Like it or not, the War on Terra is here to stay. The debate over its reality is redundant. The shape of its evolution is what matters. So I set forth for Wired with multimedia heavyweights like Shepard Fairey, DJ Spooky and more to remind you of its catastrophic possibility, through the medium of warm but wise graphic posters. Whatever works, dude.
Green Patriot Posters is an arty hangover cure for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving that has become a national spasm of hyperconsumption.
Thumbing through the book’s ecology-themed imagery, created by multimediators like Shepard Fairey and DJ Spooky, won’t stab you in the gut with dogma — but it could tickle your conscience.
“Co-editor Dmitri Siegel and I started Green Patriot Posters because we felt the sustainability movement needs better images and messages to connect with people,” co-editor Edward Morris told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “It needs more positivity and urgency, and a better connection to values that aren’t simply about nature and conservation, which not everybody cares about, but also jobs and a better future.”
The visual meditations on sustainability and overload evoke World War II–era posters that inspired the campaign. The posters can be torn out of the book and plastered somewhere useful.
“America is the child of the Enlightenment,” Morris said. “Climate change is the ultimate challenge to that rationality. The risk of increased conflict, refugees, famine and economic failure are not debatable. Whatever country figures out newer, cheaper, safer forms of energy is the new economic superpower.”
MANIFESTO FOR A PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF ANTARCTICA
by DJ Spooky “Antarctica has many faces,” said Paul “DJ Spooky” Miller, who journeyed to Antarctica in 2007 and 2008 to shoot the multimedia meditation Terra Nova: Antarctica Sinfonia. “It’s usually thought of as a huge pile of ice that somehow stays afloat at the bottom of the world. In different ages, before humanity had mapped out the world, it would have simply been beyond most maps and most ideas about what made up the geography of the world. Today, Antarctica persists as a symbol of the unknown, and possesses great symbolic strength.”
POWER UP WINDMILL
by Shepard Fairey “I believe very strongly that green energy is the only way for the United States to achieve energy independence, create valuable technology and protect the environment,” Fairey said about this 2009 design for MoveOn.org. “I created this windmill image as a patriotic symbol of the green-energy mission.”
KEEP BUYING SHIT
by Diego Gutiérrez “To a graphic designer, there is no better reason to design than for a good cause,” said Diego Gutiérrez. “At the same time, popular media and kitsch design have exhausted a cause like global warming. Since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out, it has become popular for commercial design to take green to the masses. Although for a good cause, these sorts of commercial iterations are still very often designed with fluff for fluffy brains — there is no true statement of the urgency with which we must act to keep our lifestyle or even the world as we know it.”
SOW
by Ben Barnes “‘Sow Cultivate Thrive’ is a poster series developed around the concept of the victory garden posters of World War II, with a modern interpretation,” said Ben Barnes. “Stylistically I wanted them to have an American militaristic feel, with the idea of taking action to plant a garden.”