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Gorilla in the Greenhouse:
The ancestor that’s saving our future

by The Green A-Team

Children are the future of our planet but are grown-ups doing enough to steer them green?

Everyone had their favorite superhero growing up whether it was Superman, Spiderman, Cat Woman, or Mighty Mouse they inspired and entertained us, and in some cases, may have even been our role model.

With the internet, a new generation of casts and characters are reaching kids in new ways.

Jay Golden, creator of Gorilla in the Greenhouse, an environmentally conscious animated series.

Dr. Hufflebot has a worm in his head named Wormulus, and actually that’s the character that I play.  He sounds like this.  I want results, results I need!  Not meaningless mush! The worm actually represents the worm that’s in all of our heads where we just want to block off the natural connection we have to the earth.

This colorful interactive cartoon can be found at GreenGorilla.com.  But don’t stop there, there’s a whole lot of positive, kid friendly entertainment to grow and be inspired by.  And who knows, maybe your child’s favorite will be a green superhero.

For our full interview with Jay Golden, click here.

For links to cool green cartoons for kids and adults, check these out!

The Meatrix (Free Range Studios)

The Story of Stuff (Free Range Studios)

Environment Cartoons by Chris Madden (MSNBC.com)


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Jay Golden, visionary storyteller and environmentalist

by The Green A-Team

It’s fitting that a new generation of storytellers must adapt to the challenges faced by our future generations, namely kids.  Jay Golden, Vice President of New Media at SustainLane Media, is humbly and whimsically leading the charge with a passion for making change fun.

Q: What’s the purpose of creating a cartoon like this?

A: The purpose is very basic; it’s about making change fun.

Q: That’s it.

A: That’s it!  It’s straight up.  Our objective is to create an inspiring media property that shows kids taking action, having a blast, creating great music, collaborating, and changing the world around them through very simple steps.

Q: How old are the kids that you’re trying to reach?

A: Depending on who you ask, it could be anywhere from 6 to 60 but it starts from 6-10.

Q: So parents can get involved too?

A: Yeah, definitely.  Our show is kind of like an antidote to An Inconvenient Truth.  There’s a fair bit of gloom and doom in the media - global warming impending, economic dire straits - and our show is about simple ways to understand complex problems like, for example, mountain top removal.  Well, if you flip a switch in any one of our cities, you are contributing to somewhere a mountain coming down because of coal.  The way we tell that story is that there’s a giant worm, a giant mechanical worm that eats mountains and the kids find out about it and basically they have to come up with a way to turn it around.  So, it’s applicable to all generations but really we’re aiming at kids.

Q: You guys also have a show brining up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  Can you tell me a little about that?

A: Yeah, that was our pilot show.  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is basically about the North Pacific Gire which many people know is this swirling patch of garbage in the North Pacific about twice the size of texas.  How do you tell that story in a way that’s digestible so that people can understand and realize that when we take these little plastic pieces and toss them in the trash, sometimes they float off the heap and go into the ocean or sometimes plastic bags will float away and go into the ocean.  So in our story, the kids find out that there’s a big island of plastic bags in the North Pacific and they have to go out there, they have to research, figure out what’s going on, all in a kind of fun way, trace it back to what the cause is and then they have to come up with a solution to turn it around and we do it all in a fun and pumpin’ musical way.

Q: It’s definitely fun, the music is awesome, and a lot of the evil goes back to the villain, Wormulus and Dr. Hufflebot.  How did you guys come up with those guys?  Is it one guys with a worm brain?  Tell me a little bit about this character.

A: Dr. Hufflebot has a worm in his head named Wormulus and actually that’s the character that I play.  (Modulates voice) He sounds like this!  “I want results!  Results I need! Not meaningless mush!”  So the worm represents the worm that’s in all our heads, that worm that when you get an idea that you just wanna block off the realities and the natural connections we have to the earth, just that compelling drive that we often feel to just accumulate as much as we possibly can.  In the show, Hufflebot is always trying to please the worm in his head.  He creates this island of plastic bags for him so the worm can have his great dominion over the plastic bags or he helps the worm to create this evil maniacal, mechanical monster that eats mountains so that Wormulus will basically have all the power that he ever desired.  And the kind of back and forth is that if Hufflebot pleases Wormulus, if Hufflebot pleases the worm in his head, then eventually the worm will let him be free.  Of course, the illusion is that that never really happens, it’s an ongoing journey.  The next episode you see Hufflebot back again with the worm in his head on some scheme he’s driving him towards.  So we’re all the Hufflebots, really.

