Slightly old news, but I just came across this piece from Greenpeace featured on BBC News. US Artist Spencer Tunick encouraged 600 people to on the Aletsch Glacier in the Swiss Alps in the name of climate change. Here is Greenpeace’s take on the event:
An emergency provokes extreme responses: human beings in danger will abandon social niceties, etiquette, and the norms of acceptable behaviour to raise an alarm any way they can when lives are in danger. Today, six hundred people shed their clothes on a glacier in the Swiss Alps to bodily cry out for help against a planetary emergency: global warming.
Without clothes, the human body is vulnerable, exposed, its life or death at the whim of the elements. Global warming is stripping away our glaciers and leaving our entire planet vulnerable to extreme weather, floods, sea-level rise, global decreases in carrying capacity and agricultural production, fresh water shortages, disease and mass human dislocations.If global warming continues at its current rate, most glaciers in Switzerland will completely disappear by 2080, leaving nothing but valleys and slopes strewn with rock debris. Over the last 150 years, alpine glaciers have reduced in size by approximately one third of their surface and half of their mass, and this melting is accelerating. The Aletsch Glacier retreated 115 meters (377 feet) in a single year from 2005 to 2006.
Read more here (or check out a whole bunch more pictures here), and be sure to take a look at the French Greenpeace take on nudist vineyards (“Saving the wines of France from climate change“)
