The Bag Monster

Activism meets comedy, or what Texas has to do with Velcro.

In 1977, at the height of the 70’s environmental movement, an unlikely invention took hold: The first plastic bag (no, not that plastic bag) was introduced as an alternative to paper bags. Today, according to the EPA, it accounts for 4 out of every 5 bags handed out in grocery stores and, scarier yet, only about 1% of the 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags consumed annually around the world are ever recycled. The rest end up in landfills and, most tragically, in the world’s oceans, where they wreak devastating havoc on marine life — from entangling seabirds and marine animals to ending up in their guts upon being eaten by mistake, with gruesome consequences. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch near Hawaii, a Texas-sized gyre of marine litter, would take a week to cross by boat, and plastic bags account for much of its composition.

Long story short, while most of us know plastic bags are dreadful, we don’t necessarily realize how dreadful. And while dry stats have their place, they’re no way to move people to change behavior. Enter The Bag Monster — the ingenious creation of activist and entrepreneur Andy Keller. Keller, who masterminded the popular reusable ChicoBag, had been going around farmers markets for years, carrying around 500-700 plastic bags to tangibly raise awareness about the number of plastic bags the average American uses yearly. Then, one day, he decided to attach the bags to a jumpsuit with Velcro and wear them. The Bag Monster was born.

This summer, to support the California Bill, AB 1998 for the ban of all plastic bags in California, The Bag Monster went on a monthlong tour across the US, starting in San Francisco and ending in Fairfield, Connecticut.

What makes The Bag Monster work is that it takes a serious environmental problem but doesn’t make it grave, bends it through a prism of satire, and delivers palpable awareness in an organic, non-preachy way.

So what can you do? It’s simple, really. Pledge to eliminate plastic bags and — why stop there? — other single-use items from your life. A good place to start may be our roundup of 7 ways to have more by owning less, as well as this recent HuffPo piece on kicking the plastic habit.

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Bees, Bees, Bees: Celebrating an Amazing Creature

10,000 buzzing pixels, the real source of your breakfast, and what electron microscopes have to do with art.

Albert Einstein once remarked that if bees were to disappear, mankind would perish in just a few years. And yet honeybees are disappearing — at alarming rates, and for reasons scientists don’t fully understand. From climate change to cell phone towers, a range of manmade and environmental factors are contributing to the extinction of a brilliant, intelligent civilization responsible for everything from one of the world’s most ancient medicinal products to the foundation of swarm theory to the creation of other-worldly petal nests.

Today, we look at three different homages to bees, their socio-environmental significance, and the plight for their conservation.

BEE BILLBOARD

To promote Britain’s Plan Bee campaign, UK winery Banrock Station created the world’s first bee-powered billboard, composed of 10,000 live bees.

Plan Bee aims to campaign against the use of bee-killing pesticides and to inspire people to help bees in their own gardens.

DENNIS VANENGELSDORP: A PLEA FOR BEES

Apiarist Dennis vanEngelsdorp studies colony collapse disorder — the disturbing worldwide epidemic wiping out worker bees and Western honeybees, resulting in the demise of entire colonies of the gentle, fascinating creature. But this is no tragedy we can observe from a bystander perspective — bees and their work are surprisingly integral to our entire food system, from the breakfast you ate this morning to large-scale agricultural economy.

One in three bites of food we eat is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees.” ~ Dennis vanEngelsdorp

There are more species of bees than mammals and birds combined.” ~ Dennis vanEngelsdorp

For more on colony collapse disorder, check out the fascinating documentary Vanishing of the Bees, which follows two commercial beekeepers as they struggle to keep their bees healthy and alive, then offers ways for you to make your own living space, be it urban or countryside, more bee-friendly.

ROSE-LYNN FISHER: BEE

From photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher comes BEE — an incredibly artful, thoughtful exploration of the beautiful complexity of bees and the larger natural patterns it bespeaks. Fisher blends the immaculate scientific precision of electron microscope imaging with the aesthetic sensibility of art photography to produce 128 pages of breathtaking revelation that expands the boundaries of how we think about these remarkable creatures and nature at large.

