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30 Things You Should Never Compost or Recycle | Lighter Footstep

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Remember the good ole days — back when we only had one bin for trash? In retrospect, those days were actually more wasteful that good. We sent things to the landfill that might have nourished our yards, and buried them side-by-side with materials which should have been reclaimed and put back in the production chain.

Today, most of us have two bins: one for compost, and another for recycling. They’re great for reducing curbside trash. But not everything is suitable for one bin or the other.

We’ve rounded up thirty things people mistakenly try to compost or recycle. In the case of composting, we chose items generally avoided by experienced compost gurus. For recycling, we’ve picked things prohibited by most municipal sytems, or of limited use to commercial recyclers. Ready? To the bins!

via 30 Things You Should Never Compost or Recycle | Lighter Footstep.

Cirque du Soleil focus: WATER & CSR

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Cirque du Soleil is one of my favorite entertainment companies. I was so pleased to learn from Lyn Heward, their COO of Special Projects, that a strong environmental ethic guides their work, e.g. they installed a seven layer filtration system for their O show in Las Vegas.

Obviously, they are all about the arts. Not as obvious is the fact that Guy Laliberte, the Founder of Cirque du Soleil, is passionate about ensuring equal and clean access to water. He created the One Drop Foundation, and the foundation is breaking new ground by using theater and the arts to educate people in Central American about watershed management and water conservation practices.

“Making the most of what they have, five eclectic actors are touring the Nicaraguan countryside with a show designed to entertain and educate. This resourceful theatre troupe, HAYTA (Hay theatro del agua, “The Water Theatre”)—founded by the ONE DROP’s Water, Culture and Agriculture in Nicaragua Project combines local folklore and hard-hitting facts to push people to realize how much better life could be if water and other natural resources were used wisely.  In Texoxell y el Sueño de Clarita (“Texoxell and Clarita’s Dream”), our heroine meets several characters who use or misuse water. Performances are accompanied by educational and artistic workshops with the theme of collecting and using water more efficiently.”

Applying Cirque’s creative skills to water issues is an exciting marriage I’ll call CSR: Creative Social Responsibility.

Go to Eco-Catalysts

State of Climate Art: On FIRE!

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The Arts (music, poetry, theater and film) are one of the best vehicle in which to reach specific target audiences with your message.  Hollywood films (An Inconvenient Truth), Live Aid, and Rock the Vote are some examples that come to mind. However, I think we’re only just scratching the surface and need to more fully integrate sustainability messages into cultural programming. Someone needs to create a Sustainability Hip Hop Dance that rivals the Macarena.  Maybe the movements could simulate recycling?

I’m glad to see eco-luminary, Bill McKibben, agrees with me and is spurring a tidal wave of climate change art. Check out Bill McKibben’s article on the state of climate change art, includes references to many great works of eco-art.  Also check out his 350.org Art Page which showcases the intersection of marketing, art, and climate change.

Go to Eco-Catalysts

Video Games + Sustainability

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Video games exist for improving brain fitness, financial planning, and learning dance routines, so why not for sustainable living? The field of video games that teach sustainability strategies appears to be slowly blossoming.

  • PowerUp the Game by IBM teaches kids how to save the world by bring clean energy to communities.
  • CO2FX is a web based multi-user educational game which explores the relationship of global warming to economic, political and science policy decisions.
  • Majesco Entertainment’s “Eco-Creatures: Save the Forest” promote awareness of the perils of “…over-industrialization, deforestation, pollution, extinction and global warming.”

Post your favorite environmental video game below.

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APInews: Artists, Scientists Meet in Monson Project

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Artists and scientists will explore “Moving Perspectives – approaches to understanding water through geology, environment, art and society” at the Urbana Free Library in Illinois, October 13, 2009. The panel discussion includes George Roadcap, Illinois Water Survey; Cecily Smith, Prairie Rivers Network; Brett Bloom, artist and activist; Brigit Kelly, poet; choreographer Jennifer Monson; and moderator Michael Scoville, an environmental philosopher. The talk is part of Monsons Mahomet Aquifer Project, a series of public dance performances, workshops and a mobile gallery, October 10-18, to inform and engage the communities in East Central Illinois dependent on the aquifer and draw the audience into their own understanding of their relationship to water. Monson intends the iLAND project to “draw connections between our scientific and political relationships to natural resources and the cultural frameworks that shape our perception and relationship to these resources.”

via APInews: Artists, Scientists Meet in Monson Project .

