Pick 1 - that takes the prize for adorability, originality, and ability to engage with the widest possible audience is Frank Woodley's - Give Frank A Break

http://tenplay.com.au/channel-ten/the-project/extra/season-5/frank-woodley-3854301853001

Oddly enough since it was released has been 'closed to private audience' but you can watch the expose on the Project on the link above. It is essentially a humorous video (black comedy!) about protecting our oceans from waste pollution. Frank Woodley manages to tread a fine (fishing) line between environmental pathos and green humour. He certainly seems to be saying the less words you use - the more you convey in Give Frank and the Oceans a break.  On the Project TV show Frank shocks everyone by swallowing a plastic bag - presumably one which will break down inside his stomach!! 

Am hoping the link will be working again shortly. 

Pick 2 - Animal Australia - caged eggs videos campaign --- 'That aint no way to treat a lady'.  

Not as creative as the Give Frank A Break Video - nevertheless these videos are clever in that they remove any semblance of the pedestrian or prosaic from the 'chicken' label and manage to captivate us with the lovability of the chicken species. The viewer will be stunned to learn the fact that the majority of eggs in Australia are still battery hen or cage eggs which is simply unacceptable in a society which is meant to be moving towards becoming more concerned with animal rights and welfare.  

You will also learn that chickens are cleverer than we thought, can be trained to do tricks (no bird brain at all!) and they can identify the same object over and over again that depicts themselves, and even look for the missing object that resembles all of the others.  I give this campaign an extra tick as they managed to produce not one or two but four videos!

http://www.animalsaustralia.org/no-way-to-treat-a-lady

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10153403391825299&set=vb.32799215298&&theater

Pick 3  Get Up's Save the Reef 

This video just scraped it in to the 2014 list being uploaded to Get Up's Facebook in late December. It's actually very effective as it uses humour, too, but takes the innocence of the actors that little bit further and adds in some pretty hilarious misinformation.  The lack of accuracy about features of the Great Barrier Reef stirs up that familiar theme that governments don't always know what they're doing and nor do they leave our most precious natural resources in charge of the best people!

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152418994826455&set=vb.13527056454&&theater

Pick 4 - City of Yarra - Put In Bin campaign

These zany pictures have been getting a look in throughout our Facebook page over recent months.   The City of Yarra post a caption on each of the bins stating that the contents of the bins will be sorted for recycing.    See our Facebook page for several more examples. 

Interestingly the next three campaigns concern governmental apathy in Australia, when it comes to taking stronger action and making commitments on climate change targets.  

Pick 5 - Heads in the Sand 

https://www.facebook.com/AustralianConservationFoundation/photos/a.203147261340.171976.14193666340/10152850516001341/?&theater

This one speaks for itself as does the next one. 

Pick 6  - G 20 O Solar campaign

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-06/queensland-farmer-sends-a-large-climate-change-message-to-g20/5871086

Pick 7 - People's Climate March - This March has had an astounding response, not because it's particularly creative or original but merely in the use of social media to rouse so many people to come together at so many different cities and locations across the world. Hundreds of thousands of people turned up to march on 21st September, 2014 in Melbourne. 

Here's a photo from the March.  The caption in the photo says 'Hey Tony, You're Heading for a Climate Change Cliff'.   


More examples of campaigns will be added throughout the year, as more spring to mind - from 2014. 
 

What came out of last night's viewing of the Rise of the Eco Warrior for me is this.  When it comes to the Environmental Movement - the Message - needs to be Magical. And this is what the creators of this film achieved. The message was simply that - magic.  I am so much more inspired to do something about palm oil since watching this film. 

The Eco Warriors spent 100 days in Sintang and Tembak, Borneo (Indonesia) and were split off in to separate units - EarthWatcher, Deforest ACTION, propagation of seedlings for reforestation,  prepping the orphaned orangutans for socialisation and release in to the forest (Forest School), Education, Mapping of logged vs intact coupes,  and possibly other units, as well.  All bases were covered for saving the precious last native tracts of Borneo from logging. 

