Participants at the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital will learn how to build a carbon-neutral house today with filmmakers Jason Scadron and Liv Violette and builder Mark Turner. Premiering at the festival is "The Green House," a documentary that chronicles the building of the first carbon-neutral house and the designing of the first green show house in the Washington, D.C., area. The building of the house in McLean, Virginia, was captured from start to finish and the film imparts the engineering and technology that drives the house and the principles and methods of designing eco-friendly spaces. Other films showing today are Ana Sofia Joanes' "Fresh," exploring America's new sustainable food culture, and Eskil Hardt's "One Degree Matters," about the effects of climate change on society and the economy. The festival runs through March 28 at E Street Cinema. [LINK]

This spring, Auburn University continues its annual interdisciplinary series, Art in Agriculture, which brings together artists, designers and scientists to examine a topic related to agriculture, food, the environment or natural resources. This semester’s series is titled, “Reclaiming Ground,” and includes two exhibitions, several workshops for kids and seven lectures. One exhibition combines agriculture and architecture, called “Agritecture,” and another features sustainable designs by students in the Landscape Architecture Program, Design Program and Art Department. The lectures investigate questions such as: What is the role of the artist and designer in society at large? Can ordinary citizens make a difference in their local ecologies? How can a university encourage its students to become involved in their community? Art in Agriculture is jointly hosted by AU’s College of Agriculture, College of Liberal Arts and Department of Art. [LINK]

The Beehive Collective's latest project is "The True Cost of Coal," a graphics campaign that details the ecological effects of the coal industry and mountaintop removal. The Hive is on the road with this project and will be at Boston College today, March 11, 2010, as guests of ALC Political Action, the Arts and Responsibility Project and the Global Justice Project. In 2008, the Hive allied with Appalachian grassroots organizers fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining, a practice that "blasts mountains into moonscapes to fuel the ever-growing global demand for electricity." Working with Appalachian collaborators, they've designed a "visually-stunning multi-tool for activists and ordinary folks ... a graphic that honors history, respects complexity, shows everyone's place in the big picture, and inspires real solutions." They'll show it at 7 p.m. tonight in Higgins 300. Visit the Hive site for details and tour stops. [LINK]

Landscape artist Mary Miss is keynote speaker at the second annual symposium by iLand (interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance) in New York City. The March 26-27, 2010, symposium is titled "Connecting to the Urban Environment: Creating embodied and relational approaches to environmental awareness." Mary Miss developed "City as Living Lab," a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts. Miss has collaborated with architects, planners, engineers, ecologists and public administrators on projects like creating a temporary memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, revealing the history of New York's Union Square Subway station and turning a sewage treatment plant into a public space. The event also features iLand Founder Jennifer Monson, choreographer, who will present her recent work on aquifers and waterways in relation to urban development. [LINK]

The National Center for Creative Aging is expanding its frontier to the garden with "Creativity Matters: Civic Engagement and Gardening Symposium," April 12-14, 2010, in Washington, D.C. Events begin with "Generating Community: How Does Our Garden Grow? Intergenerational Program Development," a training by Susan Perlstein, founder of NCCA and Elders Share the Arts, at IONA Senior Services, recently named a “Center for Excellence in Dementia Care” by the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. Day 2 is a full-day workshop at the United States Botanic Gardens, located at the foot of the U.S. Capitol, with keynotes and breakout sessions with garden experts. Day 3 focuses on civic engagement and community involvement as participants visit and work at the Common Good City Farm and other D.C. gardens. It's all sponsored by the MetLife Foundation. [LINK]

"Planetary Breakdown" is an upcoming symposium by The Arts Catalyst investigating artistic strategies for sustainablity and survivability following impending climate change. Set for March 10, 2010, at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, the symposium will explore "the possibility of creating new autonomous infrastructures across energy, trade and transport, offering a space for everyone to contribute to an active dialogue about our futures." Speakers include writer on utopian futures Malcolm Miles and international artists Lise Autogena, HeHe, Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson, Kate Rich, Ashok Sukumaran and Shaina Anand. The symposium, produced in partnership with Intersections (Newcastle University) and AV Festival 10, is preceded by an invitational discussion on autonomous infrastructures that looks at models created by artists and communities of people operating semi-autonomously in society in intentional and utopian communities. [LINK]

The Laurier Centre for Music in the Community calls for presentation proposals for "Arts for Social and Environmental Justice," a symposium at Toronto's Royal Conservatory, May 15, 2010. The one-day symposium features as keynote speakers arts-integration educator Rena Upitis; Stephen K. Levine, dean of the doctoral program in Expressive Arts: Therapy, Education, Consulting and Social Change at the European Graduate School; and cultural critic Max Wyman. The conference invites submissions dealing with the symposium themes in the form of research papers, interactive workshops and narrative papers describing practices in the educational or arts community. Deadline is February 15. The symposium is co-hosted by ISIS-Canada and the European Graduate School. [LINK]

