I’ve compiled a unique list of what you can do this Earth Day to help save the humans from inevitable destruction via environmental catastrophe:
1. Try to exhale as little as possible today. I know it’s tough, but puffing out all that unwanted CO2 is really a downer.
2. Ever thought about how much toilet paper you use in a year? It’s widely determined to be about 30-40,000 sheets, which means that every time you do your deed, you’re foreclosing on the homes of hundreds of squirrels, birdies, and squatters. Stop using that paper stuff today, and try this LtAG-endorsed ultramodern bamboo solution on for size.
3. Old kitchen appliances are huge energy wasters- use today as an excuse to rip out your entire kitchen and revamp your eating space. You’ll feel like a Jetson, AND can finally have room for all those magnetic poetry sets. (Hint: be sure to complete this before your significant other gets home.)
Simba finally gets the thanks he deserves.
4. Do you drink your 8 glasses of water a day? Stop using all those plastic water bottles, and switch to drinking out of one of these instead. It may be a little harder to pack in your bag, but it’s refillable and will keep you going all day.
5. When was the last time you thanked a forest creature? Despite what Hallmark may have you believe, you don’t need a reason to say “thank you” to a member of the animal kingdom. So go up to your neighborhood deer, emu, or tiger today and thank them for all they do to help sustain our ecosystem.
6. Lightbulbs are so 1854. Forego the lightswitch today, and convince your office to hold a candle-lit seance. When you meet the ghosts of coworkers past, you’ll be able to tell them how environmentally responsible you are!
7. Trade in your gas guzzler for this European solution. Car pooling may be a bit harder than before, but after driving this puppy, there’s no chance you’ll be watching Hawaii 5-0 by yourself this weekend.
8. Tired of seeing all that wasted food in restaurants? Eat for free this Earth Day: pick a diner of your choice and booth hop, snagging leftovers as you go. Who said there’s no such thing as free lunch?
10. Now that you’ve completed steps 1-9, you’re due for a celebration. Take a big old swig of green beer, and rejoice in the knowledge that you’ve done 9 completely ridiculous things that may or may not have any impact on the environment.
First of all, full disclaimer that “locowashing” is an awful portmanteau – almost (but not quite) as bad as “he-cession.”
This cracks me up though, it really does. Thanks to the apparent trendiness of bioregional eating, the ad wizards hailing from the four corners of corporate fantasyland have decided that it would be a tremendous idea to “go local” themselves. Unfortunately – there doesn’t appear to be a crystal-clear understanding of what exactly “local” entails…
A few examples, ranging from the mildly bile-inducing to the full-on, gut-bustingly, milk-snortingly hilarious:
The one that started the attention was most likely the Frito-Lay corporation, whose marketing campaign in early 2009 gently nudged attention from the quality of the product itself to the “local people and communities” who grow their potatoes. The logic is sound, I guess, in an infuriating know-it-all 6th-grader kind of way: “Potatoes have to be grown by somebody, don’t they? And those people are growing them somewhere, aren’t they? So the potatoes are local to the place where they’re grown. Right?” My favorite feature of this ad campaign? It would have to be the “Chip Tracker” gadget that let’s you pop in a zip code and learn exactly which ”local community” has painstakingly and lovingly grown your potato chips, hopefully taking long, picturesque siestas and relaxing with big pitchers of iced tea and 2.5 children per farmhouse. (For the record: mass produced chips are not small-batch delicacies. It’s a neat gimmick to give you the location of where potatoes are sourced, but dollars to donuts the Chip Tracker kicks out the closest farm to your zip code without telling you anything about how millions of bags of chips are actually shipped and stored around the country.)
Terror V. Warming: everyone can agree that there will probobly be a lot of flames.
It’s all so clear now. Verily, the scales have dropped from my eyes. I never realized the problem with global warming until Big Hollywood pointed it out! The site asks the all important question: Ever notice how as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global climate change?
That’s right: according to Big Hollywood, I am worried about global warming because I am too much of a pussy to fight terrorists.
First of all, let me say that I am ashamed for linking to the site that brought us such insightful social commentaries as “rap is crap“, but in the same way that I find myself unable to stop watching the Republican leadership bumble about, I am also unable to stop reading what passed for insightful commentary out there. Or… was that humor? The author is a comedian, and she is peppering that piece with delightful Ann Coulterisms about abortion, guns, and liberal spending.
xkcd continues to be the funniest of all the web comics that I obsessively check three times a day (yes, I know that they only update once daily, or sometimes weekly. It’s reflexive, ok?) As such, I am always compelled to share the great work of Randall Munroe. Amazing stuff, all around, but check out the newest: and as always, we want to extend a warm friendly welcome to our Benevolent Robot Overlords. Smart Grids are coming, and with them Al Gore will take his rightful place as the MASTER of the UNIVERSE!
For a series of reasons, we’ve found ourselves going back through archives of old Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. We weren’t even looking with our American Green glasses on, but we still found this.
O, from the mouths of babes. There is something innocent and pure about how Bill Waterson wrote Calvin that was always incorruptible (thank god that the character was never product-ized) and as a result, his childhood confusion at nature’s destruction is the most direct link we can find to the “right” reasons for environmentalism. After all, how do you argue with the precocious little snot? And how do you disabuse the inherent notion of fairness that kids seem to hang onto till sometime around, oh… six years old?
Today is Blog Action day, with the happy topic of environmentalism. Thats right! We aren’t just passively blogging about nothing, were passively blogging about nothing IN UNISON! (editorial shout out: PGP and JES)
Anyway, in celebration of this glorious web communal action, we thought we would post something. We know this Video is old, but its worth looking at again because of its inherent similarities and differences with what we at American Green are working on. Plus, we haven’t had any time to create more of our own stuff.
Some stuff to know about this video:
There are more then 350 PAGES of comments on the Youtube page of this video. Thats a lot of comments.
When you read through these comments, you discover that 4/5ths of them say one of two things: Al Gore is stupid and global warming doesn’t exist, or George Bush is MORE stupid, and global warming DOES exist. It’s exhausting, to say the least.
It was produced by an advertising agency (or at least someone with a IP address from an ad agency) that works for Exxon/Mobile. Just Sayin.
So, give it a little watch. On the surface, it appears to be what we are all about: humor to make a point, with a call to… wait. A call to what, exactly?
