After doing their job absorbing leaked oil, dirty oil booms typically go to the their graves in the landfill, where they languish for eternity. But, as GreenTech Media reports, that doesn't have to be the case. In a triumphant PR move, General Motors has found a way to intervene in the cycle, by making use of oil booms from the Gulf for passive car parts like air dams and water deflectors.......read more
Tom Zeller for The Huffington Post: Public opinion on the topic of climate change is notoriously fickle, changing -- quite literally sometimes -- with the weather. The latest bit of evidence on this: Yale's April 2013 climate change survey, which found, among other things, that Americans' conviction that global warming is happening had dropped by seven points, to 63 percent, over the preceding......read more
We've featured plenty of amazing aerial photography 'round these parts, but New Zealand's John Crawford takes sky-shooting to a whole other dimension. In his Aerial Nudes series, Crawford creates a unique mash-up between aerial landscapes and nude photography, as he takes to the air to capture a lone naked female form lying in various environments. The results are amusing and visually......read more
If you happened to be walking through the Scarpe-Escaut forest in northern France lately, you'd be forgiven for running away terrified when you came across 'La Chasse' (The Hunt), a Blair Witch-esque installation by Seattle artist John Grade. The wood-and-string sculpture cuts an eerie figure, like an architectural skeleton in the natural environment of the......read more
The locavore/organic food movement is alive and well in Austin, TX, and Johnson's Backyard Garden is right in the middle of it. Located in East Austin, the Johnson garden has been producing organic veggies since 2004. Today, the city farm stays active supplying local eateries, selling at local farmers' markets, and packing CSA boxes for hungry locals with an interest in fresh, local, organic......read more
SELBY, U.K. – The heavy power lines and narrow roads between the steam-billowing towers of three of England’s biggest power plants traverse an energy industry in upheaval. Shuttered coal mines are flanked by emerald pastures. Towering wind turbines and solar arrays have taken root in windblown cereal fields. In the middle of the transition is the Drax Power Station — Western......read more
Photographer Eirik Johnson spent three years traveling around Washington, Oregon, and Northern California, focusing on the region’s tenuous relationship between natural resource industries--particularly logging and fishing--and the communities that rely upon them. The resulting images are gathered in Sawdust Mountain, a photographic exploration of a Pacific Northwest that reveals a......read more
Sixty years ago, there were 600 wildfire lookout posts in Washington state. Employed by the US Forest Service, Lookout Rangers worked summer jobs manning the posts and acting as lifelines for the forest. Among them was Jack Kerouac. Today, the number of lookout posts in the state has dwindled to 92. On a commission from Filson, 29-year-old photographer Kyle Johnson traveled around the state to......read more
Our mate Jay Mark Johnson, whose work hung on the walls of the first SHFT pop-up shop, uses an $85,000 slit camera to create these abstracted images that emphasize time over space. It's a complicated process, as Slate's Judith Herman explains: This unique look is possible because the fixed-position slit camera registers only a vertical sliver of a scene. Whatever passes that slit by......read more
There are a few places on Earth that feel decidedly unearthly, and caves happen to be one of them. Australian-born photographer John Spies, who has been living in northern Thailand for thirty years, spends plenty of time underground exploring caves in his adopted homeland. As a cave explorer, photographer and guide, Spies has visited 85 caves, discovered incredible formations, documented......read more