Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience.
– Alex Steffen from The Bright Green City: Alex Steffen’s Optimistic Environmentalism
 From the SOFA Gallery website:
Fusion Culture: Transportable Living and the Landscape will explore ideas about environmental change related to global warming and inventions created by visual artists in response to these changes. With increased access to the Internet and media though a variety of outlets, people often lack a sense of ownership or belonging to a specific place, landscape or environment. This has diminished traditional connections to the land, creating a new relationship to our sense of place. Because we are no longer connected to our immediate environment, we have lost our ability to measure our effect on the world and the ways that we affect the global environment.
Sarah FitzSimons is an artist whose work combines sculpture, outdoor installation, photography and video. She collaborates with oceans, deserts, rivers, and mountain ranges, exploring collisions of the physical and metaphoric.
The show runs from February 19-March 7.
Sarah Fitzsimons is giving a lecture at 6pm on Friday, February 22 followed by an opening reception for the show.
From a Yahoo! news article:
“By turning off lights and also electrical gadgets that are in stand-by mode, “citizens, the media and decision-makers will get the message about energy waste and the urgent need for action,” the Alliance for the Planet said on Friday.â€
The Alliance for the Planet is an umbrella of about 50 green associations, including the local branches of Greenpeace and WWF, and professional organisations connected with the environment.
The UN’s paramount scientific authority on climate change meets in Paris from January 29 to February 1 to hammer out the first volume of a long-awaited report on the state of global warming today.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is widely expected to declare that climate change is already on the march, many years sooner than expected, and the consequences for humans and biodiversity could be dire.â€
Link to the article on turning off lights
Link to Climate Crisis Coalition website with more info on climate change