The United States is doing it’s best to feed the world … or at least that’s what they’d like you to believe. US Food Aid may be more effective as a subsidy to domestic producers, agribusiness and shipping companies than it is at alleviating hunger in the poorest parts of the world.
Oxfam America staffers Jessica Erickson and Anna Kramer have put together the below infographic illustrating where all that money goes, and how it could go much, much further with a few changes to policy and operational procedures.
Critics are seething after Lego announced its new line of toys designed for girls. The super slim, anatomically incorrect Lego Friends figures have been accused of promoting damaging gender stereotypes and body dissatisfaction.
Lego responded to the controversy by saying they were just giving girls what they wanted. They explained in a statement that the new line was the result of “four years worth of comprehensive, global research with 3,500 girls and their moms to understand what would make LEGO play more interesting for more girls.”
The Danish toy manufacturer has yet to release data on the preteen demand for minifigure miniskirts.
It’s Fashion Week in New York, so it’s an appropriate time to ask the question: Can fashion be truly sustainable? Sure, clothes can be manufactured from organic cotton and recycled pop bottles, but is the use of such green materials simply putting a soul-soothing face on consumerism? Or are environmentally-conscious designers bringing about measurable change in an industry that produces an incredible amount of waste?
“Don’t think Sinkhold is a bookcase because of its shape and contents. Owing to its stainless steel construction from a series of sinks, it holds many things an ordinary bookcase cannot. As such, it is useful in a number of post-bookcase scenarios: terrorist attack, GMO crop blight, even zombie apocalypse.
“Just toss those books, pull the shelves and invert the sinks over up to three infants, cats or purse-dogs: instant individual bunkers! Or use it to carry your produce to the farmer’s market in the parking garage after the widespread failure of Monsanto’s platypus-corn causes mass starvation! And when everyone’s burned their wooden bookcases to cook food or scare off zombies, you’ll still have this to shove against the windows when the hungry hordes come a-knocking!
“The shelves are held in place with only spring tension, so they can be slid up or down when empty and brace more firmly against the sides when loaded. Welded from parts of a fun-park carousel, restaurant sinks and a roll-down gate, this post-industrial, post-consumer furniture is easy to lift, even fully loaded, and as such is perfect for itinerant students or that literary bedouin in your life.”
Approached by the Harare International Festival of the Arts in Zimbabwe to produce a public work for their event, South African designer Heath Nash built shade structures using scrap materials — largely discarded beverage containers.
Last week’s federal election was a stark reminder to many urbanites here in Saskatchewan how the shape of an electoral district can have a significant impact on election results.
The province’s cities are carved up into pieces, each of which is lumped into a district dominated by wide swaths of rural prairie. The end result is that comparatively progressive urban voters end up being (mis)represented by social conservatives, generating a fair amount of resentment for both the electoral system and their rural counterparts.
Vancouver, globally speaking, is barely more than a teenager. A young city nestled at the very Western corner of the nation, flung far from the battles and outposts and trade routes on which our shared myths rest. As such, it’s often thought of as part of an entirely different era, aesthetic, and mindset. Vancouver is not of Old World sensibilities. With the possible exception of Gastown, one isn’t likely to find the snaking, dead-ending avenues and cobbles of London, nor the broad, sweeping boulevards and gut-wrenching (to Canadian tastes) roundabouts of Paris. In Vancouver, we find instead mere traces and fragments of these worlds nestled into tidy New World grids.
Greenpeace UK is hosting a competition to redesign British Petroleum’s logo. Entries are due by June 28th; the winning design will be used as part of their international campaign against the oil company.
A few years ago, BP rebranded themselves as ‘beyond petroleum’. And yet BP is pursuing ‘unconventional oil’ – the Canadian tar sands and deepwater drilling, despite the massive environmental damage that’s being caused by their business.
That’s why we want you to rebrand them. Your brief is to create a logo for BP which shows that the company is not ‘beyond petroleum’ – they’re up to their necks in tar sands and deepwater drilling. – Greenpeace UK
The image above shows 2 logo designs already submitted. You can check out the rest on Greenpeace UK’s flickr stream. For more information and downloadable BP logos in “easy-to-edit formats,” visit the org’s “behind the logo” page.
(Thanks to Treehugger for the original announcement about this competition.)
The Guardian has selected political artist Michael Rakowitz as their artist of the week. Although this American of Iraqi-Jewish heritage has drawn inspiration from sources as diverse as Arab newspapers and eBay, Guardian arts writer Skye Sherwin is drawn to Rakowitz’s constructive solutions to public problems, such as ParaSITE, his custom built homeless shelters.
Often he has devised practical, creative ways to get discussion going at ground level: public art projects that directly involve people. Begun in 2004, a project he called Return saw Rakowitz relaunch in Brooklyn a version of his grandfather’s import/export business; the local Iraqi community were invited to send items to Iraq for free, testing channels of communication at a time when there was almost no postal infrastructure. For another of Rakowitz’s projects, Enemy Kitchen (2006), cooking classes became a way to broach cultural boundaries, teaching school kids family recipes with the help of his mother in workshops staged in California and New York.
An idea imported from the UK and sweeping many of the world’s larger cities has come to Canada: adverts on public transit vehicles suggesting there just might not be a god. The advertising campaign has been turned down by some, and in most cases organizers were forced to insert ambiguous words like “might not” or “maybe” in the adverts, lest believers should feel slighted. La Presse reported that the ads would run in Montreal for the month of March, while the Montreal Gazette reported two days ago that Toronto and even Calgary have joined the list of cities willing to reap advertising dollars from a campaign that questions divine creation.
Contributors
Stefan Christoff, Colin Horgan, Julia Pyper
Michelle Siobhan Reid, Valerie Cardinal, Race Capet
Laurence Miall, Terry Fairman, Tyler Morgenstern
Greenpeace UK
