Illustration by Mike Mitchell

Here at Smart Bubble Society, we firmly believe in the prospect of a greener future, so we were pretty excited (no, ecstatic actually) to partner with an organization like Greenpeace; a pioneer in the world of eco-activism. Collaborations like these give us a chance to meld our expertise in the field of communications with our desire to inspire change. Not just a generic sense of change, but in this case, a call to action to shift our perspective and dependence on oil.

In Canada, we’ve got a hefty problem on our hands because we’ve got the Tar Sands. Not only that, we’ve also got a slew of offshore drilling projects both in northern and eastern Canada (including Chevron’s new oil rig off Newfoundland, one of the deepest offshore oil wells to date). All those things are not synonymous with less carbon emissions (which might be why we didn’t commit to anything reasonable at Copenhagen last year), nor do they support any hope for a greener Canada (remember when Canada used to pride itself on being an environmentally-minded nation?).

Greenpeace’s Go Beyond Oil project is working to demonstrate how we are implanted in a system directly tied to the to the consumption of oil. In fact, the team shut down a Cairn Energy offshore drilling rig located in Greenland on Monday morning by climbing and fastening themselves to the rig.

Unfortunately, we’ve become pretty accustomed to hearing about oil spills, offshore drilling, human rights violations in oil-rich countries, and damage to wildlife and our planet in general. It’s another day of headlines. But with Greenpeace, we hoped to remind our audience that the measly fines these multinational corporations pay, often just to tidy surface damage and quiet people from making an uproar, can never truly repair the damage already done. Nearly twenty years after the Exxon Valdez spill, 26,000 gallons of oil remained in Prince William Sound’s sands and water. The effects of these disasters typically last much longer than they are expected to, which is important to highlight given the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In fact, oil that is spilled into bodies of water never truly disappears; it forms deposits near the bottom of the sea, evaporates as gas into the atmosphere, and in smaller particles, gets absorbed into various aquatic life. You’ve heard about the dispersing agents, right? All they really do – with their undisclosed, secret concoction – is speed up the process of breaking the oil down to those smaller particles. Bottom line, the oil doesn’t go away.

But don’t walk away slumping yet, we’re happy to report that we did find a glimmer of hope, in a little publicized piece of legislature called The Climate Change Accountability Act or, Bill C-311. This bill could very well be the government’s chance to put Canada on par with the rest of the world, and make up for its shameful standing at last year’s Copenhagen Climate Conference. It’s important that our country picks up the pace, and breaks up with its longtime, climate trashing boyfriend the US.

No matter how redundant the news seems to get, we ask you to do one thing; and that’s to stay on top, stay informed, and don’t lose hope. Read about C-311, about Greenpeace UK’s actions to help us Go Beyond Oil, and think about ways that you, yourself, can start to get there. It could be as simple as walking to work tomorrow, boycotting petroleum-derived products (plastic bags), or buying your first, electric car (make that second, if you’re one of those people from Who Killed the Electric Car).

To check out the Thought Bubble we created for Greenpeace’s Go Beyond Oil campaign, click here.

A Greenpeace Thought Bubble: Go Beyond Oil

To read more about this Thought Bubble and our oil dependency, check out the blog post.

Talk Green To Us (City of Vancouver Campaign)

Thought Bubble Promo 2010

As an eighteen year old, fresh out of first year of university, the idea of a job is typically one that involves bringing someone coffee, a lot of filing, or kids bouncing around. Although many young people can find a decent, and sometimes fun job, we are very rarely offered the opportunity to work closely with an idea or concept that we strongly believe in and that doesn’t ask us to compromise our values.

Two weeks ago, after a two-month trip to visit my family in Paris, I rode the subway downtown in hopes of meeting the people of Smart Bubble Society and getting a job as an intern. I had no idea what to expect; even less did I anticipate a friendly dog jumping up to greet me.

The journey that led me to this point was fortuitous. As a reader of Adbusters magazine and their blog, I came across a video they put up called Micah White’s Thought Bubble: Junk Thought. After viewing it, I clicked to find out who the creators behind it were. This event came at a time in my life when I was looking for direction. After having spent a year studying political science and history at the University of Ottawa and deciding it wasn’t for me, as well as having discovered a new fascination for the world of communications, I was looking to delve into an experience that would marry my newfound interest as well as my penchant for activism and social justice. Smart Bubble Society did just that. To add to my delight upon finding them, the Smart Bubble studio was located in my favourite area of Toronto, the Trinity Bellwoods neighborhood.

