The Trials Of Being A Fish

The Conserve Our Ocean Legacy campaign is a non-profit, campaign that is an effort to build support for ocean and fish protection in America.

To highlight their campaign they have released an online overfishing game “Ocean Survivor“. It’s designed to draw attention to the perils of overfishing and provide people with an opportunity to sign a petition to make a difference.

Pollution, habitat destruction, mismanagement and overfishing have impoverished ocean resources, and have caused more than 90% of the world’s large fish, including tuna, swordfish and marlin to disappear.

Get 2 for 1 Tickets At UK Aware

Life Goggles is offering you 2for1 on tickets at UK Aware in London on the 10-11 May. UK Aware is a massive green event with stalls, events, promotions and speakers from the green world. Tickets are normally £5 each but using the Life Goggles promotional code LG241 when purchasing tickets here, you’ll get two tickets for the price of one. See you there!

Interview With Ptomley from Hubcap Creatures

Hubcap Creatures is the idea of Ptomley, a Brighton-based artist, who (you guessed it) turns hubcaps into art. Life Goggles thought more investigation was needed, so we interviewed him.

Where did the idea come from - turning hubcaps into art?
That particular raw material came from my acquisitive nature regarding all abandoned things aesthetic to my eye, regardless of their origin. I’m not averse to picking up a bit of rubbish from the side of the road if I think it has potential. That’s what happened with the hubcaps, and I collected quite a few before I finally got around to making something out of them.

Was it an environmental decision or is that just a happy by-product?
I feel very strongly about our cultures lack of understanding regarding the nature of value. (See my website). Creating something out of supposed rubbish I hope has a positive effect on anyone open enough to absorb that concept. This sense of value was focussed by a long trip to India in the early nineties, which opened my eyes to real poverty and also to true initiative in dealing with that. When I find a particularly choice item discarded it fills me not only with pleasure at the finding but also disgust at the waste.

Do you literally just pick up any hubcap you find or have you got people scouring the streets?
They’re all side-of-the-road-finds. I used to pick up a lot going about my daily business, but with friends and family all getting into the habit I’ve been accumulating quite a hoard. It gives me a big buzz when people bother to stop and pick up a piece of rubbish to help me out and to contribute to something I feel strongly about. It’s a great compliment and a signal that I’m doing something worthwhile. I’ve had many donations from strangers who have seen me in a magazine or on TV, which makes it all very encouraging

I see a few hubcaps around - are they really that common?
Once you start looking they’re all over the place: central reservations; roundabouts; junctions; even hedges.

How did you get started?
I accumulate junk being a bit of a magpie. If you see a skip with a pair of legs sticking out of it they’re probably mine. I pick up old stereos, vacuum cleaners, lights etc. All with a view to either repairing them or passing them on, or to taking them to bits and making something else out of them. I started collecting hubcaps with the intention of making a suit of armour but haven’t got round to that yet as the fish got in the way.

How long does it take you to make a piece? I imagine the huge dragon now at a car dealership took a while!
My working days vary depending on my mood, and circumstance of course, but an average fish sculpture made from hubcaps can take about a working week to complete. Obviously this depends on how well it proceeds, and how complex or large it ends up becoming. I’ve spent over a month on one piece before, and a simple sculpture can take only a couple of days.

What’s your favourite shape to make?
The sharks I reckon…

Apart from your commissions, a lot of your sculptures are fish-based. Is that something to do with living near the sea or does the shape of your materials immediately lend itself to fish?
The fish mostly look the best as far as I’m concerned-shiny and silver, and I really enjoy myself when making them. I am foraging into other fields though, but I keep drifting back to marine creatures because I find such an enormous and interesting range. The insect world has been drawing my attention of late but I’m reluctant to make a real start so far because there doesn’t seem to be an end to the possibilities, and once I plunge in with a vengeance I’ll probably be overwhelmed.

How important is the environment in your work and outside of it?
I try to do all the usual stuff: sort out my recycling; take a bag instead of getting a plastic carrier bag; attend occasional demonstrations; shop with a conscience; use my van only for long, necessary journeys etc. But to be honest I could do a lot more. Trouble is I’m not motivated enough to take on saving the planet as my main occupation. This goes back to enjoying myself. I’m happiest when I’m creating my work so that’s where I want to be. The other things take a back seat. But I try I guess….

Is there a move towards making art out of used materials in the UK?
Not a movement as such but there’s plenty of people doing it. They’re mostly the kind that fit into the category of ‘craft’ if you’re into putting people into boxes.

