UO Interviews:

Green Patriot founder Edward Morris talks the power of positive propaganda and the new Green Patriot Posters Book.

Tell me about your background and how you came to start the Canary Project.
In the summer of 2005, my wife, Susannah and I had read a series of articles by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker about climate change, and they affected us a lot. I was generally pretty politically apathetic at that time, but what outraged me was the discrepancy between what the science community was saying and what the public was seeing and understanding. We set out to start the Canary Project, which was originally an effort to go out and photograph places being affected by climate change where you could actually see things happening. The plan was to work with the local scientists who had recognized these locations to help us understand what we were looking at. One of the first things we realized was that it didn't maximize the potential of the work just to hang it in an art gallery. We realized we wanted to reach a broader public and we started putting images on public buses, something we did with the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art.

So the buses were promoting an exhibit at the museum?
Actually, the ads were the exhibit. We decided to just put the pictures on the side of the bus —a horse in a tree that had died in Katrina, a picture of some coral that was dead and a picture of a glacier— and the message basically said 'dead horse, dead coral, deal glacier... this is what global warming looks like.'

That collaboration led us to begin to create a broader collection, working with other artists on a variety of projects, and in 2008 we launched the Green Patriot Posters project, an idea I had brought to Dmitri Siegel, who helped me develop it. We started with a bus campaign, then launched a website, and ended up with a book.

What was the process behind deciding that posters were a medium you wanted to work in?
I was in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where we had an exhibit of photographs. I walked down the hall and there was an exhibit of World War II propaganda posters and it sparked an idea in my head because of how well those posters valued an individual image. The poster is a branding message, and you have this opportunity to be clear. That was the real difference: The photographs we were presenting were so subtle, while the posters are so in your face and so current. It seemed like a good avenue to explore in being more proactive in our cause.

But the thing that changed us was the impact Shepard Fairey's "Hope" Obama poster had. We were developing this project around the same time that campaign was going on and there's no doubt Fairey's poster really helped organize people's enthusiasm. Would Obama have been elected without Fairy's poster? Probably. But it helped create organized energy and to brand an idea. That sold us on it.

It's interesting you talk about WWII posters, because propaganda seems like it has such a negative connotation to it.
You're right, people do have a negative connotation towards 'propaganda,' but it can also be used for a good cause and based in truth. Propaganda becomes oppressive when a state claims all prerogatives for truth for itself, but is actually lying; that's when it becomes negative.

We have this historical legacy we have to deal with in terms of propaganda, but propaganda isn't that different from advertising. I don't think sustainably and climate change need to be massaged or untrue in any way. The facts are there, what we need to do is sell those facts and connect those facts to values. A poster's job is to do that. It's not about creating the movement, it's about sustaining it.

What was your campaign to get the word out?
We realized this would have the most success if we were able to get big names involved for credibility's sake. We asked Michael Bierut from Pentagram to design the logo for the bus ad. Then our plan was to use that project to solicit people in our network to get them to contribute posters and grow the campaign in that way. But with no deadline, it kind of went flat. So what ended up reviving it was the idea of a book, because with a book comes a deadline. That finally got designs coming in from famous people, which got people excited and getting submissions into the website.

What were some of your favorite submissions?
Half the book is full of posters we didn't even solicit. We have this one that says "Sprumer Sumumn Auter Winting"—I love that one. There's an image of red person under water and there's a wave of smoke and his legs are factory stacks, and that really captures the urgency and solidarity. There were a lot about bikes, actually one of the things we noticed was there were a lot about bikes and local food. We didn't anticipate that; it's interesting data. Any movement needs to fire on five emotional cylinders at all time: anger, hope, solidarity, urgency and the feeling that you can make a difference. So we looked at posters that hit one of those five notes.