, literally. Back then, tiny was more of a price consideration than a conscious one. Nowadays, small is the new cool with professionals, artists, sustainability activists and Tiny House People vying for less (and less) space by choice. Consider it a backlash against the McMansion era, an unsustainable trend wherein vast swathes of suburban and exurban landscape were razed to erect prefab palaces for anyone with enough cash burning in their pocket, regardless of whether or not they could afford it.

Thanks to small space advocates like Treehugger’s Graham Hill, Tumbleweed Tiny House Company’s Jay Shafer, and George Jetson’s architect of record Nano Systems, this is the year of the smaller and vastly more environmentally considerate house that actually is affordable, in principal and derivative. But by constructing and modulating on as small a scale as possible, are we over-correcting?

Tumbleweed Tiny House Company’s “Weebee” model

Shafer’s Tiny House plans start as small as 65 square feet. That’s pretty tiny, though he’s living comparatively large in a 96-square foot home north of San Francisco in Sonoma County, an area known for particularly pricey homes.

Treehugger’s Hill crowd-sourced designers to optimize his low-footprint, 420 square foot SoHo living space, inclusive of a home office, space for two guests to stay over, dining area fit for a feast for 12, and a lounge space for eight.

The Cube Project

And now this, the 3x3x3m Cube Project. That’s the standard size of a backyard storage shed, a fairly major foray into the miniscule.

The innovative structure, a true shelter if ever there was one, is quite genius if you can wrap your head around the idea of leading with your left foot everywhere you turn. The house is meant to “generate at least as much energy as it uses,” and features solar panels, cork floors, LED lighting throughout, a composting toilet and an Ecodan air-source heat pump. It’s suitable for one lithe individual and includes a lounge, dining table and two custom-made chairs, a double bed, full-size shower, kitchen, microwave oven and a washing machine, too.

The Cube, which made its debut at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, certainly challenged onlookers to reevaluate what they thought they knew about compact, low-carbon living.

But it also makes one wonder: Is this level of extreme downsizing healthy on a purely psychological level? My Manhattan “studio” apartment of yesteryear nearly landed me in an altogether different bin. Dr. Mike Page, a Reader in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and creative force behind the project begs to differ. He believes that addressing climate change requires as much of a psychological shift as a technological one. “The Cube Project,” he says in his mission statement, “is an attempt to show that many of the technologies we need are already commonly available and at an affordable price. The question is why aren’t we using them?”

We’ve certainly seen the average size of the American home drop after 15 straight years of growth, a reasonable shift in the right direction. I suppose that because extreme micro-living, a concept that is leaps and bounds ahead of logical down/rightsizing, requires such a dramatic shift in our cultural paradigm that it can leave some of us feeling a bit claustrophobic. But such a shift is possible. Ask any Manhattanite.

Image: The Cube Project

Rapanui and the U.K.’s Met have partnered to call attention to the weather.

It’s raining, it’s pouring and the old man is snoring, and oftentimes so are we when it comes to being inspired by weather forecasts that are random in accuracy. Enter the U.K.’s Met Office, the international authority on climate change research, as well as national weather service, and brothers Mart and Rob Drake-Knight, the founders of Rapanui.

“At Rapanui we think that it’s not that people don’t care about climate and the environment, it’s just that they don’t know where to start when it comes to organic, ethical or low carbon alternatives,” says Mart Drake-Knight, co-founder of Rapanui “Our brand is about making eco fashion cool and accessible. We were delighted when we were invited to design these Met Office t-shirts.  I think as well as being a nod to the Met Office’s heritage and expertise, we managed to add a bit of ‘Britishness’ and humour to capture the spirit of ‘the weather’ as a subject.”

The collaboration was designed to bring new audiences to the Met Office who might have an appreciation for not only daily weather, but why severe weather and climate change happen. Climate change is defined by The Met as “The term climate change usually refers to man-made changes that have occurred since the early 1900s.”

Luke Green from the Met Office says: “Weather fascinates everybody and these t-shirts provide a fun way of reaching new audiences about the work the Met Office does. The collaboration with Rapanui to design and produce these t-shirts is hopefully the first step in developing new partnerships to promote our brand.”

The organic cotton t-shirts are £24.95.

Brands like Rapanui represent an ethical and sustainable shift from mainstream fashion and are not only made from natural organic fabrics, but in a  factory that depends upon the wind to power it.

You couldn’t ask for a more perfect collaboration.

Conscious themes in mainstream performance art.

Two recent London plays have had audiences grappling with environmental issues. The National Theater’s production of Greenland, slammed as partisan, dull and rotten theater by the critics, dealt with sea levels rising in the Maldives and the failed UN talks in Copenhagen. Another show, The Heretic, a black comedy by stand-up Richard Bean, drew raves over its comedic approach to atmospheric doom and gloom, focusing on an earth scientist at York University. When her studies on rising sea levels fail to yield a major grant, she appears on BBS’s Newsnight and is fired, only to end up with a column in the Daily Telegraph. Both shows feature what else? A polar bear as symbol of our shame. As one Guardian critic put it, “Climate change drama is the new growth industry.”

As green creeps into art and seeps subliminally into our global consciousness, we wonder if it makes a dent in our behavior, the true test of a shift. While New York Times reviewer, Matt Wolf, dismissed Greenland as a “falsely stitched patchwork quilt” of worse case scenarios alongside a few facts, he also admitted muttering “Recycle, recycle, recycle,” all the way home. Easily distracted as we tend to be in bad theater, his review says he also became painfully aware of the mundane activities of audience members as they crumpled packets of snacks and popped plastic water bottles. “Hang on!” I wanted to call out,” he shares. “Is no one paying this show any heed?”