I was particularly interested in the work the Education unit were doing to inculcate a love for their land in the Indonesian school children.  There were many visits to local schools and lots of creativity infused in to the education campaigns to keep the children engaged and entertained. After all, it's the young who will one day be the owners of this land who will be pressured to sell it off. Without the land-owners' commitment, the campaign is futile!

One campaigner wrote a song, some dressed up and performed for the schools dramatising what happened to the orangutans in the forest, there was a photo tree, a Photographic Exhibition, from memory, crafty activities for the kids, dancing routines, and just about anything you could think of to open up these children's hearts to the importance of the forests.  But most importantly, there was a love in everyone's hearts for the land and the wild-life which resonated and radiated amongst everyone, and the children felt it as much as ever.  This is what this film brought out, and emotion is so important in any campaign. 

I particularly love the scene where they are jumping around on the rain forest floor literally like they're on pogo sticks. You see the peat all along the forest floor is very spongey and filled with a lot of air and huge amounts of CO2s are released in to the atmosphere when it is disturbed. 

There was a small remote control plane which would surveille the forest to track down illegal logging and industrialists marking off trees for future removal. Despite Borneo not having the most advanced internet coverage, these Eco-Warriors really made the most of all technological capabilities at their disposal. 

Apart from love, another resounding theme in Rise of the Eco Warriors, is HOPE.  I have watched Green - The Film, An Orangutan's Story, which is like the representation of environmental realism on the film-maker's canvas. This film although an important piece of film-making in conveying the realities of rainforest destruction, did leave me feeling flat and that feeling of 'what can I do'? I'm not sure that a silent film actually works.  I didn't feel at all flat after watching Rise of the Eco-Warriors. Quite the contrary, it's a film that galvanises the audience to want to do something. 

What many don't know about the palm oil industry but would have learned from this film -

1. Palm plantations are mono-cultures which means high levels of fertilisers and pesticides are needed - hence groundwater will be contaminated for generations.  When native forest is culled, the orangutans are basically left with no food source, and no habitat. 

2. A mono-culture means that animal and plant bio-diversity is virtually non-existent. After 20 years when the palms are no longer bearing fruit, the land is left depleted and barren. 

3. Logging is illegal in Indonesia, but still legal in Malaysia (which is quite another story altogether!).  The local Indonesian people need to be encouraged to enforce the laws to prevent illegal sell-offs to palm oil producers. 

4. Tens of thousands of seedlings (including sugar palms) are currently being propagated and replanted to replenish the land so that the local people can generate an income from a more sustainable industry. 

This film is on limited release, but the creators are asking people (parents, teachers, campaigners) to look up this Facebook page and request its viewing at schools or in their local cinemas.  

https://www.facebook.com/ecowarriorsrise

Another point that came out of the feedback after the session was that supermarkets can be pressured in to providing greater transparency when it comes to their Palm Oil free Products.  

At Q and A time,  I piped up without a microphone (it was a full cinema) and commented that hopefully the film can have Chinese sub-titles added. After all, the bulk consumers of palm oil - are those who  use it for cooking as occurs in China, so we really need to appeal to our Asian friends to appeal to their relatives back home to find an alternate source for cooking oil. 

Been getting a few requests from people writing in to post more funny green videos, and also to post more about making sustainability fun.  

Well, thought it was time to post some more music videos which combine music, humour (aka green humor) and sustainability messages. 

Here's the Formidable Vegetable Sound System performing their highly amusing song about the benefits of permaculture, making sustainability fun and it's called 'Yield'. 

Here's the link Mr Yielder - Charlie Mgee himself (who is apparently off to the Glastonbury Festival to perform) asked me to post up - 

http://music.formidablevegetable.com.au/

Speaking of funny permaculture videos, I have a blog - bloomingandbold blogspot having studied Sustainable Landscape Design, and have been in the business of promoting Footprint Flicks, the cute and funny videos which Sustainable Gardening Australia put out a while back. See link above to their site to view samples of these. With names like Mulch Ado About Nothing, Tank Girl and Weeds - Not in My Backyard, how can you go wrong!

