In Los Angeles on any given Friday, you could venture over to Farmlab’s Salon, tuck in a full-on organic lunch and listen to an amazing line-up of art/ecology innovators and activists. Last week I heard Wes Jackson of the Land Institute describe his 50-year plan to restore the depleated soils of America’s heartland.  Next Friday historian Robert Bichard presents over 100 images exploring the first movie studios in L.A. starting 100 years ago.

Farmlab, formerly Not a Corn Field, is the invention of artist/urbanist/philanthropist Lauren Bon.  It began as a multi-year project to restore a 35-acre industrial brownfield near downtown through the cultivation of corn- not only corn, but a social sculpture and nexus for community action and education.

Recently Bon has been working with a veteran’s hospital to create the Strawberry Flag project.

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Sue Coe has an exhibition at the Philadelphia Print Center, as part of the Philagrafika 2010 festival.  A short interview with her appears in the Philadelphia City Paper:

“It comes back to that theme of power and control, who has it, and who does not and why? I am wary of telling people what to think; I do not like being told what to think. All my work is my own inquiry and despair for the state of the world, and joy in the making of art, and sharing that work with people, and getting their comments.”

A new documentary, Coal Country, directed by Phyllis Geller and shot by Jordan Freeman, tells the story of how coal mining has permanently deformed the Appalachian landscape and society. Here’s the trailer.

The film focuses on the modern mining practice of Mountain Top Removal (MTR), which involves coal companies blasting off the tops mountains to reach the coal underneath. MTR is a cheap and convenient way of getting at the resource, but causes pollutants to spew into the air and spill into the water, poisoning miners and the general population. The film shows the civil strife between miners wary of losing their jobs and anti-mining activists, some of them former miners themselves, who want to preserve the environment and protect human health. The battle continues.

In debates about the developed world mitigating the effects of climate change, sometimes it is forgotten that the necessary dismantling of our carbon-intensive economy can’t happen simply with confident utterances, but rather in the excruciating uprooting of thousands lives and livelihoods. Science says that curbing the most disastrous consequences of climate change means the immediate cessation of carbon emissions. After seeing what’s happening in West Virginia, however, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Matt Yglesias on the blog thinkprogress.org wrote a post recently concerning a troubling trend in America’s meritocracy: it doesn’t work, at least not as well as in other countries. Except for the United Kingdom, the United States has the lowest level of intergenerational income increase, meaning that, more often than not, people stay put in their parents social class. His data come from a Center for American Progress study. Here’s an illustrative graph:

The data contrast family incomes between late 60s/early 70s and the late 1990s/early 2000s.  While it seems hard to dispute such a comprehensive statistical study, the good news is that there may be other factors at work, at least in a few of the countries above. In the late 1960s, Norway had yet to exploit its substantial oil resources. At the same time, Germany, riven by the Berlin Wall, was emerging from the process of recovering from World War II, as was France. In the later half of the 20th century, however, things got better for Scandinavian and Continental countries. The United Kingdom it seems, however, has less of an excuse. There, stubborn distinctions of class seem to be at work, a barrier to a rising post-war tide that lifted everybody’s boat a bit.

What is to be done, though, in America remains unclear. The U.K. has a far more comprehensive social safety net, as do Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. But since Congress seems incapable of drafting legislation that will help keep the U.S. labor force alive, at least, there’s probably little hope in any effort that seeks to increase social mobility through redistributing wealth, at least as far as political reality is concerned. And, besides, it doesn’t seem to do much for breaking down class in the U.K. Perhaps the answer is more funding for education and school loans. But then that might mean having a less luxurious welfare state for America’s hard working corporate persons. Still, somebody’s got to lose in order for everybody to win.

Berkeley, California.

Bicycle boulevards are lightly-trafficked streets that prioritize bicycles. Although many routes have no bike lanes, bicyclists are free to use the middle of the street, sharing road space with cars. Motorists on these routes expect to see bicyclists and therefore travel with caution. Designated streets should be distinguished with uniformly colored signs and bold pavement markings.

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[Text and graphic from Livable Streets Initiative website. Photo Credit: "Berkeley Bike Boulevards - Streetfilms."]

Chris Jordan has a disturbing new series of photographs of bird carcasses on Midway Island in the Pacific.

Blane De St. Croix:  “My recent body of work explores the geopolitical landscape through drawing and sculptural installation. I conduct extensive research on each project,–through site visits, photographic documentation, interviews, and satellite imagery. Employing a combination of natural and industrial materials, I am interested in articulating humankind’s desire to take command over the earth, revealing distinct conflicts with ecology, politics and ourselves in large-scale installations that utilize architectural space in a distinct, powerful and imposing manner.”

Black and White Project Space in Brooklyn, has unveiled De St. Croix’s massive new site-specific work, Mountain Strip, a monumental miniaturized landscape revealing the impact of strip mining for coal on  West Virginia’s Kayford Mountain.

Image: Etienne Frossard

This Saturday starting at 2:30, the National Gallery is hosting an afternoon with distinguished documentary filmmaker George C. Stoney, including screenings and a dialogue with Patricia Aufderheide, professor at American University’s Center for Social Media. Stoney is also known as the progenitor of community access television.

[FYA, celebrity and parody in the service of advocacy from the aptly dubbed "Funny or Die" site and MoveOn.org. Featuring Will Ferrell, Jon Hamm, Olivia Wilde, Thomas Lennon, Donald Faison, Linda Cardellini, Masi Oka, Ben Garant, Jordana Spiro, Lauren, Drew, and Chad Carter. Cross-posted to The Data Stream.]

Post Secret is an audience-driven interactive art project founded in 2003 by Washington, DC resident Frank Warren. The initial idea was simply to have strangers he approached around the city mail him postcards baring a secret. Since then, his simple request has generated four books (the fifth will be released this October), a blog and a touring exhibition that visits colleges and other major community centers around the country.

Last weekend, I was able to attend one of these events – which are typically a mixture of funny, touching, heart-wrenching and inspiring. What I found most interesting about the lecture Warren gave was not necessarily the types of secrets he has received over the years or even how unthinkably large the project has become – but rather how much it has meant to those who have sent in their secrets.

Warren, who has been called “the most trusted stranger in the world,”  recounts how his project has actually helped people who feel profoundly alone in the universe to feel a part of something. Post Secret, it seems, has likely saved the lives of many people who felt they had nowhere to turn. Evidence of this arrives in many different shapes – from an envelope containing a ripped up suicide note to cards that bear secrets about sexual abuse never confided in anyone, it is undoubtable that the project has made a difference in countless lives – not only of the senders, but of those people reading secrets on the blog or in one of the books and finding that, amazingly, someone else out there understands them.

Post Secret is, to me, a classic example of how one person’s idea can grow much larger than himself. Warren tapped into something necessary to many people. To desire to feel heard and understood, even if by a complete stranger, is apparently huge for all people, from here to Afghanistan (where Warren has actually received postcards from).  It is also an example of how art can touch people’s lives in inexplicable ways. In addition to Post Secret events, Warren has  organized Post Secret art shows over the years, which focus more on the visual aspect of the project. For these exhibits, the post cards are suspended between sheets of plexiglas so that viewers not only see the both sides of the cards, but the faces of viewers on the other side.

To search for a Post Secret event near you, visit the Facebook page, and be sure to check the blog weekly, as a new thematic postcard essay is posted every Sunday.