It is a good question, one posed in 1971 when The Lorax was first published, Dr. Seuss’s post-Sixties warning not to fool with Mother Nature and her magical Truffula Trees, Swomee-Swans, brown Bar-Ba-Loots and Humming-Fishes. The yellow Lorax, who spoke on behalf of the trees, convinces the Once-ler to resist chopping them down to mass produce Thneeds. The lesson of greed leading to environmental destruction is being reintroduced to a new audience four decades later as an animated 3-D feature to be released March of 2012.

Arguably catering to the adult brain, the same way the irony in Shrek went past young viewers, the Lorax’s undeniable message comes at a better time now than its dawn in the 70′s, when many people still thought it was okay to throw potato chip bags out the window, run sprinklers with no end in sight, and were watching blockbuster movies like The Graduate, where a young Dustin Hoffman looked at “plastics” as his future. Nowadays, film and theater goers are much more sensitized to these underlying messages, young and old alike, thanks to the groundwork of environmentalists who act as stewards of the planet and creative writers relying on entertainment as their hybrid vehicle of transformation.

Fine art also relies on subtle interpretations of symbolism in producing change, and like many theaters, the conscious mission means process as well as product. At Eco-Logical in Los Angeles, the emphasis is on exhibiting the work of a community which uses repurposed and recycled materials.

The gallery provides salvaged billboard vinyl as canvases to artists in exchange for exposure, sparing an estimated 450 million square feet of toxic, non-biodegradable billboard vinyl tossed into landfills each year. The fine art, billboard art viewed by thousands weekly, and functional art naturally deals with eco themes, such as works premiered in its highly successful EartH exhibit, visited by more than 400 art goers.

The notion of urban blight reborn as art and theater crafted to spare trees and polar bears offers hope at a time when green as a popular movement has neared the saturation point, risking the chance of making us immune to the message.  In this way, playwright Bean’s brand of humor in The Heretic and Seuss’s quirky metaphorical verse in The Lorax might be the tonic for the catatonic, and even those resisting the green bandwagon’s cultural hold will be muttering “recycle, recycle, recycle,” all the way home.

Images: More Intelligent Life; The Royal Court Theater; Papahere; Eco-Logical

Owned. Fox News, like every news outlet is owned and if we’re going to keep our “fair and balanced” gyroscope upright we have to continually ask the question: by whom? With that, here’s some timely irony. In last weeks’ op-ed in The Australian, Wikileaks founder Juilan Assange wrote: “In 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide’s The News, wrote: ‘In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win.’”

So here’s some truth for the media magnate Assange cites in his defense of getting real. During last week’s frenzy of leak speak, this from Fox News: A year ago, during the Copenhagen climate change summit, one of the network’s reporters said on air that the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was “on track to be the warmest [decade] on record.” Within 15 minutes, a senior network official issued a memo questioning the accuracy of climate change data and ordering Fox “journalists” to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without immediately pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” The memo concludes: “It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.”

The memo, leaked by watchdog group Media Matters, was written by Fox News’ Vice President of News and Washington Managing Editor Bill Sammon. This is the same guy who instructed his network’s journalists during the health care reform debate to cease using the term “public option” and instead use “government option.”

The same night the climate change memo/directive was sent, on Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier (“the number one cable news program in its timeslot”) correspondent James Rosen brought up the Climategate scandal and claimed that climate scientists “destroyed more than 150 years’ worth of raw climate data.” This at a time when it was already well-known that, taken in any light, the University of East Anglia “leaks” (there’s that word again) had nothing to do with the veracity of facts related to climate change.

Here’s the thing: In a world where nomenclature shapes perceived reality (and we all know what perception is), we have to ask what it means when we call a spade a, well, say a diamond. There’s the continued to use of the term “theory” around evolution and the “pro-life” litmus test language shrouding what might more accurately be called “anti-choice” sentiment. And how about the “death tax” nom de guerre assigned to taxing inheritance windfalls? The idea of climate change being assigned “notion” status by those interested in altering that perception/reality is not surprising. It must be tough when facts don’t do what you want them to.

Rupert and Bill, lest there be any confusion, here are a few facts, according to the National Cimatic Data Center (NCDC): the global surface temperature (including in the United States) is rising, sea level is rising, global upper ocean heat content is rising, northern hemisphere snow cover is retreating and U.S. climate extremes are increasing.

And there’s this: While no one can say if the reporter was fair and balanced, he sure was accurate. According to that tree-hugging and far-left-extremist organization NASA, the decade ending in 2009 was indeed the warmest in history. 2009 was also “the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began.”

So let’s close the loop here on the concept of “owned” and what’s so ironic about this coming down the Fox pipes. Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox News, is under the gun right now to achieve its pledge to be carbon neutral by 2010. This promise was much ballyhooed at the time it was made (a result of Murdoch himself claiming to have undergone an eco-transformation in 2007) and, while it’s not clear if the organization is going to achieve its goal, the Murdoch PR machines have been busy working it hard over the last few years. So while his Fox News organization plays it fast and loose with the facts, it seems that Mr. Murdoch has two options: Fire Sammon and Rosen and anyone else involved in purposefully distorting facts related to climate change data – or live with this title: Hypocrite.

Image: dutchlad