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A brief glimpse into the future:

http://www.gabeira.com.br/multimidia/fotos/1350-a-china-poluida-de-lu-guang

After being fed with plastic for a long time, they die of several different complications.

Photographer Chris Jordan has a series of pictures of dead albatrosses whose bellies revealed to be filled with pieces of plastic and other forms of human garbage.

…not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Spooky to say the least.

Let’s review, in case you are new to the GreenPunk site:

GreenPunk: a technophilic specific movement centered on characters using and being affected by the use of DIY renewable resources, recycling and repurposing. GreenPunk would emphasize the ability of the individual – and his or her responsibility – for positive ecological and social change.

First, let me tell you a short story. Last fall, bought a new DVD player that at my budget, felt like state of the art. A shiny black Toshiba that was going to max out the images and sounds onto my television for a long, long time.

The DVD player died last month; it didn’t even last longer than 9 months. It cost originally about 100 dollars. Getting an estimate and fixing it would actually cost probably double of what I paid. Unlike appliances from our parents’ generation, these new devices are essentially disposable. Now I have to find out who I or where I can donate my shiny black DVD player.

I bought a new player today. I tried to find the cheapest DVD player possible at Target. 40 bucks, this time a metallic grey, and it does all the stuff the old one did. Now, when it dies and my heart turns even more brittle than before, my pocketbook won’t feel so bad. But what about the materials and the parts of these devices? Are they useless? Why do we think it’s just okay to throw stuff out so easily?

Ah, the agonies of the developed world.

The point of my story is not to tout my techno-fetishes. It is this: As writers, GreenPunk writers, what are our responsibilities to make sure that the tools of our trade are also reusable and renewable? Should we work only online, avoiding printouts on paper and ink consumption? Should we seek used computers to type out our essays and short stories for this Web site? Should we promote writing software, tools and computers that comply with green and sustainable practices? I’d love to start a discussion in the comments below on these topics. Writing is no longer a process that comes from notebooks and typewriters and reams of bond paper. Well, that’s being too hyperbolic. Many of us, I included, still write on paper. But should we be thinking harder about not using paper? Should we use our technologies to not only write interesting words and stories, but to also push further the ideas of GreenPunk?

You. Tell. Me.

Cesar Torres is a Chicago writer. His blog “Urraca” chronicles his process and efforts in publishing. He writes fantasy, science fiction and other speculative fiction; He also blogs about bugs, birds and music.

Individually hand-crafted out of scrap wire, any child would be proud to own these miniature soldiers.

They’re far better than the green, vat-molded plastic pieces you get in the drug store.

See More here

Apparently, I fear plastic bags more than murder itself.

Last night I dreamed that I, along with two other university buddies, committed a murder. The three of us were older now, no longer kids, each of us entering middle age with fully adult lives, each of us on our own forking paths of life. They resembled no one I know in real life, and even I did not really resemble myself. Crap, I might have even been straight in the dream, but I can’t recall very well. Yet somehow, a drunken evening and a foolish prank in a seedy corner of the city caused us to suffocate a transient stranger at a bar. It reeks of Hitchcock’s “Rope,” I know, but bear with me. It wasn’t quite like that.

You see, the details of the dream were all wrong. The swampy mansions of this place were more New Orleans and less Dickensian London. There’s no wide stretches of marshes cutting through the streets of London. I know that, and you know that. The Irish newsagent, wearing modern 21st century clothes at the corner belonged in present Dublin and not here. They sold butane lighters, as well as Snickers candy bars. The streets were filled with carriages drawn by horses, as well as the first few models of Ford motor cars. I might have even spotted a cell phone out of the corner of my eye. And yet, I knew we were in Dickens’ era, because the serial versions of his novels, like “Oliver Twist,”  were widely available in the street and in the newspapers. We were in the 19th century, yet there were objects, people, and language out of time, Haunting my college friends and their poor choices in the back of a urine-stained bar.

Objects out of time were haunting me.

After we committed the murder, my two college buddies and I escaped with the body into a rougher part of town, dodging curious glances, and we hid in buildings, sought shelter in gas-lit alleys. We eventually ducked into buildings that oddly resembled a Chicago Greystone (again, completely out of place in the world of Dickens). My two friends did not fare well. You see, at some point, the police caught up with them, and they were arrested.  I escaped with the body, which I stuffed into a black plastic bag. I knew that I had the upper hand, because a burlap or linen sack would smell, would stain, would lead the authorities to find me. But a plastic bag, well, we all know nothing quite escapes the man-made membrane of a plastic bag. I was the cleverest murderer.

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Fog in the trees by Jeremiah Tolbert

We are a collective of writers, artists, tinkerers and thinkers devoted to the exploration of an environmentally and socially conscious art movement that we have christened GreenPunk. You may read the original GreenPunk Manifesto here.

The purpose of this website is to: further define and delineate the boundaries of this emergent genre;  promote awareness and discussion of emergent environmental and social problems; and to create a centralized location for the dissemenation of education, art and fiction related to the same.

In accordance with our manifesto, we recognize GreenPunk as the following:

(A) A technophilic spec-fic movement centered on characters using and being affected by the use of DIY renewable resources, recycling and repurposing.

(B) Emphasizing the ability of the individual – and his or her responsibility – for positive ecological and social change.

(C) Envisions a world in which the detritus of consumer culture as propogated by the Elite is appropriated and repurposed by the masses toward the reconstruction of a devastated ecology and the address of social ills.

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