Mongabay Blog

I’m not a regular blogger, even on my own blogs, as I use them mostly as files to store articles and file ideas away for future reference, so I thank this website for giving me a chance to be one of the guest bloggers here.

I want to say a few things about a year-long campaing I’ve been conducting on the Internet to help raise awareness of global warming issues using some visual images of so-called “polar cities” (where survivors of future global warming events are imagined to find refuge in). The entire project is basically a public relations campaign aimed at making those people who are still not aware of global warming a bit more aware of it, if only for a day or two, until the polar cities images fade and they go on with their daily lives, once again oblivious to the dangers that might lie ahead for all of humankind. The dangers? You know what I am talking about. I would think that most people are aware of global warming and the danger it poses for the future of civilization on planet Earth. But apparently, there are quite a few people, here and there, who still don’t get it, or aren’t paying attention, or are in deep denial. Whatever.

So, to make a long story short: I created the polar cities project as a PR campaign to help do my small part in helping to raise public awareness worldwide. Not a huge effort, not a big stamp; just a one-man blogging band using the Internet to spread the message that global warming is for real and we need to try to tackle it. I don’t have an agenda, political or scientific, but like many other people, I think we need to face the issue climate change head on. I read green blogs every day to check on the issues (and also am a regular reader of Dot Earth over at the New York Times).

I want to emphasize that in my project, I am not saying we will ever need polar cities for survivors of global warming in the far distant future. I hope we never need them, and it’s hard to conceive of a world where they would be needed. Right? Right.

But I asked an artist who lives in my neighborhood in Taiwan to make some computer-generated images of what a polar city might look like, and the operative word here is “might”. Deng Cheng-hong, who runs a small sign shop near by home, came up with a series of amazing images. They are from his own imagination. I asked him to make the images for me, I paid him for his work, and I suggested a rough sketch of what a polar city might look like. But the artwork is all his own, from an artist’s point of view.

The images are a visual wake-up call, I like to think. In what way? If we don’t sit down and tackle global warming, then the future might be very very problematical. That’s all my PR campaign is trying to say — using a scary visual image to help wake people up. Not those reading this blog today: you already know the score. But for those people in the world who still think the Earth is flat (and by that I mean “that global warming is hoax”), my PR campaign is for them.

Read my new press here and see more of the images here. Comments and feedback are very welcome, because I learn so much each time readers give me feedback, pro or con. This is an ongoing project, unfunded, my time, my dime.

Take a look.

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Green blogger uses “polar cities” as educational tool to raise public awareness about global warming issues

NEW YORK — A lone blogger in Taiwan is using the Internet in a novel way to help raise awareness about global warming.

Green media activist Danny Bloom doesn’t believe humans will ever have to live in so-called “polar cities” (a term he coined in 2006), but he is using a series of computer-generated blueprints of a polar city as an educational tool to help raise help public awareness about the climate crisis.

Created by Taiwanese artist Cheng-hong Deng, the polar city images have appeared on hundreds of websites and blogs around the world — in English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French and Chinese, Bloom, a 1971 gradute of Tufts University in Boston, says.

The 58-year-old green activist says he is using the Internet in a novel way to get his message across.

The message? “If we don’t actively tackle the very serious problems that confront the world now, in terms of global warming, then there is a possibility that future generations might have to take refuge in such polar cities. I never want to see these polar cities become reality. So the images Deng has created for my project are meant to be a warning about global warming.”

Bloom says he has shown the images to internationally-acclaimed climate scientist James Lovelock in Britain, who is known for his pessimism and doomsaying about global warming. Lovelock told Bloom by email: “It may very well happen and soon.”

“I hope polar cities are never needed for survivors of global warming in the far distant future,” Bloom says. “These images are meant to be a wake-up call for those who are still sleepwalking through the climate crisis.”

Bloom emphasizes that he has no agenda, political or scientific, in terms of solutions to global warming, and says that he just wants to participate in the global discussion about climate change in his own personal way. “I am just using Deng’s images to sound the alarm, a visual alarm.”

He says that his Internet campaign, which began a year ago with a letter to the editor of several newspapers in North America and Europe, has had the result he is looking for.

A young blogger in Tahiti saw the images, blogged about them in French, and said that while he found the polar city blueprints to be fascinating, they made him just want to work harder in his daily life “to help fight the climate crisis so that the worst case scenarios never happen.”

POLAR CITIES BLUEPRINTS CAN BE SEEN HERE, at the newly opned “James E Lovelock Virtual Museum of Polar Cities”: http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

EMAIL: danbloom (GMAIL)

Mark Bittman, of the popular How to Cook Everything books, has written an excellent article on the environmental costs of eating meat, especially in the amounts that the average American consumes.  Oh, and he’s not a vegetarian. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

Some excerpts:

“Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

“Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

“To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.”

It seems everyday there are more studies and reports coming out on the impacts of climate change–now and in the future (at mongabay we see A LOT of them).  Yet, rarely do these studies make it to mainstream new sources.  Either, the media is still run by science-skeptics or the newspapers, news shows, and online media sources actually believe that Brittany Spears’ latest cry for help, Clinton’s (take your pick: Hilary’s or Bill’s) latest remark on race, or the newest electronic gadget is somehow more important than massive shifting of earth’s temperature, causing desertification, species extinction, ocean warming, new migration patterns, flooding, increased intensity of storms, increased unpredictability of weather, changes in agriculture, and the beginning of struggles over dwindling resources, namely water. 

The newest proof of American media’s unwillingness to accept the seriousness of climate change is the presidential primaries, which have received such a glut of coverage that I actually know how much the candidates have spent on haircuts (unwillingly).  Yesterday, both Moveon.org and the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) reported that in the primary debates  only three questions out of  2,500 have been related to climate change.  A letter from NRDC states: “they have spent more time talking about baseball, UFOs, and Chuck Norris than they have about global warming”. 

While this is patently ridiculous and gross negligence on the part of the news organizations and their top-brass anchors, it’s not all that surprising.  Global warming is a serious issue, arguably the most serious issue in our world today, and arguably one of the most serious issues human beings–as a species and a civilization–have ever faced, but sometimes America has difficulty with serious issues: we’re after all the culture of video games, reality TV, and our stupidest videos.  In general, we prefer distraction and entertainment to serious debate and thought.  For presidental debates baseball, UFOs, and Chuck Norris are much lighter (distracting and entertaining) fare than a global ecosystem undergoing massive change (although I wonder how the candidate’s policies differ regarding baseball, UFOs, and Chuck Norris).

I do not mean this to imply hopelessness.  I have hope that the next president will be serious about global warming.  I have hope our consumeristic, distracted culture can change in time.  I have hope the next generation may possess the skills to take real time on serious issues (and not just climate change).  I have a lot of hope.  I just wish–sometimes–the America of today could buoy that hope just a little, rather than tying stone after stone to it.