Do the halls of malls give you a case of the jingle hells? You could kick back for a 20-minute break from rampant consumerism to learn more about the toxic mess it makes of the planet.
Fun, right? Actually, it is with The Story of Stuff. It's a short, friendly movie covering the ABCs of consumer culture. The sky may be falling, but we can prop it up, the film suggests.
The Story of Stuff was produced by Free Range Studios, makers of the Meatrix. That entertaining, animated diatribe against factory farming has attracted more than 15 million viewers. The studio's (Grocery) Store Wars parody has been seen by some 10 million people.
Released just several weeks ago, The Story of Stuff has already enjoyed 416,760 unique visitors. Its makers hope that Stuff might similarly leave a lasting impression that spurs people to rethink their role in a pollution-based economy.
Sure, call it eco-propaganda. Yet, the facts in Stuff are well-researched and cited.
Writer and host Annie Leonard is an environmental activist who has spent two decades touring dumps and factories around the world. The Sustainability Funders and Tides Foundation provided funding.
The first chapter is embedded below, or check out the full 20 minutes at StoryofStuff.com.
Imagine if you will a room full of several hundred developers, journalists, and curious onlookers sitting together listening to the sounds of monkeys. That was the scene here at Where 2.0 during a demo for Wild Sanctuary, a project that presents sound clips of nature as a layer on Google Earth.
Users can explore various sounds, and see their placement and contextual information on the map. What's interesting about these "soundscapes" is that they can show the difference in an area before and after environmental impact both with visual maps and sound as. Several examples were given show instances where a once lush diversity of animal noises became quiet, following climate change, human settlements, logging, etc.
Wild Sanctuary joins several other environmentally focused Google maps mash-ups, including one that teaches plate tectonics, another that tracks Orca whale sounds, and Greenpeace's map of human impact on the ocean.
Today, Yahoo launched two new sites to get people motivated to be environmentally responsible. The sites complement Yahoo's previous green offering 18seconds.org, which tracks fluorescent light bulb usage in the continental United States. The sites are information tools, and part of a contest to help the greenest city in the U.S. get greener.
The first of the new sites is Yahoo Green, which helps people create their own plans to go green, using a drag-and-drop building tool. Yahoo provides lifestyle actions in four categories, which range from air drying your clothes all the way up to buying and installing solar panels on your house. Users can sort through the various actions using filters, and the builder will automatically let them know how much they're cutting back on their carbon emissions. When done, users can pledge to make those changes, and send off their plans to friends and family.
Yahoo Green gives everyone a baseline of 9.44 tons of CO2 a year, although to find something a little closer to your situation you can use Carbon Counter, which is a free tool that lets you customize your carbon offsets based on your living space and how you travel. It also lets you know how much it would cost to offset the carbon by donating to various environmental organizations.
The other new site is Be a Better Planet, which acts as a landing page for 18seconds, Yahoo Green, and links to green tools on Yahoo Answers and Yahoo's mobile search platform oneSearch. The site is the launch pad for Yahoo's new promotion that tracks and awards the greenest city in the U.S. The winning city gets a fleet of hybrid taxis. Alternately, cities can choose to take the cash equivalent and put it into their own environmental programs.
To keep score, Yahoo is doling out points for interaction with the services listed on the Be a Better Planet page. Results are shown on a map, which will start displaying each city's scores starting tomorrow. Users can improve their city's score by continuing to use Yahoo's green-oriented services, although it's clear that larger cities get an advantage over the smaller ones, assuming their residents are Yahoo users.
Yahoo's Green Plan builder lets you make your own plan to save the planet, or at least start by using recycled paper.
(Credit: CNET Networks)-- Find toxic wastelands via Google Earth. The EPA released a master list of landfills and other offenders to the public today in hopes of getting some recognition on mapping services such as Google Earth and Windows Live Local. Here's hoping for a Toxic button next to the beloved satellite view on Google maps. (CNET News)
-- Global digital-music sales nearly doubled in 2006. It was a good year for digital downloads, but they're still coming in at only 10 percent of the total music market. (CNET News)
-- MTV to buy RateMyProfessors.com. With more than 900,000 professors already rated, RateMyProfessors is now on its way to being owned by MTV as part of their MTVu service. (CNET News)
- prev
- 1
- next
