Photographer Kim Preston’s clever images of everyday objects as the sea creatures they endanger are part of a project to raise awareness about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Posts marked climate
James Balog has spent years setting up cameras from Greenland to Alaska to capture beautiful images that capture the ugly reality of climate change. He has now assembled that work into the book Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers.
About the book:
A never-before-seen look into the forbidding environment of glaciers, this book celebrates a realm of magnificent endangered beauty. Since 2005, renowned nature photographer James Balog has devoted himself to capturing glaciers and documenting their daily changes. These stunning images are a celebration of some of the most extraordinary natural formations on earth, as well as a dramatic and timely demonstration of the stark consequences resulting from global warming—from Alaska to Iceland to the Alps. As glaciologists for the Extreme Ice Survey, Balog and his team are conducting the most extensive glacier study ever, covering France, Switzerland, Iceland, Greenland, the United States (Alaska and Montana), Nepal, Bolivia, and Antarctica. Their high-resolution cameras capture approximately 4,000 images per year. From this collection of nearly half a million photos, Balog presents the most stunning panoramic photography of glaciers ever published.
Awe-inspiring NASA satellite images of past hurricanes and typhoons. Click on the photos to see which storms are pictured.
Dramatic images of Hurricane Sandy from NASA.
A Portrait of Ice by Caleb Cain Marcus
About:
Glaciers—massive and frozen reservoirs of freshwater—range in size from the length of a football field to the breadth of a continent. Photographs, on a much smaller scale, are reservoirs too. They store up a good deal of the data we rely upon to engage with, function in, and document the world. They blanket culture, media and everyday life, just as glacial ice covers vast portions of the globe. Bore down below the surface of glaciers—or photographs—and layers of stratified evidence and meaning re-emerge. Scientists drill, sometimes more than a mile deep into the earth, to extract core samples from ice fields, flecked with dust, ash, traces of atmospheric gas or radioactive substances, even fragments of meteorites. Upon examination they reveal the details of hundreds of thousands of years of climatic history and change. Look deeply and critically enough at the information and narratives embedded in any single photograph and something similar happens as evidence of flash-frozen moments and their motivation resurfaces and falls into place.
The Little Green Dress Project by Nicole Dextras
About the project:
The concept behind the Little Green Dress has been extrapolated from the age-old fashion adage that every woman should own a little black dress and brings this notion into the realm of today’s environmental awareness. It proposes instead that women should have at least one item of clothing in her wardrobe that is produced in a sustainable and equitable manner. The aim of this project is to promote awareness on the impact of industry on our environment and to offer a realistic opportunity for change by creating a demand for better practices through consumer purchasing. For this reason the dresses will be made entirely from organic materials; Wear it and Compost it!
The Little Green Dress Project replaces the ubiquitous black dress with one that is truly organic: made from leaves and flowers. Its design is based on the classic shift dress, first introduced in the 1960’s by Coco Channel. The twenty-eight participating women will be chosen for their support and involvement in eco-fashion. Each dress will be made to measure by the artist from locally sourced materials representing a wide cross section of women of all ages and sizes from fashionistas, to gardeners. Invited participants will be asked to describe their favorite sustainable article of clothing and their interest in creating sustainable industries.
The project will be presented at the Earth Art exhibition in Vancouver, BC Canada as an outdoor installation of 28 dresses, each draped over a wooden stand. They will be created on site and installed during the run of the exhibition. As with Dextras’ previous Weedrobes series, each sculpture will be photographed and then left to decompose over time.
What Lies Beneath by Gabby O’Connor represents an iceberg brought indoors.
About the work:
At a time when we are becoming increasingly aware of global warming and climate change, and what it means for humans, the melting of ice occupies a sensitive place in the collective consciousness. One of the projected impacts of climate change is a rise in average sea level, due in part to the melting of land-based ice. The gallery installation projects this possibility onto a physical space, where we are imagined underwater.
Awe-inspiring photography by Marc Adams.