Q: KJ, or Kijani the Green Gorilla, who’s kind of the Yoda mystic character.  How did you come up with him and how did the kids find him?  How did this character come about?

A: Kijani actually means “green” in Swahili.  So he’s our green gorilla character that sits in the greenhouse in San Francisco that’s kind of a concealed greenhouse.  Basically it was an idea that our company, Sustain Lane’s founder, James Elson, came up with and he really wanted to see this green gorilla character but he didn’t have the other pieces to it.  So we kind of put the kids together with this mystical green gorilla who basically represents indigenous wisdom.  It’s earth wisdom so when the kids find a problem like Scoot skates into the greenhouse covered in plastic bags then KJ gets a hint and he starts beatboxing and basically bringing down a vision and he brings down a vision and he paints it with his fingers and colors in the air but they’re in symbols, like drawings on a cave.  Now the kids have to interpret it, so in the first episode he draws plastic bags and an earth and a swirl in the ocean and the kids have to translate that.  They talk amongst themselves, they do the research on the web, and they pixelate out to other places around the world so they can come up with the answers and figure out what the solution is.

Q: I wish I was a part of the pitch meeting for this show… it sounds like so much fun!

A: It was a blast!  I put together the smartest people that I know and I got everybody in a room and I said, “Here’s what we wanna do: We wanna create the most inspiring show to help kids take real world steps towards a healthier planet and we wanna make it as fun as possible and we wanna bring in kids all around the world.  How do we do this?” And this incredibly intelligent, creative, amazing group of people they all put their heads together and I was fortunate enough to be in the room.

Q: That actually brings me to my last question regarding your contributors and your involvement with Free Range Studios.  Now, they produced something called the Meatrix and for anyone who’s listening to this who hasn’t seen the Meatrix, here’s a link!  You should now go watch it after you’ve finished listening to this podcast.  But, what was your involvement with Free Range?

A: I was fortunate enough to be the Entertainment Producer at Free Range for a couple years, I produced 12 movies for them.  Basically, what Free Range does is they create these amazing viral web pieces for social causes which are basically distinct messages kind of wrapped in stories that travel far and wide and Story Stuff is a great example.  In fact, The Story of Stuff just made 20 different language versions which is terrific.  I basically learned the trade from them and now we work closely.  We hired them, actually, to be our Animation and Art Direction group and so I couldn’t be happier.


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Elephant poo paper cleans up

by Rich Awn

For no other reason than this kinda made me chuckle when I first caught wind of it on GreenUpgrader.com and then again when thepoopoopaper Twittered me, it seemed irresistibly interesting.  Turns out this elephant dung paper ain’t no joke but a potent little eco craze that’s helping keep these mammoth beasts thriving in the wild.

The diet of an elephant consists mainly of fruits, fibrous grasses and bamboo.  These plants can be used to make paper on their own but requires a rather toxic process to achieve what an elephant’s digestive system does on its own.  What’s left behind is the undigested plant matter that is first washed, combined with some other plant fibers, molded into “cakes” or “wafers”, left out in the sun to dry, and then peeled off it’s tray to make poop paper products!

The process is as brilliant as it is beneficial.  The dung used is collected from conservation parks creating a clean environment for the animals while the whole process from elephant grazing to paper raising creates jobs down the entire line.  The Elephant Poo Paper Company, Ltd. even goes so far as to donate a portion of your purchase from their “Poo-tique” to elephant conservation services worldwide.

Who knew poo could be so cool?  Hooray!


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Curt Ellis, Co-Creator of King Corn

by The Green A-Team

I’m speaking today with one of the creators of the documentary film, King Corn, he’s also a Food and Society Policy fellow with the Kellog Foundation.

Q: At the very beginning of the film you talk about how our generation is at risk of having a shorter life span based on the foods we eat, specifically regarding the omnipresence of corn in our diet.  Was there one thing in particular that really calcified this fear and got you off the coast and in the corn belt?

A: I think it was that announcement in a major medical journal.  Around that time I was graduating from college, that my generation, I’m in my 20s, my generation is likely to have a shorter life expectancy than my parents generation and that’s something that’s really never happened before and it’s a result of this incredible explosion of obesity.  The fact that obesity has doubled in the last 30 years in this country and now according to the CDC one in three kids is on a path to develop type-2 diabetes.  So we’re seeing this tremendous explosion of healthcare problems that really are being caused by the way we feed ourselves.

Q: Specifically, how is corn putting us at risk of a shorter life span?