Richland College will celebrate the opening of its platinum certified LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) science building with community engagement and art. Dean of Instruction and Professor of History and Humanities Carole Lester says, “Although it’s a science building, community engagement and the arts will be front and center. Artists were engaged in the design of the building, so that the building itself is a work of art. There are permanent large-scale artistic installations, including a DNA model, a 12-foot-tall pendulum and a running mural along the first floor depicting artists’ interpretations of all of the sciences.” The two-day celebration, beginning January 28, 2010, will include a dedication ceremony, a symposium on "Art, Science and Sustainable Community" featuring local artists and community activists and a regional juried art exhibition, "WATER: More or Less." [LINK]

Artists from all countries are invited to send a proposal for a site-specific outdoor public art installation that will involve working with local elementary school children in Taiwan. Deadline for the 19-day residency in rural Yunlin County is February 12, 2010, for proposals to create an artwork focusing on making a greener world and celebrating the importance of wetlands in Earth's environment. The Cheng Long Wetlands is a developing wetlands preserve and environmental education project in an economically depressed area of the southwestern coast of Taiwan. The Cheng Long Elementary School has about 75 children in grades K-6 (ages 5-12) who will join with the artists in this project. [LINK]

The social/political obligations of cultural organizations to their respective communities will be examined in "Love in a Cemetery," a participatory project opening soon in L.A. Inspired by an Allan Kaprow quote -- "life in a museum is like making love in a cemetery,” metaphorically equating a museum with a dead and sterile space -- curator Robert Sain has framed a series of questions designed to open a public dialogue about L.A.'s cultural organizations and their approach to civic life. Sain will set up visual presences in the main gallery at Santa Monica's 18th Street Artss Center beginning January 23, 2010, to create a community-wide dialogue about the role, function and fundamental purpose of L.A.’s arts organizations. Part of "Status Report: the Creative Economy," 18th Street's theme for 2010, a marked shift in its working model from conventional gallery to artist laboratory. [LINK]

Oakland's Art in Action will launch its Green Youth Art & Media Center in Oakland, Calif., on January 14, 2010. The solar-powered center, at 2781 Telegraph and 28th St., offers entrepreneurial, vocational and green-job readiness training for Oakland youth between the ages of 18 and 25. Center activities include leadership development, new media, arts training, music production, community organizing skills and green-job education, plus a business that sells and contracts merchandise produced by program participants. The Center’s Youth Green Team remodeled the 3,000-square-foot site, putting in recycled fiber carpeting, a mini-garden, a Kijiji Grows aquaponics system, four state-of-the-art recording studios, a computer lab and an eco-dance floor made of bamboo. The Grand Opening, starting at 3 p.m., features a Youth Arts Festival with freestyle rap and dancing and live painting, followed by arts performances and a ribbon-cutting. [LINK]

Manhattan-based Stolen Chair Theatre Company recently launched its artistic season based on the economic business model of community-supported agriculture (CSA). In CSA, farmers sell memberships (or “shares”) to individuals who then receive a weekly portion of crops throughout the growing season. In Stolen Chair’s community-supported theater (CST), theater-goers invest “seed” money to reap a season’s worth of “creative harvests.” Jon Stancato, co-artistic director, said, “What really struck us were all the ways in which the farms try to let consumers gain insight into their process.” From November 2009 through July 2010, CST members will engage in Stolen Chair’s ensemble-based theatrical process to create a new play, “Quantum Poetics: A Science Experiment for the Stage.” CST is supported by The Field's Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists. Visit Stolen Chair’s web site to purchase a CST share! [LINK]

The Wormfarm Institute in Reedsburg, Wisc., is calling for submissions to its Roadside Culture Stand project; deadline is December 31, 2009. Roadside Culture Stands (urban/rural) are artist-designed and -built mobile farm stands that will be used to display and sell fresh local produce and the work of local artists. "The Roadside Culture Stand," says Wormfarm Project Director Donna Neuwirth, "tangibly unites art and farming – reminding us that culture surrounds our food and food imbues our culture. This project is open to artists, architects, mechanics, farmers, visionaries and handy folk throughout the upper Midwest." Each stand will be built on a 5x10-foot steel flatbed trailer, will incorporate an informational display component that highlights area food and cultural offerings and will have a home base but may also travel to local festivals, county fairs etc. Winning entries get $3500 for fabrication. [LINK]

