Category Archives: Green

Reverse Graffiti Artists Create Clean Urban Murals

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Thanks to artists like Banksy and Shepard Fairey, most of us are aware of street art; usually unauthorized and often subversive, the sculptures and spray-painted murals pop up everywhere from Sao Paulo to London. In many cases, the art is applied over layers upon layers of previous graffiti. Even the best pieces are temporary (unless they’re Banksys, in which case they’re removed and sold for six figures).

But Banksy is old news. I’m here to show you a new trend in street art that’s storming the internet: reverse graffiti. Instead of stenciling over layers of paint and dirt, the artists clean away grime to create an image from negative space.

For example, Dutch Ink, a group formed by four brand communications students in South Africa, scrubs pictures of birds, fish, landscapes, and baroque fleur-de-lis designs onto dingy city walls. Their work, highlighting the disconnect between urban life and nature, has landed them plenty of attention online, as well as commercial jobs for ad agencies.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, reverse graffiti pioneer Paul Curtis teamed up with GreenWorks (Clorox’s eco branch) to stencil a forest of native plants on the inside of the Broadway tunnel. Filmmaker Doug Pray produced a short documentary on the project:

Uncommissioned reverse graffiti presents city officials with a bit of a conundrum. Authorities in many areas are quick to paint over murals and prosecute street artists. But reverse graffiti undeniably improves the urban environment–and who’s going to arrest someone for cleaning a wall?

Of course, the discussion extends to “traditional” street art, as well. If you paint birds and trees on a building, are you defacing property or beautifying unused space? Where does vandalism stop and art begin?

Some would say that art is considered crime when no one profits from it–in other words, authorities hide street murals because they don’t fit into the capitalist machine. But, when urban art is permitted, does it loose some of its impact? After all, part of the appeal comes from its ephemeral, guerrilla nature. It has an accessible art-to-the-people vibe that slick galleries can’t imitate. Can it maintain that quality when it’s legal, or even commissioned by a company like Clorox?

Philosophy aside, reverse graffiti has enormous potential to make our cities more pleasant and our commutes more entertaining. Commercialized or not, legal or not, creative projects like this are an exciting new element in the urban environment.

What do you think? Where and how does street art fit into modern urbanism? Is it illegal because it’s destructive, or because it’s subversive? Is the chance to reach a larger audience worth the artistic cost of commercialization? Share your thoughts in the comments or @thegreenlens. 

[Images: Dutch Ink, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0]

Farmers Markets: Fresh Food Movement Reaches Beyond the Eco-Scene

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“Don’t tell me y’all grew these,” the woman said, examining a basket of plump tomatoes, as bright and smooth as any from a supermarket shelf.

Across the table, the woman tending the booth chuckled. “If we had’na grown ‘em, they’d throw us outta here.” Even a small-town farmers’ market has rules. One of them is that you can only sell produce you’ve grown yourself.

The chuckling woman goes on to explain how she manages to grow perfect tomatoes, even this late in the season. She and her husband, a slim farmer with a scraggly gray beard, are fond of handing out advice to their customers, right along with the rattlesnake beans and eggplants. In fact, they seem to enjoy talking about vegetables as much as selling them.

Last week, the bearded farmer warned me with particular zeal against weeding watermelons, something he says should never be done. Never. 

He seemed to know his melons, so I bought one from him, along with some eggplants. The eggplants were especially good, some of the best I’ve had. Today, I tell him as much.

“How’d you cook ‘em?” he demands. He and his wife listen with genuine interest before sharing their own recipe.

Farther down the line of tables, another farmer is selling jars of bay leaves from his twenty-five-year-old tree. Every year for more than two decades, he tells me, he has carefully pruned his bay tree and collected and dried the leaves. The trees grow real slow, so there’s a bit of history in those jars.

Conversations like these are what you come to expect from a local farmers’ market, but they’re simply impossible in the supermarket system. In the Wal-Mart age, we’ve almost done away with face-to-face, farm-to-table food shopping. While we’ve gained convenience, we’ve lost personality, and I don’t think it’s a fair trade.

I’m not the only one. Nationwide, there are enough local foodies to support over 7,000 farmers’ markets; the number has increased 150 percent since 2000. And they’re not just popular in green strongholds. Even in Alabama, where the recycling rate is appallingly low, farmers’ markets are everywhere. Buying fresh and local is something we all can get behind.

To many greens, local food and sustainability go hand-in-hand. But unlike many aspects of sustainable living, farmers’ markets have not been colonized by politics. People don’t go to make a political statement; they go because they want to buy fresh food from real people they can get to know. That’s part of what makes farmers’ markets successful throughout the country.

The social aspect of farmers’ markets runs deep. Your food dollars stay in the community and help independent growers stay independent. The money goes to the growers themselves, not to faceless corporations. And until you’ve experienced it, you don’t realize the value of actually knowing your farmer.