A: Corn is the basis for fast food in our country.  When we go to McDonalds or Burger King and order a fast food meal, the hamburger is fed corn in confinement and as a result it’s higher in saturated fat than a grass fed cow would be; the soda is almost completely corn because of high-fructose corn syrup; and french fries are fried in corn oil or soybean oil and all those weird polysyllabic food ingredients like propylene glycol and citric acid, those are corn too.  So really what we’ve done is, in the last half-century, create an industrial food system that uses these highly processed commodities like corn and soybean to fuel a conversion from eating fresh food and nutritious food to eating these empty calories like high-fructose corn syrup.

Q: You and Ian looked like you guys were having a pretty good time throughout the film, was there ever a point where farm life seemed to be getting just a little too much for you guys?

A: Definitely!  We moved to Iowa with this expectation that we were gonna spend our first year out of college as farmers and I think we brought with us a lot of expectations as far as what that meant.  I remember a friend of us gave us work gloves because he imagined we’d be out digging in the soil with a shovel but the reality was completely different and it’s a sign of just how disconnected from agriculture most Americans have become.  For us, farming was not at all like gardening.  If you’re growing 1000 acres of corn or soybeans, it’s about driving giant tractors, spraying some pretty intense herbicides, injecting gaseous ammonia fertilizer into the field.  It was, to us, a totally different experience than we imagined.

Q: It’s all machines now.

A: You know, we didn’t touch the soil with our hands once in the course of growing 10,000 pounds of food and that, on a cultural level, was a real shock to us.  We have this incredible bounty coming from the land but very little interaction with it.

Q:
Disturbing.  In your interview with former Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, seemed to be one of the most tense and poignant moments on screen.  Having served for 5 years in that position, Buts is depicted as having probably the greatest effect on the US farm program in history.  Has there been much change to the Farm Bill he created in 1973 that indicates that the overproduction of commodity corn is being addressed?

A: No, there’s been piece meal change over the last 40 years.  But the way our farm subsidy systems work today, like in the early 70s, channels an incredible amount of tax dollars to promote the production of a handful of commodities, the commodities that become the basis for fast food and processed food.  In the last 10 years, we’ve spent more than 50 billion dollars just on promoting corn production through federal subsidies.  And we’re not subsidizing fruits and vegetables, the kind of things we know are healthy for us so what we’ve done is tinker with the free market and create a new system in which fast food and processed food and processed commodities are artificially cheap and abundant.  And the foods we know are good for us, fresh fruits and vegetables, and the things we know are good for the land like conservation practices, those things have not received their fair share of subsidies.

Q: Are we gonna need some new sort of fast food chain of natural foods in order to combat this?  I mean, what can we do?

A: Well, there’s certain things consumers can do if you decide you don’t wanna feed your kids high fructose corn syrup it’s probably gonna make them healthier to not have too many empty calories in their diet but the bigger thing we can do is become policy advocates in however small a way.  One reason the farm subsidy program has stayed intact for the last 40 years and is working against us as consumers and against farmers, family farmers, one reason that program has stayed intact is because there has been no outcry from the public.  Most of us have just assumed that farm subsidies only apply to farmers or to the “farm states” but the reality is this is also a food bill, the farm bill is a food bill, and the way we grow food and the kind of food we promote affects our health down the line and affects what we see when we walk into the supermarket which right now is a whole lot of processed corn and soybeans.

Q: Have you continued your farming practices after this whole thing?

A: I haven’t.  I will admit, I’m part of a growing number of people in my generation who want to get back to the land in some way and it’s pretty important.  The typical farmer now is around 55 years of age so there’s about to be a tremendous turnover in who’s farming the land and what they’re growing.  So I’m off the farm for now and making films like King Corn and traveling around showing them to people.  My desire in the long run is to be a farmer and to not just grow commodities on a 2000 acre scale but also grow some food for direct consumption.

Q: Any more films of this nature that we can expect from you guys?

A: Yeah, we just finished a documentary about the first big green residential building in Boston.  It’s a film called the Greening of Southie and it’s basically the story of couple hundred blue collar jobs going green and I think in many ways it comes from the same place as King Corn which is this idea that we live in the most advanced country in the world but we pay almost no attention to the fundamental things - food and clothing and shelter - which at the end of the day, are still the most important things.  King Corn’s a film about where our food comes from and the Greening of Southie is a film about the buildings we live in.

Photo by Ian Cheney | Independent Lens | PBS


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Rocketboom: Get boomed

by Rich Awn

Why am I suddenly so obsessed with Rocketboom?

