Smoke Break #740: The Migration Of The Majestic Plastic Bag…

A conservation advocacy group from Santa Monica made this fantastic short film detailing how a “wild” plastic bag “migrates” to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the middle of the ocean. That it’s narrated by Academy Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons makes it doubly awesome. If you watch just one thing today, this should be it.

PS. Beware the Yorkie!

Smoke Break #729: There’s Smug And Then There’s “Green Smug”

Surely this electric-powered Tesla sports car with its eco-smug personalised license plate is on its way to LAX for a private jet joyride (via The Daily What).

Smoke Break #717: Greenpeace Releases World Cup Guilt Trip

via Ad Freak:

It’s bad enough that Greenpeace is a pine needle in the ass and fishhook in the eye of hard-working loggers and whalers worldwide. (Loggers and whalers breaking the law? As if!) Now, the environmental group is exploiting the World Cup with the Australian spot below, which claims, “Every two seconds an area of forest the size of a football pitch is being cut down.” What’s their point? No endangered species inhabits a football pitch, unless you count the U.S. national team. The graphic in the spot shows green match-head trees covering a soccer field. They’re set ablaze, and flames engulf the goal.

Um, Don’t You Know When You Are Going To Shock The Monkey?

Ben Lee’s “Song for the Divine Mother of the Universe” gets loaned to a top drawer ad agency producing on a World Wildlife Fund brief (via TDW): humans send a monkey to space (as we so often like to do) and it comes back decades later to find his home in tatters and his masters gone. Pretty impactful stuff (and much better than the gratuitous Peter Gabriel headline).

“The Story Of Bottled Water” In Honour Of World Water Day…

Today, if you didn’t already know, was World Water Day, and in its honour we’re putting up this brand new shortdoc, The Story of Bottled Water, for your enjoyment.

The Story of Bottled Water, released on March 22, 2010 (World Water Day) employs the Story of Stuff style to tell the story of manufactured demand—how you get Americans to buy more than half a billion bottles of water every week when it already flows from the tap. Over five minutes, the film explores the bottled water industrys attacks on tap water and its use of seductive, environmental-themed advertising to cover up the mountains of plastic waste it produces. The film concludes with a call to take back the tap, not only by making a personal commitment to avoid bottled water, but by supporting investments in clean, available tap water for all.

Drink up.

World Water Day Observed With “Blue Gold” At Rhizome Cafe

You can count on East Broadway’s Rhizome Cafe to always come up with some pretty solid community-oriented events. This week they’re screening the documentary Blue Gold (by the same producers as “The Corporation.”) which will be followed by a discussion on local efforts to conserve and protect water. It’s all going down in anticipatory recognition of World Water Day on March 22.

In honour of World Water Day, we’ll reflect on organizing successes internationally and locally. What can we do nationally and provincially to protect our commons? We’ll screen the film “Blue Gold”. Information on other WWD events will be available. Proceeds will go to Partners in Health for water support in Haiti.

Find the Wiki on WWD here. | March 18 | 7 pm | Rhizome Cafe | Sliding scale $5 – 10

I Wonder How Long Stanley Park Would Last Against Chainsaws?

(Via Sully) Watch this profoundly humanist anti-deforestation ad by Maya Lin. The basic visual arithmetic of loss of habitat + global warming + mass extinctions = you losing your favourite city park might not balance out, but that doesn’t make the final minute or so with the tree felling seen in reverse any less poignant. Can you imagine Stanley Park gone in sixty seconds? I’d rather not. More at WhatIsMissing.net.

New Species Of Crab Discovered Just Before Going Extinct

The saddest story in the world as of 2pm today comes to us via the Huffington Post:

“A marine biologist says he has discovered a new crab species off the coast of southern Taiwan that looks like a strawberry with small white bumps on its red shell.

National Taiwan Ocean University professor Ho Ping-ho says the crab resembles the species living in the areas around Hawaii, Polynesia and Mauritius. But it has a distinctive clam-shaped shell about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) wide, making it distinct.

Taiwanese crab specialist Wang Chia-hsiang confirmed Ho’s finding.

Ho said Tuesday his team found two female crabs of the new species last June off the coast of Kenting National Park, known for its rich marine life. The crabs died shortly thereafter, possibly because the water in the area was polluted by a cargo ship that ran aground.”

And just like that, the strawberry crab enters and exits. No word yet on what the researchers ate instead.

Cloudy With A Chance Of Polar Bears Falling To Their Deaths…

A new ad brings the high environmental costs of commercial flying down to earth, rather literally.

How To Scare Your Kids & Make Them Think Parents Kill Bunnies

A new British advertisement poignantly stirs the climate change pot (via AdFreak).

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