Santa Goes Green: Games, Books & Magazines

We've found some fun stuff to amuse you over the holidays. Enjoy!

Magazine 

Biographic, an online photography magazine, shares images and stories of some amazing species from around the world. There’s a female flying fox who carries her nursing pup under her wings as she moves from foraging grounds to roost, a sinuous comb jelly that resembles an underwater strip of the Northern Lights, and a video of the sacred salamanders of Mexico City. 

Books 

Based on the popular webcomic, Bird and Moon, Birding is my Favorite Video Game by Rosemary Mosco “is a collection of fun, quasi-educational comics combining weird science, cute visuals, sweet wit, and a strong environmental message.” 

Looking for more environmental cartoons? Check out Green Humour by Rohan Chakravarty. 

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson is an anthology of women’s art, poetry, and prose on climate change. “My heart is moved by all I cannot save: So much has been destroyed/I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely/with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” (Adrienne Rich) 

Kids’ Books for All to Enjoy 

Wild Symphony by Dan Brown takes you on a world tour to meet a wide variety of creatures. As you can expect from this author, there are clues and coded messages. Plus you can play related songs by hovering your smart phone’s camera over each page. 

Get your kids hooked on astronomy when they’re still toddlers with the Animals in the Sky board book by Sara Gillingham. (The 10 Best Children's Books of 2020, Smithsonian Magazine)

Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book of Animals explains how to use a few simple shapes, letters, numbers, and symbols to draw almost any animal. 

Games 

Create your own nature reserve, follow monarch butterflies on their migration, try your hand at evolution with these natural history board games. 

You can also rethink orthodox economic theories with a tactical card game. 

 

You can follow EcoFriendly Sask by liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter, or by email (top right corner). 

Did you know? Birds and other predators know that Monarchs taste horrible and stay away.

New Year's Eve Special 2019

Greetings! We’ve got apps, comic strips, Instagram accounts, graphic novels, and even a game to help you welcome in a green new year.

A new generation of naturalists & environmental activists:
BirdGirl is a 17-year-old birder and environmentalist who wants to remove the barriers from visual minority ethnic (VME) people getting into nature.

Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles 15-year-old Dara McAnulty’s world in Northern Ireland.

@glacier996girl introduces climate change to a younger audience.

Next Generation Naturalists is a Kamloops group for 17-22 year olds, facilitated by the Kamloops Naturalist Club.

Comic strips, graphic novels, games, & Instagram:
Consider the vulture: a comic strip that gently reminds us that we will all return to the earth someday.

Follow the story of two ecologists studying quail in the Sierra Nevada in a short art game.

@colinfranksphotography takes photos of birds in Victoria, BC.

@everydayclimatechange, photographers on six continents, document climate change.

Rain, a graphic novel by Mary and Bryan Talbot, is both a love story and a flood story: “ a desperate appeal on behalf of our land, our lives and the lives of our “non-human fellow earthlings.”

There’s an app for that:
Eevie is an eco habit tracker, designed to help you improve your carbon impact by making small changes every day.

Lens is designed to help us explore our surroundings - from identifying plants and animals to scanning and translating text or seeing what’s popular on menus.

They may be shy and retiring, but they still leave tracks in the snow. Find out their identity with iTrack Wildlife.

Help identify plants as part of a citizen science project with Pl@ntNet.

“The only lost cause is the one we give up on before we enter the struggle.” – Vaclav Havel

You can follow EcoFriendly Sask by liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter, or by email (top right corner). A full list of upcoming events can be found on the EcoFriendly Sask Calendar

The Art of Protest

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” – Degas

A flock of origami birds, created by concerned citizens from across Europe, successfully stopped Spain’s plans to dredge a river in Doñana National Park.

Photo Credit: #OrigamiMigration campaign 2016

A fish sculpture named Goby is keeping a local beach clean as people fill it over and over again with garbage. Around the world, people are creating works of art, “transforming hearts and minds as well as changing policies, cultures or behaviours.”

Photo credit: http://yupthatexists.com/goby-plastic-beach-fish/

Gerald Beaulieu’s crow sculptures weigh 386 kilograms and are 5 metres long. Made out of used tires, they are “public memorials to the dead . . . . Larger than life and made of the material that often kills them, they are impossible to ignore.” Crows are scavengers attracted to roadkill. And yet, in the process of cleaning up our roads, they themselves are often killed.

Bringing attention to the wildlife that is killed every day on our roads isn’t an easy task. “Beaulieu expresses this complicated subject in the most impactful and palatable way. By using pieces of vehicles to create the works - the tires themselves - he deftly turns road-killed crows into impossible-to-ignore visible reminders. They die on the road because of us.”

Photo credit: Imgur Photos

Nicole Marie Burton “believes that comics, because they are relatively inexpensive to produce, are a great medium to amplify marginalized voices.” She recently illustrated her first graphic novel about two young people who find work in the Canadian oil industry.

Photo credit: https://thedigitalpress.org/thebeast/

Carla Scotto shares her “eco-sassy art” on Instagram. There are lots of images reminding people to reduce their plastics as well as one reminding people not to feed the ducks: “Did you know it’s ducked to feed ducks bread? Not only does it cause malnutrition but mouldy leftovers hurt local water quality opt for seeds, frozen peas, oats, corn, greens - or nothing at all so they learn to forage for themselves.”

Photo credit: https://www.instagram.com/carladrawz/

In his Unhappily Ever After project, Jeff Hong shocks us by inserting Disney characters into modern-day reality –the Lion King lies dead on the African plain, while Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood has been clearcut.

Photo credit: http://disneyunhappilyeverafter.tumblr.com

The sculptures in Mathilde Roussel’s Lives of Grass, which are “made of soil and wheat grass seeds strive to show that food, it’s origin, it’s transport, has an impact on us beyond it’s taste. The power inside it affects every organ of our body. Observing nature and being aware of what and how we eat might make us more sensitive to food cycles in the world – of abundance, of famine – and allows us to be physically, intellectually and spiritually connected to a global reality.”

Photo credit: https://anti-utopias.com/art/mathilde-roussel-lives-of-grass/

“Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.” – Albert Einstein 

See Also:
Our Favourite Climate Conscious Artists 
10 Eco Friendly Artists who will Blow Your Mind