Image via ecoartspace.
Green thumbs in New York and around the world are planting the flag for environmentalism along with roof gardens and native trees as part of two participatory art projects that combine green activism with the power of social networks.In the summer of 2008, Miami-based artist Xavier Cortada planted a green flag at the North Pole to “claim” the landscape for nature as part of a New York Foundation for the Arts-sponsored project addressing global climate change. Writes the ecoartspace blog:
Melting polar sea ice has global political powers clamoring to place their flags over the Arctic to control the Northwest Passage shipping lanes and the petroleum and mineral resources beneath the ice. Cortada developed Native Flags as an eco-art project to engage people globally in a reforestation campaign to prevent the polar regions from melting.
Participants anywhere in the world can plant a tree native to their area next to a replica of Cortada’s green flag to reclaim a little plot of land and encourage neighbors to do likewise — declaring their affiliation with nature much as a political yard sign displays support for a favored candidate during election season.
Image via Seeding the City.
Seeding the City
Brooklyn artist Eve Mosher, who previously worked on the High Water Line project that demonstrated the impact of rising oceans with a chalk boundary running through New York waterfront communities, makes the evangelizing component more explicit in her Seeding the City initiative, which we first read about in I.D. magazine.
People who want to receive her “green roof module” — a kit of plants and a 2-by-4-foot container to grow them in, plus a flag marking the spot and street-level signage explaining the project — must first identify two to three other people in their neighborhood who are interested in greening a corner of their rooftop, in what I.D. called “a pyramid scheme” that “spread[s] environmental awareness, one roof garden at a time.”