I was one of many folks who toured the country in a veggie-fueled bus several years ago, when biodiesel was becoming more well-known. The concept of a fuel made from a waste product was so exciting that it produced Straight Vegetable Oil caravans that traveled the country, celebrating the new green fuel and the art of living sustainably. Times have changed a bit.

The issue of green living has become much more complex. How sustainable is a fuel if rainforest was cleared to plant its feedstock? How sustainable is an organic orange if it traveled 3,000 miles to get to you? I’m about to go on the road again, this time with a group seeking to address these issues: the Sustainable Living Roadshow. It’s an eco-carnival, a roadworthy green festival, a grown-up veggie caravan. The launch party is today, and it’s partnered with another great local-living organization: Victory Gardens 2008.

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This Fall the Miss Rockaway Armada will be born again as the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea. It’s the same fun idea: recycled rafts and boats floating down a river, touting all things sustainable and art-fueled, but this time the fleet is powered by alternative energy sources like biodiesel, solar and steam.

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Polar bears, polar bears. Those ubiquitous symbols of climate change. Cute and cuddly, ethereal and majestic, they’re popping up everywhere - including atop subway grates on the streets of New York City. Artist Joshua Allen Harris has created quite an online buzz with his puppy-like inflatable plastic bag polar bear: it inflates and deflates with the passing of subterranean subway trains, springing to life and then fading away in a vital commentary on global warming. We’ve covered inspired plastic bag art in the past, but never with such an animated aesthetic.

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ARTinACTION is an artist-in-residence program for post-Katrina Louisiana that effectively uses art as a creative, rehabilitative tool. Invited artists are encouraged work on-site and with local communities that are still struggling to recover from the ravages of the hurricane’s devastation. Says Director Elizabeth Underwood, “The ARTinACTION context creates a very real ‘aesthetic eco-system’ in partnership with the land and community of each site.” Today (July 26) is the unveiling of ARTinACTION’s most recent installation, Field Guide, by artist Jacqueline Bishop. We wanted to give you a closer look at just one example of how this part of Louisiana is imaginatively rebuilding itself.

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This summer PS1 Contemporary Art Center, an arm of MOMA, celebrates the 10th year of Warm Up, its annual summer music series, in New York. This year folks who go to catch the DJs and live music will have the opportunity to also visit a farmers market, dip their feet in a cool pool, and generally chill in the shade of Public Farm 1, by Work Architecture Company. It’s a series of recyclable cardboard tubes that grows rainwater-irrigated veggies while providing solar-powered cell-phone charging and community playspace. Whew!

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The concept of a seed bomb - a mobile medium for seeds - is not new. They were used in 1973 by the Green Guerillas in New York. Artist Kathryn Miller is famous for using them in a 1992 work. More recently, earthen seed bombs have shown up on the art scene in all sorts of forms, including handguns. The bombs themselves are usually little sculptures of clay, compost and seeds. But this work of the Dutch Studio TX takes the concept to a whole ‘nother level - with biodegradable seed balloons!

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We’ve seen lamps made from many different types of recycled materials, including plastic bottles, and the result are often fabulous. One of the greatest things about green design is that everything shiny, snappy, translucent, funky or everyday works great for repurposing into a lamp. There’s something especially stunning about the light creatures created by Lisa Foo and Su Sim. This pair of designers sat down with a pile of plastic mineral water bottles and came up with a collection of etheral light creations where the plastic bottles become unrecognizable as fluid, organic, blossoming forms.

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It’s officially summertime, and that means that the sustainability music/event smorgasboard CitySol is in full gear this weekend in NYC’s Stuyvesant Cove Park! Intended as a creative, multi-disciplinary coming-together of alternative ideas, as well as an educational outlet for sustainability solutions, CitySol features workshops, panel discussions, live concerts, and comedians listed alongside green art installations. Of the three panels to be conducted this weekend, two focus on sustainable design and the future of NYC: “From Temporary to Permanent: Sustainable Design for Solar One” and “Interactivism: A Conversation about the Practical Intersections of Design” on Sunday, June 29, which will break down the morphing combination of grassroots advocacy and interactive design.

If you are in town this weekend, do not miss the dynamic line-up and the opportunity to immerse yourself in some CitySol eco love!