CAN has added to its Places To Study database a BFA/MFA program in a new signature discipline at the University of New Mexico: Art and Ecology. Building from Bill Gilbert's successful Land Arts of the American West program, Art & Ecology is an umbrella that includes undergraduate and graduate curriculum offering students an understanding of and participation in representation, land use, ecology and classic land art in the U.S. Southwest in preparation for careers in not only public art, fine art and education, but also in activism and land-use interpretation. The curriculum engages ecological scholars, artists and activists within and outside of academia. A&E also umbrellas Robin Ward's psychogeography studio, "Re-Wilderness Studio," and Michael Cook's field-intensive "Nature and Technology" course, which takes place in residence at the Young Ranch in collaboration with the Department of Anthropology. [LINK]

Iowa Poet Laureate Mary Swander’s poetry classes at Iowa State University are collaborating on "More Than Words," an "accessible" poetry and art event, December 1, 2009. Swander's classes and the Iowa Department for the Blind partnered to create “tactile poetry," says Riki Saltzman, Iowa ARTS Council accessibility coordinator, in Iowa Arts News (11/09). It's a new, nonvisual way “to enjoy poetry that is more accessible to the blind. They are recording poems that they’ve infused with music and sound, and some are creating tactile pieces of art to go with the poetry.” They'll present it at the Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, December 1, and exhibit it at ISU in spring. Last year, Swander's students authored "Farmscape: Documenting the Changing Rural Environment," a play based on interviews with Iowa farmers. It spawned Agarts, a campus group that formally explores agriculture and the arts. [LINK]

Five media artists are on Midway Atoll near the apex of the North Pacific Gyre, a huge circular current in which vast quantities of floating plastic trash are trapped. Artists Chris Jordan, Bill Weaver, Jan Vozenilek, Victoria Sloan Jordan and Manuel Maqueda are exploring the beaches, shooting photographs and video, writing poetry, and trying to respond to what they find, says Brooke Jarvis in YES! Magazine (9/16/09). The island of trash is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area twice the size of Texas where tiny bits of plastic outweigh zooplankton seven to one. They've found thousands of bird skeletons with piles of plastic where their stomachs had been. In some cases, the skeleton had entirely biodegraded; the plastic remained, unchanged. The YES! article is linked to the project's Web site. See video on CANtv. [LINK]

People and animals at the bank of the Hudson River on the upper west side of Manhattan will gather with artist Aviva Rahmani as part of "350," the largest global day of climate action ever. On October 24, 2009, Rahmani will alternately walk to the water and sing Puccini's aria "Vissi d'arte," a capella, a song "about beauty and betrayal," and stop at the shore to draw pictures of the waters, reflecting on "how they are rising in some places under the assault of global warming while in other places, fresh clean water is vanishing." Simultaneously, people worldwide will be taking up to 4,000 similar actions, from climbers with 350 banners high on the melting slopes of Mount Everest to government officials in the Maldive Islands holding an underwater cabinet meeting to demand action on climate change before their nation disappears. [LINK]

A werewolf will prowl at dawn and dusk in the abandoned City Park of New Orleans as residents gather for "Loup Garou," "part performance, part ritual, part howl to the world about southeast Louisiana’s plight." The artists of Mondo Bizarro and ArtSpot Productions will present the outdoor performance Thursdays-Sundays, October 8-25, 2009, including post-show discussions about coastal land loss with experts from the Gulf Restoration Network. The artists say a "loup garou" is a "wild and dangerous entity (some say a werewolf) well anchored in the folk traditions of southern Louisiana," going back to France and Acadia. The event is "environmental performance that uses rigorous physicality, poetry, music and visual installation to investigate the deep interconnectedness between land and culture in Louisiana." Thursday performances begin at sunrise and weekend performances end at sunset; free gumbo on Fridays. [LINK]

A Piipaash song cycle and dance recently filled the Arizona State University Art Museum's Ceramics Research Center during an intervention by Postcommodity, an interdisciplinary indigenous artists' collective. Postcommodity's installation, "Do You Remember When," is part of the museum's exhibition "Defining Sustainability," August 28-November 28. The artists cut a square hole in the gallery floor, exposing the earth beneath the institution, and displaying the block of removed concrete, standing upright, on a pedestal. It's "a spiritual, cultural and physical portal," say the artists, contradicting the rigid Western scientific world view of our environment. Postcommodity's Kade Twist (Cherokee) makes it clear that the piece was a collaboration with the museum - not the university. The show parallels ASU's October global sustainability conference. "Sustainability has become an academic gold rush; it's been turned into a commodity," Twist told the Phoenix New Times (8/30/09). "The university is having this discourse without including any indigenous people in it." [LINK]

