GreenJean

There are days when recycling and changing lightbulbs feels hopelessly trivial. 

Miss Landmine is a beauty pageant for Angolan women who have lost limbs in landmine accidents. This project, by norwegian artist, Morton Traavik, has generated some debate. Shouldn’t this be the purpose of art? Creating dialogue, provoking thought, moving people to action?

THE MISS LANDMINE MANIFESTO (from the project website)
(in no particular order)

* Female pride and empowerment.

* Disabled pride and empowerment. * Global and local landmine awareness and information.

* Challenge inferiority and/or guilt complexes that hinder creativity-
historical, cultural, social, personal, African, European.

* Question established concepts of physical perfection.

* Challenge old and ingrown concepts of cultural cooperation.

* Celebrate true beauty.

* Replace the passive term ‘Victim’ with the active term ‘Survivor’

Look at the smiles and read about the lives of the candidates at Miss Landmine.

Imagine, for a moment, living that life, having those dreams.

This is a site that allows you to build your vocabulary while donating grains of rice to feed the hungry. Yes, grains of rice - ten for each word that you choose the correct meaning for.

The rice is donated through the United Nations World Food Program  paid for by the advertisers that appear on the site.

Do you know a business that espouses ‘green’ but uses virgin old-growth toilet paper? (Not that T.P. is ever labelled in that way.) Why does this happen? Could it be because the standard office supply catalogues offer no alternative?

Visit http://www.frogfile.com and consider making a change.

 It might be like turning the Titanic, but until the bigger catalogues offer the green goods, it’s worth trying.

Why change to recycled toilet paper?

According to Greenpeace, if each household in Canada replaced 1 roll of virgin toilet paper with just 1 roll of recycled toilet paper, we’d save 47,962 trees, 3,204 cubic metres of landfill (181 garbage trucks), 65.5 million litres of water (a year’s supply for 135 families of four, and avoid 4,567 kilograms of air and water pollution from manufacturing.

All this for one roll of bum wipe.

passive: 1. suffering action, acted upon. 2. offering no opposition; submissive. 3a. not active; inert.

activism: vigorous action to further a cause, noun: activist

The dictionary definitions suggest that at best, passive activism is an uneasy balance of opposites. Daily life and observation imply that enormous segments of the population fall into this category of activism.

It’s a lot easier to send Greenpeace a cheque every month than it is to hang suspended 42 metres above an icy cold river.  

Greenpeace activists hang Stop the Tar Sands banners above the North Saskatchewan river in Edmonton. Photo courtesy of Greenpeace.

Which questions are worth asking? Are the answers out there? Too often, we  jump on a quick solution, tie it in a tidy bundle and shelve it as answered, finished, over and done with.

Sometimes, just asking the question kick-starts the thought process. The brain ruminates and explores. It wanders and sifts through knowledge and experience, and tries to untangle the heart of the question. Tangents lead us astray. Thinking spirals, outward to bigger concepts, or inwards to an emotional core or resonant truth.

This blog asks questions. Some posts will include concrete answers, other posts might serve as springboards to further thought.