Green Thing Blog

It's an understandable sign of the earth-shaking times given the tramatic, catastrophic global events taking place all around us (war, weather, wall st, etc) and the ever worsening news about climate change - the disaster movie is back with a vengeance.

There was an interesting piece about this in the Observer a week ago about the penchant for post-apocalyptic storytelling sweeping through Hollywood like some dystopian greenhouse gas-filled tsunami.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road, for instance, (which I still haven't steeled myself to read, in spite of being a McCarthy fan and friends telling me it's bleakly brilliant), or The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington, Tim Burton's animated 9, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Zombieland or "Apocalypse porn" fest 2012.

US TV and literature is getting in on the act too. The Colony reality show is about scrambling for water and food to survive after some kind of catastrophic global event. The World Without Us, the bestseller which explores the vision of a planet without people, has just made into a TV documentary.

The problem is that fear sells, but what someone needs to be selling is a positive vision of the future we can see ourselves in an actually want to move towards. That's the best way to get people to change their behaviours and live more sustainably. Which is, of course, what we all need to be doing to help avert the very disasters we're paying good money to 'oooh' and 'ahhhh' our way through on the silver screen.

That's what Green Thing is trying to do, in our own way, by mobilising Creativity vs. Climate Change to inspire people to lead greener, happier, healthier, more ingenious, more fulfilled and simply better lives. We think it's the start of something big that can really make a difference. The alternative? Come back Lord Humungus, all is forgiven...

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1. DO be creative, inventive and all consuming, using existing resources. In the above case, use hair.

2. Don't blow things up. It might have worked for the Russians, but likely chaos will ensue.

3. DO think like NASA, and invent aerogels to sponge up the spills.

4. Don't use a toxic dispersant. The effects on animals, plants and humans is not well known.

5. DO use tools like Ushahidi, a web-based platform that aggregates real time information and maps it. It helps visualise data and organise relief efforts. 

6. Don't start racial profiling. Dear Sarah Palin, the oil spill is very upsetting, even for Brits! And not all British people work for BP or condone their actions.

7. DO keep up to date with the efforts. Twitter has some great up to date news and information from the gulf.

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