Maybe because it’s a little too glib… just a hair too clever for its own good.  Or perhaps those stunning femme digitales on camera are so sincere and seductive that Rocketboom.com’s daily dose of internet noggin fluff succeeds in whacking you upside the dome with a light saber and leaves your dismembered memes sputtering about on the floor gasping for air.

“Meme, you say?”

Yes, meme (MEEM).  First coined as a philosophical neologism of ontology in 1974, the term now describes a bite of culture, like an amino acid in the double helictical spiraling chains of DNA that encode our digital life.  Memes are identified by the good folks at Rocketboom, posted, linked, and later examined in the labs of the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies.  Findings reveal the social significance of such memes as Star Wars Kid, Technoviking, fail, pwned, owned, Magibon, and the Rickroll phenomenon.

Rocketboom spares no expense with fancy taped maps as backgrounds and generously provides supplimental hand-drawn diagrams on marker board to help make difficult concepts like “WTF factor” and “KUWAII ^___^” easier to understand.  Here, the hyper-future is propagated through a phonograph with video segments that are fun to watch and written just snarkily enough to have some spice without an over-saccarine saturation.  As far as talking techhead digital video digests go, Rocketboom totally boomed me.


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One year in two minutes

by The Green A-Team

Eirik Solheim makes more colors melt here.


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WALL-E

by The Green A-Team


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Greenhouse open for eco-conscious clubgoers

by Rich Awn

Full Gothamist article here.

This post was originally scheduled for News but I thought, “how is this news?”  I mean, it’s significant but it’s not the kind of thing that’ll  determine the pace of the world’s environmental progress/decline.

But I digress.  My feelings about LEED nightclubs and decor that screams GREEN the minute you walk in is something that puts me in a quandary and schedules this post under the Category, “EEEEEK-oh!” - a category loosely defined as “the sound my brain makes when reacting to something that reeks of greenwashing.”  Posts filed under EEEEK-oh! may be a cautionary tale with an undercurrent of truth that connotes a good deed despite it’s flashy exterior.

I digress again.  Does anyone remember the “Pink Room” at the 90’s NYC club, The Tunnel?  The Pink Room looked like the walls had been stuffed with that Pink Panther-endorsed insulation and everything was plushy and furry with globular mirrors all over the place.  Seems like not much has changed since those ecstasy-heavy days but instead of fiberglass insulation as decor, now it’s some other fake fur crap.

Decor aside, has anyone figured out how to do the kinetic energy dance floor thing yet???  That’s seemingly the most intuitive innovation to making a club green but then again, you need people to fill the floor to make the lights come on.  Is clubland still packing the house like it did in the 70s, 80s, and 90s?

Photo by Katie Sokoler.


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Life on the Green Carpet:
Exclusive Interview with Ryan Leslie

by The Green A-Team

Going green on the red carpet.

Rising stars in the worlds of music and entertainment have the voice and popularity to shape a generation.

Ryan Leslie is no stranger to the spotlight.  His recent signing to Universal by way of Sean “P-Diddy” Combs, has thrust him into into a fast-paced world of private jets, tour busses, and a lifestyle surrounded by excess.

I think that my voice will be chiming in with the voices that everyone’s been hearing over the past few years, especially with the work of someone like an Al Gore, who’s really brought to the forefront in a very cool way the importance of taking stock in the environment and the smart use of our natural resources.

Ryan’s talents both as a singer and forward thinking entrepreneur give even more depth to his powerful voice and message.

For more of our exclusive interview with Ryan Leslie, click below.

Read the rest of this entry »


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How to build a ZERO impact rocket (for Halloween)

by Rich Awn

Woah!  Been a minute since I’ve posted in here… what HAVEN’T I been doing!!!???

HAPPY HOLLOW-WEEN!!!

Here’s how you deal with Halloween and stay green and save money -  FIND EVERYTHING!  Step by step on how to retrofit a sustainable rocket (as your costume).

1.)  Get lucky.

Riding by at break neck speeds on my Cannondale about two weeks ago, I noticed this fully formed cardboard structure on the side of the road.  Without stopping, having only seen it for 2 seconds, and about a half a mile down the road, using my powers of Halloween intuition, I thought it might’ve made the best rocket costume ever.

Sure enough, it turned out to be the coolest rocket I’ve ever seen made of cardboard, definitely some kind of Scandanavian kids toy judging by how well it’s crafted.  Kicking myself for not having come for it the night before, I found it the following day (luckily) to have been kicked in, stomped on, and pissed on.  The smell of stale urine actually tuned me away at first and I finally stiffened up and vowed to restore it to is original splendor in the name of all things hallowed.

