stay grounded: protest paper airplanes!
this valentine’s day origami is all the rage. folded paper hearts with whimsical poetry seem the “thing” for expressing your love & devotion. but i think the brits over at do the green thing, get it perfectly right with their simple Stay Grounded paper airplane project. no intensely convoluted manipulations of paper to show how you really feel. just simple folds resulting in the always favorite paper airplane.
so what are they confessing?
their love of green, of course! this month, which is the heaviest flight-booking month of the year, they are asking us to Stay Grounded & avoid booking or taking a flight if you can. to do this, they’ve launched a collection of Protest Paper Planes in London created by talented famous people & talented normal people alike. each paper plane will be a folded up sheet of A4 artwork with a brilliant piece of anti-flying or pro-flying alternative artwork on it.
i love sweet protests like this. it sends a bright message to the industry that change is needed. it’s not enough to simply buy carbon offsets for your flights–for one, it is impossible to exactly calculate the waste. a trip from NYC to LA was recently clocked in at anywhere between 1,924 to 6,732 pounds of carbon being created. hmmm. i’ll go with answer number one?
however, while i like the idea of restraint in our flight patterns, the aviation industry is also hurting from the economic crisis. i don’t know if thumbing our noses up at them entirely is a great answer either. rethinking the industry seems a better way to go. companies like virgin & continental (who just flew the first sustainable biofuel demo flight a couple of weeks ago) deserve our respect for working towards change. because while loved in theory, we will not stay grounded for long. air travel is going to continue–it’s the path that it continues on that needs greening.
you’re too late to submit artwork now, but you can still get on over to the corner of endell street & betterton street in covent garden–beneath the balcony of london’s hospital club–and see the one-of-a-kind paper airplanes from james franco, emma thompson, gus van sant & others.