Interspecies – artists collaborating with animals

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2-4 October 2009, open 11am-7pm admission and all events free

An exhibition, live event, symposia and family day at

A Foundation London
Rochelle School
Arnold Circus, London, E2 7ES

www.artscatalyst.org for details and booking
This event was also in Manchester in March, see more about that by clicking here.

How do humans and animals relate to each other? In The Arts Catalysts’ Interspecies exhibition and event, seven international artists have created a range of work that explores this complex relationship. From live experiments that allow visitors to communicate with fish to a video work that explores the age-old affiliation between falconer and falcon, Interspecies brings together a number of artists working with animals and explores the boundaries of our interaction. Curious about the animal’s point of view, the artists challenge the dominant human viewpoint and aim to work in collaboration with other species.

The family day on Sunday 4 October will give families a chance to see artists in contact with real animals – like performance artist Kira O’Reilly who will be Falling asleep with a pig, called Deliah, and Antony Hall whose Enki Experiment 4 invites visitors to communicate with an electric fish.  During the afternoon, parents and children can take part in a series of free events.

Interspecies is organised by The Arts Catalyst in partnership with A Foundation.

The Arts Catalyst commissions artists and curates exhibitions which explore contested issues in science and society www.artscatalyst.org

Events

Friday 2 October

6pm, Exhibition tour with curator Rob La Frenais

7–9pm, Symposium: Non-Human Primates with Patrick Munck, collaborator with Nicolas Primat, Rachel Mayeri and Sarah Jane Vick, primatologist. Limited spaces, please book online.

Saturday 3 October

1-3pm and 3.30-5.30pm, Primate Cinema: How To Act Like An Animal. Two workshops with Rachel Mayeri for over 16s exploring the social dynamics of non-human primates through performance.  Limited spaces, please book online.

2pm, Tour of ENKI experiment 4 with Antony Hall

3–6pm, Symposium: Animals, Humans and Power (BSL interpreted) with Antennae editor Giovanni Aloi, Photographer Karen Knorr, Helen Macdonald, writer of Falcon, Ruth Maclennan and Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson. Limited spaces, please book online.

6pm, How to Act Like An Animal performance

Family Day – Sunday 4 October

2–4pm Becoming Bowerbirds. These intriguing birds show unusual creativity – they construct bowers which they decorate with found objects to attract females. Children and parents are invited to be a Bowerbird for the afternoon with artist Sally Hampson.  Advanced booking advisable at www.artscatalyst.org (Children 5yrs or under need to be accompanied)

2pm, 3pm and 4pm, Interspecies Tales by poet and storyteller Shamim Azad.  Shamim’s work uses aspects of the Asian folk and oral traditions, enlivening traditional stories with chant and body movement, poems, percussion instruments, tabla and songs.

4.30pm, Animal Handler’s Tales, broadcaster and trainer of the owls used in the first Harry Potter movie, James Mackay talks about his work as ‘The Animal Man’ with exhibition curator Rob La Frenais.

Admission free to all events. Accompanied children and families welcome. Unfortunately, dogs cannot be permitted.

Physical access to some parts of the exhibition and events is limited; please contact admin@artscatalyst.org for further information

For images and more details, please contact Jo Fells, 07977 226187, jo.fells@artscatalyst.org

Climate camp 2009: Blackheath

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climatecamptwitter
This year’s climate camp turns out to be on Blackheath. They’ve been pouring onto the site for the last two hours after the secret location was finally disclosed.  Reading Twitter gives you a great sense of the infectious drama of the moment, and why it has such momentum.

Why Blackheath? Proximity to the city? Joan Ruddock’s constituency – Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Department of Climate Change? Or, as the rapidly updated Wikipedia entry for Blackheath suggests, because this was the site of the Peasant’s Revolt. Let’s hope it’s not the latter as that particular popular movement was spectacularly sold down the river.

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Eliasson on TED

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This quote from Olafur Eliasson put me in mind of the New York Waterpod project I mentioned last week.  “Water,” says Olafur Eliasson in the excellent TED Talk he did last month, “has the ability to make the city negotiable.” In a talk calledPlaying with space and light, he was discussing his Green River project, in which he dyes the water of rivers flowing through a city a bright, startling,  green, cajoling citizens to notice the flows and eddies around which their cities grew up, and asking them to reconsider their relationship to water. (Just in case you’re alarmed, the green is  non-toxic).

