hey! did you know that this Friday, Sept 20 is the start of the global climate strike? well now you do, nerd! so this week here’s a special edition of AGtC to get you ready before our regularly scheduled programming for the week.

if u wanna do something in the meatspace:

I am personally not that much of a crowd person, but every once in a while it is worth it. you can look up local protests on the Global Climate Strike site, Fridays for Future, or the websites/social media accounts of local Fridays for Future branches. don’t you want an excuse to get out of the office/studio for an afternoon? I’m gonna go to the CDMX event myself, I promise! if you’re having trouble finding something in your area, double check on Facebook - it’s a lot easier for a local group to just create an event there than to mess around with the international maps if they are pressed for time.

fyi I am that kind of person who believes in bringing safety goggles even to a grandma protest, and if you are too, this guide from Amnesty International covers the basics of staying safe pretty well.

if online is more ur thing:

if you have your own website, there’s an easy-to-add banner widget that you can drop in by including this script in your header:

<script src="https://assets.digitalclimatestrike.net/widget.js" async></script>

you can already see it in action on my site. there’s also a Wordpress plugin as well as a bunch of banner ads you can use on a blog or social media or whatever that are available here, and if you want to customize the widget you can check it out here on Github. it’s really easy! it literally took me the 2 seconds it takes to log into my server via FTP to add this to my site. even if you’re not an IRL protest person, you never know you’ll inspire with something as simple as a line of code.

if you wanna spend money:

there are lots of great orgs that you can donate to, and I always recommend picking something local where you can feel connected to what is happening with the money.

that said, basically the only thing to come out of the latest Y Combinator batch that actually caught my eye is Wren, a subscription service where you can offset your carbon footprint. you enter your email, answer a few questions about your lifestyle, and the site creates a personalized subscription rate to offset your emissions via accountable projects. filling out the questions has made me more conscious and conservative about my day-to-day choices, so the impact of this is already bigger in my own life than the donation itself. you can think you are doing all great biking “everywhere” but then when you actually count up those late night Ubers it’s almost as bad as owning a car.

they currently have a feature that allows companies to offer Wren as a benefit for employees, but I’d love to see some event and conference organizers stepping up to use something like this to consciously offset the carbon emissions of speakers and participants flying in to a given city. when I set up my own subscription my #1 issue was all the flights I have had for work in the past year! both the art world and the tech industry put a lot of pressure on people to BE THERE for events, conferences, residencies, etc. in order to BE RELEVANT. we should talk a little more about how that impacts the environment!

if u wanna make something:

SparkFun makes an environmental combo breakout that can provide readings for humidity, temperature, barometric pressure, and eCO2. why not grab one and tinker with some local data collection and visualization? you can check out their learning guide here. Adafruit also offers a sensor for temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and VOC gas, as well as a pretty affordable eCO2/TVOC sensor.

and if you’re feeling like tinkering with DIY hardware has too small a scope, well, here’s an off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi taking photos of the Earth from orbit as inspiration.

and, for this year’s Digital U micro-commission, Art Gene welcomes applications from artists and creatives to exhibit projects that explore the collision of art and the environment in the digital age. you can learn more and apply here by September 30.

ok stay tuned for a regular post tomorrow! talk soon!