Peace Day Vs The Age of Stupid (WN0023)

The Age of Stupid Global Premiere Trailer from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

It's a tough call over which one of these two videos to put at the top of the post. In a surprising convergence of highly connected issues, today (September 21st) marks Peace Day, while tomorrow (September 22nd) is the global premiere of 'The Age Of Stupid', the already widely-acclaimed documentary film about climate change.

Above is the trailer for 'Stupid', while the clip below gives an explanation about Peace Day. It needed really be a choice between one or the other. By all accounts, 'The Age Of Stupid' is a film that literally everyone should see. Peace Day is an annual day that all signatories at the UN General Assembly have agreed should be a day for cessation of hostilities.

Neither initiatives on their own will automatically make the world a better place, but both show that forces pushing back against the challenges the planet is facing are getting stronger.

Find or give a screening of 'The Age Of Stupid' and tell everyone who'll listen about it.

Make peace. Every day.

'Will you eco-marry me?'

Will you eco-marry me? from UNUChannel on Vimeo.

A friend of mine who works for the United Nations University's Media Studio in Tokyo has produced the above short documentary about a Japanese couple that decided to make their special day an eco-wedding.

The film is a thoughtful piece on how even the bigger or more important parts of our lives can be adapted to reduce our footprints on the environment. A full article on the film by Johanna Stratton can be found here.

To visit the UNU's fascinating and insightful webzine on further solutions to the complex problems facing our planet, visit Our World 2.0.

Greening Tokyo (WN0016)

Sometimes you come across something on the web that is hard to resist letting others know about. Being an ongoing Tokyophile, I was alerted to these images via a couple of feeds in my Tweetdeck (a tool that lets you keep track of what's going on in your Twitterverse).

If you count the surrounding prefectures (Yokohama, Chiba, Saitama, etc), the entire Tokyo region is made up of 34,000,000 people. That's a lot of folks condensed into what is effectively a very small space. Naturally, green spaces are pretty hard to come by and of great value when they do appear.

The Green Island Project have put a contemporary and ecological twist on a popular theme in Japanese creative culture of re-imagining of the city. In these pictures, the streets of Tokyo have been grassed over. For places that I'd come to know so well over the five years I lived there, it puts the city in a remarkably different light.

The picture at the top is of Shinjuku while the one below is of Shibuya. Click here to visit some of my own pictures of the city.