When I knocked on the door and met Jonathon and Suzanna (and Fable, of course), I was excited to find out how much we had in common and how enthusiastic they were that I had found them. After an interview the next day, I was officially a part of the team as an intern.

I am more than excited to have the chance to cultivate my own knowledge of the current issues our planet and population are facing, and to learn about the world of graphic design and animation, but also to do my part to get the word out about Thought Bubbles. I will be reaching out through Twitter and Facebook and frequent blog posts. If you want to say hi, I can be reached at julia@thoughtbubble.org.

I think we all have moments where we question whether what we’re doing is making an ounce of difference, or at least, I hope we do. Smart Bubble Society is quite new-new in its take on activism, in the sense that our mandate is to make a difference through raising people’s awareness through infographics, something that we have to define to most people before we can explain its impact. But if we woke up tomorrow and the internet was reduced to a smoldering cube, we would be screwed. What would we do then? Motion graphics would obviously fail to survive. Would we tell stories in person? Create traditional art to convey our messages instead?

Sometimes, when I see footage of an overwhelmingly huge protest or march, I wonder if I’m in the right place. What’s more powerful? My computer? Or my feet? To remedy the perplexing, seemingly unanswerable question, I remind myself that we all have different tools with which we communicate our desire for change, and make a difference. Some people do use their feet. Some use their voice, others use their paintbrushes, and we just happen to use our design talent. But there’s a second part to the question, and it relates to us as a whole. Why are we as a global community, so seemingly ineffective at battling today’s issues (forgive me for the momentary pessimism)? We’re seeing several simultaneous wars, a impending global catastrophe that I don’t even need to explain, and more. Much more.

Micah White speaks to this problem in a recent article entitled, The Future of Activism. In it, he discusses the necessary marriage between physical activism and mental activism:

“Untangling this difficulty begins with acknowledging the complicated relationship between our interior reality (the mental environment) and our external reality (the physical environment). Mental pollution is not just an annoyance; it is a tool in our oppression. The interjection of advertising and other info-toxins into our mindscape neutralizes our attempts to construct an alternate future because from a poisoned mind spring only poisoned deeds.”
(If you’re intrigued by Micah White’s passage here, be sure to check out his Thought Bubble on Junk Thought).

Indeed, our minds our poisoned. Everyday we’re barraged with advertisements selling us an overwhelming assortment of THINGS, and illusory concepts (‘buy/do this and you’ll be beautiful’). In Canada, I’d say in a very general sense, we’re comfortable enough that there’s no real need to rise up and fight for anything as a country, though there are plenty of reasons to stand up and scream. What Micah also explains, is that we can’t fix the world by fixing only our minds, and we can’t fix the world by fixing only the world:

“If we burn the world without a change of heart, it will resurrect; if we change our hearts without leveling the world, it will persist.”

So we have to address both frontiers at the same time. But I think it starts with our heads; our Thought Bubbles, if you will. If we’re indeed too distracted and comfortable, then we simply need to regain our focus. We need to clearly see what’s wrong with the world, rather than ignore it and pretend everything’s a peach. Peaches are wonderful, but they have pits, and you need to appreciate both aspects to see a peach for what it is. Ha! What a random analogy, but it works eh?

If we can at least allow ourselves the SPACE in our Thought Bubbles to see the world as it is right now, that’s enough to pit us (pun intended) against any ridiculous attempts by certain entities to take advantage of our ignorance. Because such entities will likely stick around, it’s how WE choose to live each day that matters. That’s how we begin to change our Thought Bubbles. It’s about every single decision we make, from whether to buy tomatoes from across the planet or from that farm across the street (which if you have one that close, lucky you!), to whether to spend two hours looking at what our quasi-friends are doing on Facebook, or reading a book about our country’s history (real history, please). WE are our most powerfool tool, but it starts with our Thought Bubble.

Micah White continues to say that:
“Each of us knows that a tremendous crisis is looming, but it is so large that we are paralyzed. Knowing that our future constitutes a world without ice caps and fish, a world that is dominated by constant starvation and hordes of refugees, we can only continue our day-to-day lives if we suppress the fear of collapse.”

I think our tendency to ignore what’s going on in the world is very possibly rooted in our fears about it. Like the peach analogy above, we have to see the pit, and it doesn’t mean we have to eat it (it’s bitter and gross), but we definitely have to acknowledge that it’s there before we can enjoy the glorious sweetness of that peach flesh. And the pit doesn’t have to be all that bad (apparently is has health benefits): Check out some alternative news sites, turn off your TV a few nights a week, open a good non-fiction book, engage in a meaningful conversation with someone, think about what you’re about to buy, who made it, how they made it, what the value is, and whether you really need it to be happy. And to round it all off so that you don’t end up depressed in bed at night, snuggle with a loved one, human, or furball. That’s the peach flesh. Yum.

