Eskom has recently applied to be exempt from South Africa’s minimum emission standards. Here is a short seven minute video which shows how the impacts of Eskom’s coal-fired power stations are creating heavily polluted air breathed in by people living in the Highveld region in Mpumalanga. Continue reading
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Two of Project 90’s films showcasing our work are being screened at the Cape Town Eco Film Festival which starts later this week. Read on to see the schedule and book your tickets. We hope to see you there! Continue reading
“Coalition of the Willing is an animated film about an online war against global warming in a post-Copenhagen world”.
This forward-thinking film takes a look at what the citizens of planet earth can do after last year’s failed Copenhagen’s climate change conference, using the power of the collective and Internet technology.
Coalition of the Willing describe the film on their website:
“‘Coalition of The Willing’ is a film that discusses how we can use new internet technologies to leverage the powers of activists, experts, and ordinary citizens in collaborative ventures to combat climate change. Through analyses of swarm activity and social revolution, ‘Coalition of the Willing’ makes a compelling case for the new online activism and explains how to bring the fight against global warming to the people. As the film tackles the subject of online activism, we decided that the logical home for ‘Coalition of The Willing’ is here online. Between the start of February and the beginning of June 2010, Coalition of the willing was released in sections onto this website. Groups of sections were released roughly every 2-3 weeks, with the final completed film going online at the start of June. This un-conventional release strategy allowed us to build and engage with an audience whilst the film itself was being made. “coalitionfilm” has now become an online environmental brand in itself, with contributors Tweeting and Facebooking every day about issues discussed in the film; environmentalism, open source culture and swarm politics.”
Online activism: sign our petition calling for 4 million Solar Water Heaters.
Posted in climate change, Climate Change Activism
Tagged climate change, consumerism, Documentary Film, Sustainability
Today is World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought. It aims to highlight the urgent need to curb desertification and combat drought across the world and to strengthen the visibility of this issue on the international environmental agenda.
This year, the Day’s slogan is “Enhancing soils anywhere enhances life everywhere”. As 2010 is the year of biodiversity the UN is educating the public on the relationship between desertification and the loss of biodiversity within the soil.
On their website they state: “Healthy soils produce life, and yet soil health depends a lot on how individuals use their land. What we do to our soils determines the quality and quantity of the food we eat and how our ecosystems serve us. Our increasing ecological interdependence also means enhancing soils anywhere enhances life everywhere.”
We have two inspiring videos that we urge you to watch today. The first was submitted in a contest, “U@50” by a 20 year old and is the opposite of a palindrome. A palindrome reads the same backwards as forward, but this exceptionally clever video reads the exact opposite backwards as forward.
Our second video, My Paper Boat, is the story of a little boy in the heart of India who can no longer play with his boat due to drought. This video manages to portray a world of meaning in less than 2 minutes and without using words. Watch the video here
For those of us who are fortunate enough to have a garden with good soil why not start a vegetable garden today. You could start off with planting a few pots of herbs and begin to prepare your soil so that you can start to plant in Spring.
Here are some great websites to get you started:
http://www.homemakersonline.co.za/features/282/time-to-plan-you-summer-vegetable-garden
http://biophile.co.za/gardening/starting-a-vegetable-garden
http://www.bcb.uwc.ac.za/envfacts/facts/vegetables.htm
Do you have a vegetable garden? Send us your pictures and we’ll feature your veggie patch on our Blog.
21 June 2010
Here are a few pictures of my vegetable garden at home:
“We wouldn’t be the first life form to make itself extinct. But what would be unique about us is that we did it knowingly. What does that say about us?” – The Archivist, The Age of Stupid (Peter Postlethwaite)
This new documentary film is set in 2055, a little less than half a century on from today. Pete Postlethwaite plays a man living alone in a devastated future, looking back at our world of today and asking why we didn’t save ourselves when we still had time. His character is not the last survivor, as is often misquoted: groups of individuals are seen in the devastated scenes preceding Pete’s introduction and the camera pans past a large, populated refugee camp. Many people are left alive, but there has clearly been a collapse in both the human population and the structures of civilization we know today.
In the world depicted in the film, the inhabitants are suffering the results of all the cumulative emissions that we have already put into the atmosphere (between the start of the industrial revolution in1850 and today, 2009), plus additional emissions which will have been added over the future decades – during which, according to the conceit of the film, humanity continued with its business-as-usual fossil fuel use and did not make dramatic emission reductions. This conceit is, again, not a work of our scriptwriters’ feverish imaginations, but is currently considered the most likely scenario: according to the International Energy Agency’s standard forecast, emissions will be 45% higher than today as early as 2030. Over the last decade or so, the rate of emissions increase has nearly tripled.
The film is pessimistic in the sense that it examines in imaginary hindsight from the vantage point of 2055 why humanity failed to reduce its emissions – but, more than fifteen years since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed, we should already be asking this question. From a policy-as-usual perspective, it is a reasonable supposition that we will probably keep on failing. (This is not to suggest fatalism or denial: the film is a clear cautionary tale, and one which is already backed up by a campaigning effort aimed at inspiring its viewers to become climate activists – visit the ‘Not Stupid’ website, www.notstupid.org) – review by Mark Lynas, author of “High Tide” and “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet”
This is a must see film! We will organize a screening here in Cape Town as soon as we can get hold of a copy. So watch this space! In the meantime, for more information visit The Age of Stupid.
The 90 by 2030 Team.
“The very fact that the crisis is taking place within our generation, that it’s happening right now, means that we are tremendously powerful people. So this position of despair and I can’t do anything and there’s no point is completely illogical, it’s exactly the opposite.” – George Monbiot, Journalist & Author
Project 90 by 2030 