Some folks who have been around a bit longer than I might be amused that the idea of buying food from an individual is suddenly new and progressive. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that people visited the barber, the dentist, the grocer… Then came fast-food culture–an example of progress taking a wrong turn.

In recent years, the trend has been toward convenience, at the cost of quality and personality. But if we want to build sustainable communities–not just companies with social responsibility statements–we need to shake the drive-through mentality. We need to take a good, long look at our food priorities.

Why choose food out of so many pressing issues? Food has one thing that solar panels and Priuses do not: a universal connection. In other words, everybody has to eat, and most of us would rather eat something good. As a result, many people with no interest in being green are turning back to real, fresh food. It’s this group, as much as the granola types, that has made farmers’ markets popular.

In short, food brings families and communities together. Because of that, it is powerful.

Image credit: Natalie Maynor

Urban Roots: Rebuilding Detroit with Community Farming

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Poster by Shepard Fairey

The Motor City may once have been a model of the American industrial dream, a booming example of progress in the age of big business. However, the auto industry exodus and massive population collapse that followed have left the much of the city literally in ruins.

As the people of Detroit moved out, so did many businesses. One result is that hundreds of thousands of Detroiters now live in a “food desert,” an area where healthy, quality food is extremely difficult to find. The population, often low-income, is forced to rely on fast food. In the wealthiest country on earth, equal access to nutritious food is a serious problem.

Produced by Leila Conners and Mathew Schmid and directed by Mark MacInnis, Urban Roots tells the story of Detroiters working to revive their city and change the food desert into an oasis. Their solution? Urban farming. Their goal? To “turn Motown into Growtown.”

The film is narrated by the farmers and community members themselves, who range from reformed convicts to bearded tree huggers, with a strong base of everyday urbanites in between. The American Dream has failed them, and many are disillusioned with industrialism. “I don’t think we need to Wal-Martize anything in this city ever again,” one organizer says.

Urban Roots is not about disillusionment, though. It’s about a varied group of people taking their situation into their own hands and developing Detroit’s vast plots of neglected land into a network of farms. The plan, according to one farmer, is to “create a model where people can make a living on an acre of land, either as a collective or as individuals.” Another grower explains, ”We’re not waiting on anybody to give us a grant or to give us funds. This is something that we see a need for and we’re making it happen.”

Here lies the interesting paradox of community farming in Detroit. We see the progressive idea of workers reclaiming land, sharing the means of production, resisting big capitalism. There is even a subversive nature in the farms, as many operate under the radar, outside of development laws. On the other hand, we see disadvantaged people helping themselves, not asking for for government handouts or charity–a concept that has been labeled “conservative.”

In fact, free enterprise is at the heart of the urban farming model. For example, Earthworks Urban Farm grows and distributes 100,000 seedlings throughout the city. The aim is to encourage low-income or unemployed Detroiters to produce and sell their own food, working to become more self-sufficient.

In the end, the urban farming movement shown in Urban Roots is not a political statement but a proactive response to a problem. If successful, the concept of small-scale, decentralized farming could be applied to communities in similar situations. Kathryn Underwood, an urban planner interviewed in the film, says that “Detroit has an opportunity to redefine urbanism and to redefine what happens to a post-industrial city.”

One question remains: Does the urban farming system work? This is actually difficult to answer, partly because several different models are being used in Detroit. One farm, for instance, operates as a non-profit, allowing passersby to pick as many vegetables as they like, for free. Another hires neighborhood workers and sells its produce at markets and to restaurants. Along the way, it introduces city kids to the wonders of nature.

When it comes to farming in cities like Detroit, I think we need a new definition of “success.” Success in the corporate world, including the ag industry, means maximizing size and profits. But that model didn’t work for Detroit.

The new (or not so new) thinking demonstrated by the farmers in Urban Roots is not to feed a whole city in one stroke, but to grow food, jobs and lifestyles one community at at time. And at the core of the movement is something big business tends to ignore–the human element.

Urban Roots documents the practice of urban farming and does an good job of it. But what leaves you inspired as you eject the disc is the impression of how much true grassroots efforts can accomplish when rebuilding a collapsed community.

In films as well as businesses, it seems the human element makes the difference.

[Images courtesy of Urban Roots Film.]

Girl Scout Cookies and Rainforest Destruction: Teens Working to Break the Connection

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Why two Girl Scouts are campaigning against Girl Scout Cookies — and how their efforts have taken America by storm.

Four years ago, Girl Scouts Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen were doing research for their bronze award project. Their subject of choice was the endangered orangutan and the threats it faces from deforestation. They discovered a little-publicized fact about Indonesian rainforest destruction: Acres upon acres of orangutan habitat are being cleared for plantations to produce palm oil, an ingredient in about 10 percent of consumer products. Madison and Rhianon decided that their goal would be to raise awareness about palm oil and its impact on endangered species.