Adams on his work:
I’d like to introduce you to the natural world I know. Come follow along on my journey. Explore, consider, and take something with you. This is nature through my eyes. These photographs do not arise from any particular desire to see the world through a lens, but rather from my deep passion for this land we call wilderness. It has shaped every aspect of my life. I wish to show you the amazing, beautiful and powerful forces that have created the Earth we live on…
I want you to know just how undeniably precious these lands are in their preservation. We NEED wilderness; now more than ever. The wilderness experience becomes ever more important to balance our lives as we become more industrialized and therefore bound within our own creations. This is because there exists within it a deep connection unlike anything that can be found in today’s intense world of instantly manufactured gratification. There is a certain freedom that comes only when we are immersed in the natural world. I come to the wilderness to experience something much greater than ourselves, and I hope you will too…Never be afraid to explore, to wander, to find a new direction. Share the beauty of this wonderful life and this wonderful Earth so they may be here forever.
Read his whole statement here
China’s Environmental Protection Foundation wanted to draw attention to the increasing environmental impact of the growing Chinese car industry and to encourage people to walk more, and drive less. DDB China Group put together a clever campaign that did exactly that in a fun and engaging way.
About the campaign:
We decided to leverage a busy pedestrian crossing; a place where both pedestrians and drivers meet. We lay a giant canvas of 12.6 meters long by 7 meters wide on the ground, covering the pedestrian crossing with a large leafless tree. Placed on either side of the road beneath the traffic lights, were sponge cushions soaked in green environmentally friendly washable and quick dry paint. As pedestrians walked towards the crossing, they would step onto the green sponge and as they walked, the soles of their feet would make foot imprints onto the tree on the ground. Each green footprint added to the canvas like leaves growing on a bare tree, which made people feel that by walking they could create a greener environment.
The Result:
The Green Pedestrian Crossing was carried out in 7 main streets of Shanghai and later expanded to 132 roads in 15 cities across China. A total number of pedestrians that participated exceeded 3,920,000 people. Key media both online and offline rapidly wrote about the campaign. According to research, the overall awareness of environmental protection had increased 86%. After the campaign, the print was exhibited at the Shanghai Zheng Da Art Museum.
These images from NASA’s Operation Ice Bridge aerial survey show the opening waters of Arctic Sea region. Scientists directly attribute the record high pace of ice melt this year to climate change, which is no laughing matter.
Wired UK has assembled images from J Henry Fair’s book The Day After Tomorrow into a chilling slideshow: In Focus: The blue planet’s toxic new colors. Check it out to learn more about the locations pictured and the toxins that are contaminating our environment.
About the book:
The Day After Tomorrow takes readers on a journey to bear witness to the environmental destruction that is currently plaguing our planet; from a forest in West Virginia devastated by mountaintop removal mining, to a region in Florida left in ruins by the phosphate mining industry, J Henry Fair presents hard evidence that our unchecked consumerism is leading the way in the destruction of our planet, one natural resource at a time.
Primarily through the use of aerial photography, Fair captures spellbinding vistas of pools of toxic hog waste, streams of paper mill runoff, and the remains of hollowed-out mountains. These environmental abstractions lure the viewer in with unique asymmetrical shapes and striking colors; however, fascination quickly turns to horror, as the viewer realizes what lurks beneath the surface of the image.
This mural of a tree by Andreco mimics its subject by actually improving the air quality of its surroundings.
Instead of using traditional exterior paints he used a special kind of photochemical paint that reduces the amount of nitrogen monoxide in the air. According to the artist, the artwork represents a big tree, inspired from the Philosophical Tree of the Alchemists of the 14th century. The painting is also designed to resemble a big egg and a crystal, symbols that represents the transition from the organic to inorganic material.
Above Zero by Olaf Otto Becker
About the project:
Following Broken Line, a prizewinning portrait of the coast of Greenland, Olaf Otto Becker turns his attention to the interior of the island in his new series, Above Zero. Second only to Antarctica, Greenland has the largest inland ice surfaces in the world. Becker’s spectacular portraits of this region are taken during physically strenuous, sometimes life-threatening treks among glacial crevasses and melting ice floes, with a cumbersome large-format camera. His photo studies draw out the overwhelming beauty of this icy landscape, while documenting their present fragility: dust and rust in the air form black, crusty deposits, which, in conjunction with global warming, accelerate the melting of the ice sheets—with what will probably be inevitable, catastrophic results. Becker warns that even in these uninhabited regions, human actions can have fatal consequences.
Images from Camille Seaman’s exhibit The Last Iceberg at the Chroma Projects Art Laboratory in Charlottesville, VA through June 29, 2012.
Images from a great Wired gallery of stunning views of glaciers seen from space. Check it out to see more photos and to find out more about them.
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