I love living in San Francisco, where not only do we have a City Department of the Environment, but it's teamed up with the Sierra Club on an environmental art/advocacy project that is all at once simple, creative, thought-provoking, cheap, and replicable.
Today, they launched FutureSeaLevel.org to bring the climate crisis home. It's an ingeniously simple idea: Participants tape up public spaces with a line of blue tape that marks the new sea level after unchecked global warming.
In a coastal city like San Francsico, it's a disturbing sight indeed -- the blue line cuts the urban landscape mercilessly, and you can really feel yourself going under. The project launched at Pier 39 -- tourist central here in SF -- so it's getting lots of exposure.
Now if only they'll share the tape so we can try this everywhere else there's a coastline too ...
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Comments
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activista79 Posted 10:03 am
21 Sep 2006
love this idea
This is a very cool idea--thank you, Sierra Club! Now, how can we do this in other cities around the country?
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Simon Donner Posted 4:38 am
22 Sep 2006
just how high should the tape go?
It is a fun idea and a simple way to visualize potential sea level rise in the future. Participants should just be sure to read all the caveats on the web-site about the uncertainty of changes in sea level, and recognize that a 3-7 m rise would not happen for centuries. Otherwise, any critics could easily, and not so wrongly, claim that the scientific results are being twisted by environmental groups.
http://simondonner.blogspot.com
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