Girl Scouts Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen

If that had been the end of it, the project would have been commendable. But the girls’ focus shifted when they found that the Girl Scout Cookies they sold every year contained palm oil. Suddenly, they weren’t just working toward a badge; they were campaigning to change one of the country’s most well-known nonprofits.

Now fifteen and sixteen, Madison and Rhiannon have partnered with Rainforest Action Network (RAN) to bring their message to a wider audience. Their PR efforts paid off in May with a front-page Wall Street Journal story, followed by a flurry of TV interviews on ABC, CBS, and Fox News (yes, even Fox).

The responses from Girl Scouts USA have been more defensive than sympathetic. In early May, for instance, RAN and Change.org helped Madison and Rhiannon launch a social media campaign to put pressure on the Girl Scouts administration. After about fifty messages had been posted on the Girl Scouts Facebook page, GSUSA deleted the comments and added a statement assuring viewers that “our bakers source palm oil exclusively from members of the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil.”

The claim is true but misleading. RAN calls the RSPO “more of a pay-to-play organization than a serious watchdog group:”

There is a very important distinction between RSPO membership and RSPO certification. RSPO certification is a seal of approval that is given to palm oil grown on a plantation that has been certified through a verification of the production process by accredited certifying agencies. In theory, the “certified sustainable” palm oil (RSPO oil) is traceable through the supply chain by certification of each facility along the supply chain that processes or uses the certified oil.

RSPO membership, however, does not require companies to follow sustainability guidelines. In a letter to GSUSA CEO Kathy Cloninger, RAN explained,

[RSPO} member companies have been documented clearing forest, peatland and critical wildlife habitat while ignoring human rights — all of which are prohibited in the RSPO principles and criteria. In essence RSPO membership does not ensure that deforestation, orangutan extinction, and climate change are not found in Girl Scout cookies.

For instance, one RSPO member, IOI Group, is illegally operating a palm plantation on the ancestral land of the Long Teran Kenan people, in Malaysian Borneo. A court ruled that the plots in question were, indeed, on indigenous land, but the conflict has not yet been resolved, and the RSPO has failed to take decisive action against IOI.

Returning to the Girl Scouts, the organization’s executives did finally meet with Madison and Rhiannon while the girls were in New York for their media interviews. The meeting was a step forward, with GSUSA leaders verbally agreeing to address concerns about deforestation and human rights abuses.

The bakers of Girl Scout Cookies began using palm oil in 2006, in an effort to rid the cookies of trans fats. (Palm oil is the cheapest “healthy” oil.) A spokesperson for the Girl Scouts has insisted that the group has little or no say in the cookies’ ingredients — it’s up to bakers. But if GSUSA demanded a recipe change, the bakers would have to comply, or else lose the Girl Scouts business. With 200 million boxes of cookies selling per year, the idea that GSUSA has no influence is a bit hard to believe.

Part of the mission of the Girl Scouts is to empower girls to “make the world a better place,” and the idea seems to be working. Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen are making a difference; they’ve already brought as much attention to the palm oil-deforestation issue as any environmental group has so far. Their biggest challenge, ironically, is getting the Girl Scouts leadership to follow its own credo.

This story should serve as inspiration for any young person who hopes to spark positive change. If and when Girl Scouts USA does make its cookies rainforest-friendly, the impact will be huge. And two teenaged girls will be responsible.

How to get involved: Sign up for RAN’s Girl Scouts e-mail list here. Learn how you can take action online and offline.  

Greenaid turns vintage gumball machines into seedbomb dispensers

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Urban eco designers create new tool for guerilla gardening

File this one under “random but brilliant.” Commonstudio, an emerging design practice and consultancy, has begun distributing gumball dispensers converted to hold seedbombs.

If you’re new to the idea of seedbombing, here’s some background. You’ve seen those “gray” spaces in cities — empty lots where buildings were torn down and derelict parking spaces, for example. With cash-starved governments unable to revitalize abandoned areas, an increasing number of green thinkers are taking matters into their own hands, discreetly planting flowers on unused land.

Seedbombs, an essential part of the guerilla gardener’s arsenal, are nothing more than clay, compost, and seeds. Slingshot them onto an empty lot, wait for them to break down, and watch the plants retake a forgotten urban void.

Here’s how Greenaid will help:

You can purchase or rent a machine (or two, or ten…) directly from us and we will develop a seed mix as well as a strategic neighborhood intervention plan in response to the unique ecologies of your area. You then simply place the machine at your local bar, business, school, park, or anywhere that you think it can have the most impact. We will then supply you with all the seedbombs you need to support the continued success of the initiative.

Can’t find a Greenaid dispenser near you? Don’t despair! Just follow these steps to make your own seedbombs. You only need clay, water, compost, and (of course) seeds to get started with greening the gray space in your community.