Abdomen at 23x zoom – foreshortened view of the abdomen with sting | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

Wing at 170x zoom – the hamuli attaching to the wing fold | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

Wing hooks at 700x zoom – a closer view of the hamuli | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

The first time I looked at a bee’s eye magnified I was amazed to see a field of hexagons, just like honeycomb. I wondered, is this a coincidence or a clue? Is it simply that hexagons are ubiquitous in nature, or is there a deeper correspondence between the structure of the bee’s vision and the structure she builds – in other words, similar frequencies being expressed in similar form? This got me pondering on the connection between vision and action at a more abstract, metaphoric level. Is there a parallel kind of encoding relevant to humanity? At a refined level of our own nature, does our deeper capacity to see and to do correspond with an intrinsic structuring?” ~ Rose-Lynn Fisher

Body at 75x zoom – one abdominal sclerite (plate) overrides the next | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

Antenna at 900x zoom – plate and peg sensila of the flagellum | © Rose-Lynn Fisher

Images via NPR

BEE came out in 2010 and is without a doubt one of the most visually stunning, conceptually ambitious photography books in recent years.

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Fault Line Living: The World’s Most Dangerous Landscapes to Live

Geysers, mud pots, and what Barba Papa has to do with the benefits of geothermal energy.

Fault lines are cracks in Earth’s crusts where tectonic plates converge. As you’d expect, these areas have an extraordinarily propensity for earthquakes due to the constant geodesic activity going on beneath. And yet millions of people around the world live on and around fault lines, in a constant state of alertness, with the sound of the earthquake drill alarm growing more familiar than the doorbell.

Faul Line Living is a 15,000-mile expedition from Iceland to Iran documenting the lives of people who live along the world’s most notorious fault lines. The multi-media project explores the human stories that populate these high-risk natural environments, working with school students, seismologists and citizens of each country along the way to better understand how different communities adapt to the challenges of life in fault zones.

Broken jug, damaged in the 1976 earthquake at Kopaska, belonging to Jon Halldorsson

The Blue Lagoon – despite the wind and rain, the warm waters of the Blue Lagoon provide a fillip to tourists and locals alike

Faul Line Living won the 2010 Go Beyond bursary from the UK’s Royal Geographical Society and Land Rover, a £10,000 award encouraging winners to push past their own limits as a way of promoting a wider understanding and appreciation of geography.

Fun after the rain

Steaming mud pots at Namafjall

On July 31, the UK-based team — Tamsin Davies, Serena Davies and Adam Whitaker — embarked upon their journey into these collision zones of nature and humanity. For 12 weeks, they will drive across the UK, Denmark, Iceland, Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Syria and Lebanon, learning to use a seismometer and delving into the social anthropology of fault line living through photography, interviews and real-time mapping.

Honeycomb basalt formations at Dimmuborgir

Barba Papa house at Seysdisfjordur

Explore the project’s breathtaking gallery and follow along vicariously on Twitter. Meanwhile, keep yourself grounded by appreciating the geological stability of your own locale.

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7 Ways to Have More by Owning Less

Inconspicuous consumption, or what lunching ladies have to do with social web karma.

Stuff. We all accumulate it and eventually form all kinds of emotional attachments to it. (Arguably, because the marketing machine of the 20th century has conditioned us to do so.) But digital platforms and cloud-based tools are making it increasingly easy to have all the things we want without actually owning them. Because, as Wired founder and notable futurist Kevin Kelly once put it, “access is better than ownership.” Here are seven services that help shrink your carbon footprint, lighten your economic load and generally liberate you from the shackles of stuff through the power of sharing.