Illustration by Laura Callaghan.

Our mandate this year is to create a Thought Bubble that will speak to Canadians. Sure, maybe it was the result of an all time, patriotic high from witnessing people flooding to the streets to celebrate our olympic wins in Vancouver last winter (go Canada!), or maybe it was the fact that when the whole Thought Bubble crew sat up late at night watching live feeds from Copenhagen day in day out for the duration of Cop15, we felt like the worst country in the world. We were actually quoted to be “to the environment what Japan is to whaling”. We were ranked 56th, out of 57 countries in the Climate Change Performance Index. We broke our own law by signing the Kyoto Protocol, and then breaching it. Canada couldn’t even stand on it’s own two feet and pledge more than the US’s measly 17% reduction from 2005 levels. When you consider the fact that all other countries pledged reductions of a similar amount from 1990 levels, that brings Canada’s reduction to a mere 4%. According to Treehugger, our emissions will actually be 2.5% HIGHER. As Treehugger states in the article:

“…reductions by 2020 from 1990 levels need to be in the 40% range in industrialized nations to put us on a track to keep global average temperature rise below the critical threshold of +2°C and give us a shot at returning CO2 concentrations to 350ppm.”

350 ppm refers to the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere that we need to retain (or achieve, rather) in order to avoid severe climate consequences. In 2009, it was at 387.35 ppm (parts per million) according to the Mauna Loa Observatory and 350.org.

Canada has spun an upsetting, million-knotted string of disappointments, to be sure. Not to mention the elephant, juggernaut of an issue called the tar sands. The “second largest source of oil in the world after Saudi Arabia”, according to the government of Alberta. In addition to that their website says that, “production is expected to increase from 1.31 million barrels per day in 2008 to 3 million barrels per day in 2018″. There’s no signs of it stopping anytime soon. It’s widely held that the tar sands is the largest, most destructive project in all of human history. According to oilsandstruth.org, “the tar sands mining procedure releases at least three times the CO2 emissions as regular oil production and is slated to become the single largest industrial contributor in North America to Climate Change.” It has cleared an absurd amount of ancient Boreal forest, and endangered downstream communities who are reporting increasing rates of rare cancers. If you’ve wondered why Canada is so absurdly pathetic at committing to environmental law, or even setting respectable emissions reduction targets, the tar sands is why. Interestingly, it spells rat backwards, that ought to say enough!

Driving across Canada, we spoke to many strangers and friends along the way. We talked about taxes, indigenous issues, but most of all, we heard about the tar sands, and not just as a problem Alberta’s responsible for, but a problem that Saskatchewan may soon get pulled in to too. Canadians we talked to actually trembled at the thought. There are claims that tar sand production is already slowly spreading into Saskatchewan. That’s why we want to team up with the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest citizens organization. Started in 1985, they “work to protect Canadian independence by promoting progressive policies on fair trade, clean water, energy security, public health care, and other issues of social and economic concern to Canadians.” Who could be better to team up with to create a Thought Bubble on Canada’s biggest and baddest issue? One of their campaigns is already about the tar sands, and actually ties into another issue they’re passionate about: water. A massive amount of water is needed for the oil extraction process (2 to 4.5 barrels of water for every barrel of synthetic crude oil produced, to be specific), threatening the Athabasca River in Alberta. We’re going to combine these issues (as they’re all related), and inform the Canadian public about a topic we should most definitely have a spare bedroom made up for in our Thought Bubbles.

In closing, this is the result of our cross-country, what’s in Canada’s Thought Bubble tour that we so earnestly had hoodies created for (which I now wear everyday to lounge in and remind myself of my passion): a tar sand Thought Bubble. A tar bubble about tarnada’s tarnishing trap.

To learn more about some of the issues we also heard about from our trip, keep an eye on our Twitter feed. We’ll be posting quotes throughout the next few days.

If you want to be in the know when it comes to special edition Thought Bubbles like this one, or others we create in the future, be sure to sign up for our mailing list at the top left corner of your screen.