2.) Cut out the urine-soaked base.

Working on the refurbishing and retro-fitting for the zero rocket, the foul odor emanating from it’s interior was stifling.  With a few quick slashes of a box cutter, the problem was solved and peace was restored to the restoration.  Be sure to cut out just enough for the structure to fit firmly on the hips without compromising the structures overall integrity.

3.) Add a harness.

Using the camel back attachment for my girlfriend’s hiking bag, I laced a piece of nylon rope though holes I made 1″ apart along the back, poking them through with a fillips head screwdriver.  Just like lacing a sneaker, I cris-crossed the rope over the back of the camel back and under the shoulder straps at the height necessary for the rocket to sit comfortably just below my waist and high enough for me to see out every port hole.

4.) Add an interior light.

Using rechargeable batteries and this cool old fluorescent light I found in the bottom of a tool box, I used the aforementioned “shoe string” principle to attaching the light.  Less holes were necessary and shorter rope but it worked just fine.

Et voila!  As you can see from the slide show, it looks amazing… and the best part about it is that it’s recyclable and/or you and an agressive mob of candy-crazed trick-or-treaters can bash the hell out of it at the end of the night.


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Scrap Your Car for a Bike at the Tour de Fat

by The Green A-Team

Forget about trading in your SUV for a Prius, how about scrapping it altogether in place of a bike?

Gas, as we know, is virtually a luxury item these days, and even still the reality of ditching ones car is more achievable for some than for others.  But excuses won’t be stopping the Tour de Fat.  The Tour de Fat is a rambling carnival of two-wheel toting cyclers advocating bike-for-car swap outs accross the country this Fall.

What you’re likely to find at one of these peaceful demonstrations are bicycles of all shapes, colors, and configurations, live local bands, and hordes of cyclers who fearlessly gather by the thousands in the name of pedal power.

You can burn at least 300 calories an hour or about 25 per mile which requires a good amount of fuel in the form of food, or in this case, beer.  The New Belgium Brewing Company is the primary sponsor of the Tour de Fat pumping a steady stream of fermented hops and good spirits throughout this multi-city tour.

For some essential commuter cycling tips and more on the Tour de Fat, read on.

Photo by fastboy.

Read the rest of this entry »


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Word of the Day: Upcycling

by The Green A-Team

Word of the day: upcycling.

What does it mean for the way we think about our trash?

Originally coined by Michael Braungart and William McDonough, authors of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, upcycling is the liberation of discarded materials to create something completely new and beneficial.  It differs from recycling in that the material doesn’t need to go through any extra steps to begin it’s new life as something else.

Take a sheet of hard industrial plastic, for example.  To recycle it, the type of plastic must be identified, sorted, cleaned, and reformed using a slew of chemical processes.  The same sheet can instead be upcycled and used with little or no modification to become the surface of a picnic table or other useful permanent object.  Upcycling gives meaning to the hands-on reuse of materials in their original state without the mystery of the hands-off method of recycling.

For some ways to try upcycling for yourself, check out these links!

Upcycle Art

Upcycling Old Clothes

Upcycled Furniture

Photo by Enno de Kroon.


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Word of the Day: Permaculture

by The Green A-Team

Word of the day - permaculture.

What does it mean for the future of farming and the survival of humanity?

It’s best understood through its roots, permanent and agriculture:  Something permanent exists perpetually without significant change and agriculture is the science and art of cultivating land, livestock, and crops.  The combination forms the basis of permaculture, where we give back to the land as much as we take.

Developed in the 1970s by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, this natural systems design model was born in response to the mistreatment of billions of acres of farmland jeopardized by overuse of chemical fertilizers and genetic mutation of crops.

Permaculture provides us with a toolkit for how we can inhabit our world through integration instead of domination.  By careful attention to life’s full spectrum from mammals to microbes, permaculture can sustain huge populations without disrupting nature’s delicate balance.

To find out where you can visit, volunteer, apprentice, and enjoy permaculture sites in your area, the links below should help get you started:

Midwest Permaculture

Northeastern Permaculture

Permaculture Research Institute, USA

Planetary Permaculture Directory

Illustration is the cover of Permaculture: A Designers Manual by Bill Mollison.


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London 2090:
UK Arc Fest Freaks Take Over

by Rich Awn

INSANE imagry from Squint/Opera is what happens when you sandwich architectual peanut butter with imagination jelly.

The London Festival of Architecture is doing it’s swinging thing from June 20th-July 20th and where else can you get architects to dream up an ecopolyptic invasion of the body snatchers?

Dezeen has more eye candy.


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