Stay Grounded

On the last Thursday of January, we launched a fleet of Protest Paper Planes from a cold but sunny rooftop in London's Covent Garden. A month before we had asked artists, celebrities, designers, illustrators and community members to create pieces of Stay Grounded propaganda on recycled sheets of A4 that we could fly to the world.

The response had been staggering. Around fifty designs came in (if you scroll down you can see them all) and the designs were as different as they were brilliant.

Emma Thompson drew a delightful step by step guide to how to live greener on the ground.

Artist Dinos Chapman produced a truly black list instructing us how to reduce our carbon footprint. "Stop having babies" was his third instruction. "Eat all the babies" was his fourth.

Crayondreamer created a series of window simulations that you didn't need to fly to see. Meanwhile the brilliant Supermundane drew an alternative way to touch the clouds.

Director Gus Van Sant sketched a domestic apocalypse falling from the sky, while Derek Jacobi drew a knob with wings on which seemed to say it all.

So on a cold but glorious January afternoon, we launched limited edition prints of a selection of the planes and watched as they sailed silently through the air. Lucky people on the street below caught a valuable piece of artwork but also a powerful message - that excess flying isn't good and plenty of talented people have taken the trouble to say so.

Postscript: that was the last Thursday of January. On the first Monday of February, Heathrow was closed because of snow. Does protest move in mysterious ways?

Post-postscript: please don't stop with your Protest Paper Planes because we'd like to make our fleet ever bigger and better for future launches on future rooftops around the world. Download the template, create a brilliant piece of anti-flying or pro-flying-alternative artwork, write a sentence or two about what you've designed and why and mail it to hello@dothegreenthing.com - thank you.

Download the protest paper plane template