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Golf courses are notorious for water consumption, pesticide use, and unforgivable outfits. There is a modern movement to correct or minimize some of these wrongs - the Audubon Society names some 2,300 golf courses in its Cooperative Sanctuary Program, and many modern courses have integrated IPM and native plants. The vast majority, however, remain a green carpeted water suck. This aspect was not overlooked by artists participating in Walker on the Green. An artist-designed mini-golf course, this project takes eco to the greens at the Walker Art Center’s Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

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Who doesn’t love a nice water installation? The bubbling and gurgling of things like fountains has an undeniably relaxing effect - and yet, there’s the nagging guilt that comes from running a pump for the sheer purpose of recirculating water. How much power does it draw? What’s the carbon footprint of your meditative state? What has that water feature done for you, aside from making that ridiculous noise? No so relaxing anymore. Fortunately, artists Amy Youngs and Ken Rinaldo have devised a way to create guilt-free water pleasantries while producing food and providing oxygen. The Farm Fountain, which uses aquaponics to fertilize plants with the waste produced by fish, is a bubbly oasis of greenery and aquaculture.

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The former soviet states are littered with half-finished buildings and projects cut short by the collapse of the Soviet Union. High schools, factories, apartment complexes: some of the buildings stand abandoned for years, stripped of their valuables and left bare to the elements. In some scenarios, they at least become playgrounds for explorers and artists. But occasionally, a lucky building will be reborn as a center for culture. In Latvia there are several examples of this: Karosta, an abandoned naval port which now includes a movie hall and artist training ground, The Dream Factory, which is well known as an alternative performance and party space, and most recently, a proposal for the new Contemporary Art Museum of Latvia.

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There is currently a totally fun exhibit on view up at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) put together by “a small group of people with extensive experience making big, insane projects.” The insane project in question is the Miss Rockaway Armada, a collection of recycled junk-rafts that spent two summers traveling along the Mississippi River in the spirit of an itinerant circus or a traveling medicine show. The cure-all and genuine good-health elixir of this project was sustainability, a theme the troupe has transferred onto dry land in an interactive exhibit featuring this experimental, floating eco-voyage.

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With all the exploration of recycled materials in green design these days, the work of artist Chris Gilmour seems like a logical and amusing next step in terms of upcycling and eco-friendly art processes. Gilmour, an English artist based in Italy, re-creates objects and machines from our everyday lives using only packing cardboard and glue. Industrial cardboard is typically used only once for shipping materials and then wastefully discarded. Often adorned with logos and other graphics, the remnants of the material’s former use is an aspect that Gilmour wryly incorporates into his sculptural work, with an ironic wink to the viewer.

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Imagine if R2D2 didn’t project images of Princess Leia, but rather an assessment of local superfund sites. Objectively, it’s nothing like the very adorable R2D2, but the Environmental Risk Assessment Rover (ERAR) by EcoArtTech is proving to be a very useful and devoted robot friend. Solar powered and GPS-oriented, the ERAR analyzes data from its surroundings, including air quality, local traffic accidents, and current terrorist warning levels. The rover breaks its findings down into fourteen unique (and pretty funny) categories, everything from “Plastic Bags” to “Regis and Kelly”, and projects them onto nearby natural surfaces. Just like the Princess Leia projection, right? Okay, not really, nor with the cute little meeps and whistles, but this thought-provoking rover sends a more urgent and critical message.

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It would be logical to think that buying organic soy milk is to buy non-GMO soy milk. The guidelines for keeping weird science, in this instance genetically modified organisms, out of your body would seem intuitively straightforward. Yet with current product packaging there is no label for “Now with extra GMOs!” Given that the grains even look the same, how might one critically go about addressing the genetically modified food onslaught? Critical Art Ensemble says to ‘de-modify’. With eco-art as a tactical weapon, the collaborative five-artist ensemble addresses issues of rampant biotechnology using everything from live performances, to installation art, to controversial counter science.

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Tinkerer Phil Ross is a one-man laboratory for geeky eco-art experiments. His illuminated hydroponic sculpture, ‘cultured’ living organisms, and clever splicing of ancient and future technologies aim to make controlled environments and gadgets a bit less daunting. Part quirky and part eerily familiar, Ross’s bio-tech works examine ‘the idea of nature’ within an identifiable social or historical context. His are the home-brewed science projects that you just cannot take your eyes off. ‘Nurture vs. nature’ is part of the underlying tension that seems to populate both his world and ours.

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