Also, here's a link to Tim Minchin in his very popular You Tube video about canvas bags which definitely has comic moments (and some would call it a tad satirical).  It takes a few minutes for the song to get going, so give it a chance, as the rewards are there for your patience.  Tim Minchin has a wonderful talent for getting the audience roused as well as involved, and that is what we sustainability communicators want to achieve - isn't it!

There's quite a few videos on the internet which are purportedly humorous, which I don't find especially amusing, so I will endeavour to put just the very best ones up here, well from my perspective. 

I go in to green humor and making sustainability fun in my book Green Spin (Or) Promoting the Green Message.  If you like this site, then why not buy a copy of my book (US $2.75) as a sign of your support! 

There are more funny videos throughout this blog under the tage of humour in green message.

So we want the viewer to consider the emotions that get aroused when you watch the videos. How do they make you feel? The next time you see some environmental messages - ask yourself the same question - think emotion,  empathy, mirror neurons, emotion? Also, likewise when you  see images and cartoons attached to some green communication ask how does it make the viewer feel? Unless we are always asking ourselves these questions, we are not being effective campaigners.  

Just a little post to link to an interesting exhibition video about the convergence of art, design and science and a computer game - Making climate change  accessible and popular. The exhibition shown in the video demonstrates the use of Infographics and Sonification.  It's about not just what we say, and how we say it, but also the way the typesetting occurs to emphasize aspects of what you are communicating.

The aim of the computer game  is to stop New York from flooding. Top stuff! 

But let's agree that anything visually enhancing - in the days of the internet and computer games, works exceedingly well in conjunction with the written word: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HCHDFjGvxM

I find myself reverting in to my childhood self as I watch a UK TV show, concerning the Miniature Wonderland, replete with tiny toy trains circling a long course with an audience of hundreds of people milling about at the Fremington Quay, UK district.  All well known doco. makers are involved with this documentary, but I was so engrossed, I didn't get around to finding out the name of the programme. But what really matters is that the 'plucky bullet train' is certainly outdoing the rest. 

What this programme does is remind us of the power of toys to inspire wonder in people, and that also includes children! When we are around toys we are removed from our day to day lives and transported to another place. Toys take us back to a time where we were an empty slate, waiting to be filled up with new ideas, inspirations and feelings. Toys inspire not just wonder but also, I think, a great deal of love and loyalty in those engaging with them. To see the adults staying up all night to see a tiny little train surging past, and getting emotional at Instow (7 miles in to the course) about their trains not getting past this point, is pretty good evidence of this. 

Because of this empty slate aspect, both emotionally and intellectually, I think that toys might be used a lot more in inspiring devotion amongst the masses when it comes to climate change and the behaviour required to mitigate against it. Aside from engendering a sense of loyalty towards the toy (which can represent all manner of environmental personalities and themes)  and inspiring wonder in the subject matter, too, the toy actually makes sustainability fun! 

We were discussing other reasons why toys are potentially so inspirational where our ecology and climate change is concerned.  First of all, the toy brings out in the audience a caring spirit. Therefore toys are excellent at drawing out empathy within the audience.  This paternal instinct and empathic response stirs up sub-consciousness feelings and responses, which we might not have had, but for our engagement with the toy.  This in turn makes us more susceptible for having a change of heart, where behaviour change is concerned.  A change of heart can then in turn bring about a change in habits. 

Think of mermaid toys with 'accessories/story books' representing the wonder of reefs and the fish and the actions the merpeople are taking to protect them.  Think of how inspiring characterslike Wall E and Mo are. The use of toys, environmental heroes and childhood themes in the context of behaviour change - knows no bounds.  

See also separate tagged topic - 'eco screen dream' on RHS blog labels and also this is discussed under the tag Green Humor - left hand menu.