Green Patriot Posters: Images for a New Activism

This book brings together the strongest contemporary graphic design currently promoting sustainability and the fight against climate change. Collectively, essays by Michael Bierut, Steven Heller, Edward Morris and Dmitri Siegel look back in time to posters and ideas that set the stage for the current movement (World War Two posters, images of international cooperation, posters from the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s) and address the state of the poster: what is the efficacy and mode of distribution for purposeful, message-oriented graphic images today? Thomas L. Friedman advocates for "a redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology that can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the twenty-first century." The bulk of the book is given over to a compilation of the best posters on the theme of sustainability by a variety of contemporary artists (both emerging and established), among them Shepard Fairey, Michael Bierut, DJ Spooky, James Victore and Geoff McFetridge. These posters, which have a strong graphic presence and which never rest on the tired slogans of the past ("Save the Earth," etc.), show that graphic design does not passively respond to the zeitgeist--it helps shape it. The book, which is sustainably printed in the U.S., reproduces 50 of these posters as tear-outs. Also included is a section on action, with documentation of designs at work in the world: on buses, billboards, protesters' placards, graffiti, t-shirts and so on. This movement is about a new form of patriotism, one that exhibits pride of place, but not fear of others.