You’re appearing at UK Aware in May. Apart from to sell your pieces, is that in part to show a wider audience a different side of recycling/reusing?
I don’t do a lot of self promotion and I’m often absorbed in my work so it’s good to go out occasionally to remind people that my stuff available, but mainly it’s to say that art isn’t necessarily a high brow thing. Anyone can do it, and the big benefit of eco art is the raw materials are plentiful, and usually free. That’s a big help when it comes to encouraging people to have a go. I think everybody has some sort of a creative bud inside them and it should be given plenty of water…

The 5 Stages Of Global Warming

[Via: Cectic
All contents are copyright © 2007, Rudis Muiznieks.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.]

Eco-Libris Joins Forces With BookMooch

We previously featured Eco-Libris on Life Goggles with an interview with Raz Godelnik. They’ve now teamed up with BookMooch a leading book-swapping site.

BookMooch is an international online community for exchanging used books that has more than 500,000 members who exchange books for free, using a simple points system - every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get with it any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch.

Eco-Libris is a green business that works with book readers as well as with publishers, writers, bookstores and other organizations in the book publishing industry to balance out the paper used for printing books by planting trees. Within six months of operation, Eco-Libris has balanced out 10,000 books.

Eco-Libris and BookMooch are partnering now to offer the BookMooch community a special green option - BookMooch members can earn points by planting trees with Eco-Libris. For every 10 books they balance out, they receive a free BookMooch point they can then use to mooch a book for free. They also receive an Eco-Libris sticker made of recycled paper for every book they balance out, saying ‘One tree planted for this book’, which they can display on their books’ sleeves.

Welcome To The Green City

Greenpeace UK have launched an online virtual town called EfficienCity. It’s powered by clean and efficient (”decentralised”) energy. Based on actual communities in the UK, it aims to show that nuclear and coal powered power stations are not required.

It also aims to show how local councils, businesses and people are able to play a part in making the leap to a more sustainable future. The town is very interactive, with video case studies, animations and slideshows that explain how a clean and efficient energy system works. The tidal power animation was particularly interesting. Take a look at the Efficiencity, and you can read more about it here.

100 Ways To Save The Planet - The Next Generation #3

Yep, praise be, here are some more ways to save the planet. You can find part 1 of this ‘next generation’ here, part 2 here or get the original 100 Ways eBook for free here.

121. If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down. Nuff said.

122. Our friend Vanessa over at Green as a Thistle (she’s number 101) has lots of ideas for saving the planet, so I’m stealing some of them. Back in April (remember those joyful days when you’d only been going six weeks Vanessa?) she changed to an eco-friendly dental floss, while I’m not sure how bad floss is itself, it certainly comes in terrible packaging so time for a change.

123. Drink local. Not just at the pub nearest you house, but drinks from your own country. You can get local beers in many pubs and some even brew their own - microbrewies as they’re known. While some of the ingredients may still need to be imported, often they use locally grown products and you might just find that taste sensation you’re been looking for.

124. Grow your own medicine. Well not the stuff to reduce your blood pressure, but plants like Aloe are easy to grow and are lovely and soothing. There are others too but err keep it legal.

125. Read magazines online. I’ve cancelled my film magazine that gets delivered and am going online instead. Saves the printing and delivery and only uses up the energy to power my PC.

126. Help save the gorillas. We’ve talked about recycling mobile/cell phones before, but at www.eco-cell.org they promote reusing phones as a way of saving the gorilla’s habitat:

Cell phones also include coltan, a mineral extracted in the deep forests of Congo in central Africa, home to the world’s endangered lowland gorillas.
Fuelled by the worldwide cell phone boom, Congo’s out-of-control coltan mining business has in recent years led to a dramatic reduction of animal habitat and the rampant slaughter of great apes for the illegal bush-meat trade.

And if they can’t reuse the phone, they will recycle it with a “no landfill” policy.

127. Don’t get take aways. Think about it - the energy for it to be delivered and the cartons, cutlery, napkins etc you’re left with. Not very environmentally-friendly, so save it as a treat once in a while.

128. Ditch the gym. I have a love/hate relationship with the gym and have decided that it’s not very green so have cancelled it. I play football and badminton and all my runs will be outside from now on (hat and gloves required wear for much of the year in the UK). At least I can do press-ups at home, I’m sure I’ll be doing that every night without fail.

129. Don’t use taxis or limousines. Public transport, walking, bikes and rollerskates are the way forward. Well maybe not the rollerskates.

130. They were mentioned back at number 105, but Real Simple have another (yes, another) 20 ways to reuse plastic bags (and paper as well). This time it’s things like stuffing pet beds with them and covering your car mirrors with them in the winter.

Next Page »