NEIGHBORGOODS

The age of keeping up with the Jonses is over. The time of linking up with them has begin. NeighborGoods is a new platform that allows you to do just that, allowing you to borrow and lend from and to your neighbors rather than buying new stuff. (Remind us please, what happened to that fancy blender you bought and used only twice?) From lawnmowers to bikes to DVD’s, the LA-based startup dubs itself “the Craigslist for borrowing,” allowing you to both save and earn money.

Transparent user ratings, transaction histories and privacy controls make the sharing process simple and safe, while automated calendars and reminders ensure the safe return of loaned items.

Give NeighborGoods a shot by creating a sharing group for your apartment building, campus, office, or reading group — both your wallet and your social life will thank you.

UPDATE: Per the co-founder’s kind comment below, we should clarify that NeighborGoods also allows you to import your Twitter and Facebook friends from the get-go, so you have an instant group to share with.

SNAPGOODS

Similarly to Neighborgoods, SnapGoods allows you to rent, borrow and lend within your community. SnapGoods takes things step further by expanding the notion of “community” not only to your local group — neighborhood, office or apartment building — but to your social graph across the web’s trusted corners. The site features full Facebook and Meetup integration, extending your social circle to the cloud.

You can browse the goods people in your area are lending or take a look at what they need and lend a hand (or a sewing machine, as may be the case) if you’ve got the goods.

LANDSHARE

Growing one’s own produce is every hipster-urbanite’s pipe dream. But the trouble with it is that you have to actually have a place to grow it. And while a pot of cherry tomatoes in your fire escape is better than nothing, it’s hardly anything. Enter Landshare, an innovative platform for connecting aspiring growers with landowners who have the space but don’t use it.

Though currently only available in the U.K., we do hope to see Landshare itself, or at least the concept behind it, spread worldwide soon.

SWAPTREE

swaptree is a simple yet brilliant platform for swapping your media possessions — from books to DVD’s to vinyl — once they’ve run their course in your life as you hunt for the next great thing. Since we first covered swaptree nearly three years ago, the site has facilitated some 1.6 million swaps, saving its users an estimated $10.3 million while reducing their collective carbon footprint by 9.3 million tons.

Inspired by the founders’ moms, whose lunch dates with girlfriends turned into book-swap clubs, swaptree makes sure that the only thing between you and the latest season of 24 is the price of postage.

GIFTFLOW

Most of us are familiar with the concept of regifting. (No disrespect, but the disconnect between good friends and good taste is sometimes astounding.) Luckily, GiftFlow allows you to swap gifts you don’t want for ones other people don’t want but you do. The platform is based on a system of karmic reputation, where your profile shows all you’ve given and taken, building an implicit system of trust through transparency.

So go ahead, grandma. Hit us with your latest sweet but misguided gift. Chances are, there’s someone out there who’d kill for that kitschy music box.

ZIPCAR

We’re big proponents of bikesharing but, to this point, the concept has failed to transcend local implementations. While some cities like Paris, Amsterdam and Denver are fortunate enough to have thriving bikesharing programs, we’re yet to see a single service available across different locations. Until then, we’d have to settle for the next best sharing-based transportation solution: Zipcar, a 24/7, on-demand carsharing service that gives its members flexible access to thousands of cars across the U.S., U.K. and Canada. Zipcar has been around for quite some time and most people are already familiar with it, so we won’t overelaborate, but suffice it to say the service is the most promising solution to reducing both traffic congestion and pollution in cities without reducing the actual number of drivers.

SHARE SOME SUGAR

Lend me some sugar, I am your neighbor. More than an Outkast lyric line, this is the inspiration behind share some sugar — a celebration of neighborliness through the sharing of goods and resources. Much like SnapGoods and NeighborGoods, the service lets you borrow, rent and share stuff within your neighborhood or group of friends

* * *

For more on the culture of shared resources, do watch Rachel Botsman’s excellent TEDxSyndney talk. Her forthcoming book, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, hits bookstores in two weeks and is an absolute must-read.

UPDATE: Botsman’s book, What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, is now out and landed promptly on our best books in business, life and mind shortlist for 2010.

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