Fable officially joined the Smart Bubble Society team when she was nominated during our second board meeting. As she says, Fable ‘doesn’t know much about nuthin’, but what she does know, is that she loves to take naps. She also inspires us every moment, of every day, as she lives in our studio, and compliments everything we do with her easygoing, all-accepting attitude. Like she already does, we strive to spend more time thinking in the present, openly assuming that everyone is good (giving the benefit of the doubt), curiously questioning everything that comes our way, and most of all, divorcing ourselves from the useless distractions in life. For example, Fable has no idea what The Hills is (I’m not linking that one), and I’m glad she never will. You can see Fable in almost all of our Thought Bubbles, and you can also follow her on Twitter. If you have something to say over 140 characters, you can even send her an email her. We promise she’ll respond.

Andrej is a masterful painter, illustrator, and graphic designer. He basically does it all, and he does it with ongoing innovation, creativity, and class. He first nurtured his craft in the faraway land of Poland, earning a Masters Degree from the Academy of Art in Warsaw. He designed famed movie and event posters, worked gigs as an art director in big advertising firms, and was part of the team that created an oscar-winning animated short in the eighties. He created his life’s work through a variety of artistic outlets; posters, illustrations, animations, Nelvana cartoons, logo designs, and paintings. After building a solid career that took him from Warsaw, to New York, and finally to Toronto, he settled down to focus on what he loves most. Painting, and illustrating children’s books. Naturally, Smart Bubble Society was ecstatic to have an artist like Andrej on board, who could marry the new, modern era of motion graphics and computer-driven graphic design, with traditional, classy art. In his spare time, Andrej likes to spend time with his really cool cat Bazyli, and travel the Canadian landscape via camping, hiking, and canoeing. He’s so much cooler than we are.

If you want to take a look at a portfolio of his incredible work, visit his website.

Our very second board meeting (our first was technically when we incorporated last September), took place yesterday over a snack-filled (healthy, I might add) span of three hours. It was awesome to get together and talk about the direction that Smart Bubble Society is heading in, because talking about it with someone other than that little friend in your own brain, or your co-executive (ahem, Jon), makes it all the more real.

It was also nice too look back on the year and take note of our accomplishments, for example, we planned to have five Thought Bubbles completed by the next year, and we have eight. We wanted the term Thought Bubble to gain acceptance in our community of fans and supporters, and noticed that happening before we even had many done. We were (and continue to be) approached several times via email by the greeting ‘hey Thought Bubblers!’ and asked to create ‘Thought Bubbles’. Maybe we should add it to the Urban Dictionary. In our excitement over the frequent recognition and loving embrace, we even appropriated the Thought Bubbler designation into every account that requires a username, if you noticed, and actively use the verb bubbler/bubbling as often as we can.

We were broadcast on TV, and have reached way over 100,000 YouTube views – making it 240,000 to date (we’re including John Green’s popular post of our healthcare video, because we can). We also got a new website out there into the ether-digital world, and got to do a Thought Bubble for a writer and thinker I greatly admire; Micah White.

As for our future, we’re now rooting for Michael Pollan, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky. We want to see a Thought Bubble broadcast on a network that will reach an even wider audience (or blog of similar caliber). And among other things, throw a T dot-launch party with our studio partner-in-crime, Trouble and Maker.

We plan to bring you some exciting Thought Bubbles this year too, one being the resultant topic from our cross-country ‘What’s in Canada’s Thought Bubble?’ campaign (which will be announced in our next post!) We also got wind of a really interesting online organization called Kickstarter, through which we hope to gain funding for certain donation-based Thought Bubbles that we otherwise wouldn’t afford to do at a given time. We’re engaged in their submission process right now, so wish us luck!

And of all things, the most entertaining accomplishment was our nomination of Fable to Smart Bubble Society mascot. If you don’t know who Fable is, you’ll get to, because she will now begin Tweeting (TBfable). Fable’s approach to life suits the Thought Bubble philosophy, because one, Fable is bubbly. She’s always in the present moment, and ready to shower anyone that comes her way with love and acceptance. If that hasn’t disgusted you, two, she’s got the right formula when it comes to thinking. She doesn’t think about anything useless, fills her ‘Thought Bubble’ with information that is relevant to her and her life, and best of all, she comes to new ideas and experiences with curiosity, and a naive sense of wonder. Qualities that I wish we all had when it comes to our Thought Bubbles. You’ll soon see Fable on our About Us page (you can also catch her in every Thought Bubble), and if you ever have any questions for Fable that surpass 140 characters, you can send her an email at fable@thoughtbubble.org. She’ll answer you in the best digital version of a southern Tennessee accent possible. Why Tennessee you ask? We don’t know, it just evolved that way.