Eliasson is that rare thing, an artist who is beautifully articulate not only in his work, but in what he says about his work. He talks about how his art is about changing people’s relationship with what they see, and about with how a piece of work allows the viewer to renegotiate his or her position in relation to what they see. This, he says, means that art has a role in democratising the space that art exists in:

What the potential is, obviously, is to move the border between who’s the author and who’s the receiver, who’s the consumer and who has the responsibility for what one sees. I think there is a socialising dimension in moving that border; who decides what reality is. […] What consequences does it have when I take a step? Does it matter if I am in the world or not? Does it matter whether the actions I take filters into a sense of responsibility? Is art about that? And i would say yes, it is obviously about that. It is obviously about not just decorating the world and making it even better or even worse, if you ask me…  it is obviously about taking responsibility.

Tucked away in the talk is the notion that this kind of art embodies not just a political position, but a unique one:

Art addresses great things about parliamentric ideas – democracy, public space, being together, being individual,… How do we create an idea which is both tolerant to individuality and also to collectivity without polarising the two into opposites?  Of course the political agenda in the world has been very obsessed with polarising the two against each other in different, very normative ideas, and I would claim that art and culture – and this is why art and culture are so incredibly interesting in the times we are living in now – has proven that one can create a kind of space which is both sensitive to individuality and to collectivity.

At the very least this seems to be a nice distillation of the intentions of much of the best contemporary art…

Photo: Green river by Olafur Elliason, Moss, Norway, 1998

Go to RSA Arts & Ecology

Philly Fringe: Off the Grid

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Excerpt from centraljersey.com: “Off the Grid, on the Fringe” by Ilene Dube, August 26, 2009

Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, the creators of The MeLTING Bridge, Flamingo/Winnebago,¡El Conquistador!, and Red-Eye To Havre De Grace & Lost Soles, present a new theater festival to be powered entirely by renewable energy. Titled Off The Grid, the festival will take place concurrent with the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe and will feature three world premiere theater works and a hybrid performance concert. Off The Grid will be powered by solar panels, a wind turbine and bicycles and will take place in the heart of Old City, Philadelphia, at the Painted Bride’s new studios at 230 Vine St. The festival was conceived by Thaddeus Phillips and Tatiana Mallarino, co-artistic directors of Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental.

The program includes new work from Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, New York based Magician Steve Cuiffo, Miro Dance Theater and a concert by the Mural & the Mint. Each work will be powered by a different renewable source — the only thing these artists promise to be plugging into is creativity.

Mr. Phillips, co-organizer of the festival within a festival, says “After creating two works that dealt with current environmental problems — Flamingo/Winnebago and The Melting Bridge — we wanted to create a work that explores solutions to those problems. We thought we would try something that has never been done before: create a visual theater work without plugging into the power grid. Realizing that it could be virtually impossible, we took it to the next level and decided to make a whole festival of it, and challenge other artists to create work “Off the Grid,” to make and perform multimedia pieces using only sustainable energy.”

Performances will rotate on a nightly basis. Mr. Phillips will perform in Microworld(s) Part 1, a world premiere and solo theater work set in Tokyo and played within a 3-foot-by-3-foot-by-8-feet white box. The play is about a man named Milo who is fascinated by Nikola Tesla, the comedian Bill Hicks and Fumio, his rubber duckie. Milo does not see the need to leave the self-contained world he lives in until he loses everything. This live action piece claims to be the first theater work constructed only out of recycled materials and special low-energy LED lighting.

Digital Effects will be powered by solar panels, Generate. Degenerate. will be powered by bicycle and the Mural & the Mint will be powered by solar, bike and “weza.”

Tickets cost $15

For more information, visit offthegridfest.org

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Go to the Green Theater Initiative

Cycle-powered cinema: Nottingham’s Hinterland 2009

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…talking of taking art to the waterfront, this looks like fun. Hinterland 2009, a season of site-specific projects alongside the River Trent, Notts, curated by Jennie Syson opens on Friday night with a cycle-powered cinema located somewhere on the banks of the river. Annexinema features a mixture of new and old work by John Cage, Margaret Tait, Fernando Sanchez, John Smith, Mischa Leinkauf & Matthias Wermke, Chris Marker, John Chapman & Frank Simeone, Ben Rivers, George Barber, Emily Richardson, Matt Hulse & Joost Van Veen plus live music from Zelig. The event is preceeded by a foraging walk and talk led by artist/activist/gardener/cook Rebecca Beinart.

The full programme of events looks interesting too.
http://www.hinterlandprojects.com/

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