Patricia Johnson will discuss her collaborative Petaluma Wetlands Park project at the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment LAB (Reno) in November. The talk, November 13, 2009, is part of "Art and Infrastructure," an exhibition of her drawings and designs on display in the museum's CA+E LAB, September 19, 2009 - January 10, 2010. Using constructed and natural wetlands Johanson created a multipurpose public landscape in Petaluma, Calif., providing three miles of recreational use, educational programs and nature study alongside a facility that processes human sewage, while also generating crops and creating wildlife habitats. "One of my missions as a designer is to create inclusive, life-supporting landscapes that broaden human understanding," says Johanson on her Web site http://www.patriciajohanson.com. "Artists have always changed the way we see. Now we need to change the way we act." [LINK]

"Mapping the Desert/Deserting the Map" is "an arts-centered investigation" of California's deserts by UC Riverside's Sweeney Art Gallery, October 22-25, 2009. The project also investigates "the new, not-so-new and downright ancient technologies that make such mapping possible." The four-day gathering, along with a year-long series of events focused on California’s deserts, is partially funded by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts in association with its new Social Ecologies: California-centric embedded arts research program. The "Dry-immersion Roving Symposium" exploring "widespread concern over environmental, economic and cultural sustainability is fast pushing the desert from the margins to the center of attention in debates on the future of our planet" includes tours of the 29 Palms Marine Base and the lower Colorado desert oasis/dune systems and lectures and discussion on desert issues. [LINK]

Artists and scientists will explore “Moving Perspectives – approaches to understanding water through geology, environment, art and society” at the Urbana Free Library in Illinois, October 13, 2009. The panel discussion includes George Roadcap, Illinois Water Survey; Cecily Smith, Prairie Rivers Network; Brett Bloom, artist and activist; Brigit Kelly, poet; choreographer Jennifer Monson; and moderator Michael Scoville, an environmental philosopher. The talk is part of Monson's Mahomet Aquifer Project, a series of public dance performances, workshops and a mobile gallery, October 10-18, to inform and engage the communities in East Central Illinois dependent on the aquifer and draw the audience into their own understanding of their relationship to water. Monson intends the iLAND project to “draw connections between our scientific and political relationships to natural resources and the cultural frameworks that shape our perception and relationship to these resources.” [LINK]

New in CAN's Places To Study database is "Art and Environment," a course taught by Erika Osborne at West Virginia University in Fall 2009. The multidisciplinary graduate and upper-division undergraduate studio/seminar course is designed to increase awareness for the interactivity of studio artists and the environment, including studio work and extensive field activity. Students will address topics such as micro-ecology with soil scientist Jeffrey Skousen; astronomy with physicist Boyd Edwards; organic agriculture with Steve and Sunshine Vortigern of Round Right Farm; permaculture with landscape architect Ashley Kyber; Kayford Mountain (a mountaintop removal site) with Larry Gibson of Keepers of the Mountains; acid mine drainage with Amanda Lachoski of Friends of Decker’s Creek; and art in Antarctica with artist Chris Kannen. [LINK]

iLAND (interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art Nature and Dance) has announced the recipients of its 2009 iLAB collaborative residencies: two collectives called Waterways and Strataspore. The New York residency program supports collaborations among movement-based artists and scientists, environmentalists, urban designers/landscape architects, architects and others that integrate creative practice within different fields/disciplines, culminating in public actions. Waterways is a collaboration among The League of Imaginary Scientists and Danish choreography collective E.K.K.O. Their research, surrounding the theme of water, takes place aboard the Waterpod, a floating habitat that is host to collaborations and artists, beginning August 15 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. StrataSpore is "a platform for collective knowledge about mushrooms" as the pivotal orientation point for exploring urban systems. Strataspore's public work begins October 5 at Gabriel Rivera's facade/fasad in Brooklyn. Details online. [LINK]

This summer, artist Justin Shull has been touring the U.S. in his Porta Hedge, a mobile artificial hedge with an exterior of recycled artificial Christmas trees. The interior conceals a remote observation system and satellite Internet uplink, mobile solar electric power, observation/escape hatch, bird camera, swings, chalkboards and Porta-Potti. Smudge Studio describes it as a "critical vehicle" that "seems to question icons of environmentalism. The design mobilizes, after all, a number elements that are popularly associated with 'sustainability' or 'green design.' But it does so in ways that don't quite add up." See a cross-country tour map and blog on the project Web site. There's a second Porta Hedge "Backyard Naturalist Study" installed at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., part "Flora: Growing Inspirations." See CANtv for video. [LINK]