Gently down the stream.
Tucked away in a corner of Southeastern Ohio, Raccoon Creek winds across a hundred miles of natural splendor.
Now a local community group is organizing to preserve the river for future generations, creating and publishing a map of its many secret gems to distribute throughout the state and beyond.
Map makers take flight.
Two young cartographers are on a mission to create a hub for exploring the future Patagonia National Park.
As the newest national park in South America, Patagonia is a largely undocumented expanse of wilderness. Kickstarter project creators Marty Schnure and Ross Donihue are using their web-based platform for open cartography, Maps for Good, to share the information they collect about the park with their backers and the wider community of wilderness adventurers.
The sound of growing things.
The Switched-On Garden is an outdoor art experiment that merges technology and the natural world through live music and participatory installations.
The team behind this bio-interactive event successfully funded the project on Kickstarter and just uploaded an eight-part documentary of the strange and wondrous day in Bartram’s Garden.
Art or frack?
No Land Escapes is a collaborative exhibition featuring new work by six artists influenced by the natural world and concerned about its safety.
The photo above includes many of the rewards available to backers, including original prints by all six participating artists. With the pace of fossil-fuel extraction continuing to increase throughout upstate New York and across the country, these printmakers are asking viewers to look at their surroundings and imagine the impact of our decisions.
A little squirrelly.
This past spring, an enterprising team of writers, designers, students, researchers, and rodent enthusiasts gathered to perform the first squirrel census of Inman Park.
Part statistical survey, part storytelling experiment, the undertaking culminated in the Inman Park Squirrel Census Data Presentation & Spectacle — a veritable smorgasbord of squirrel-centric science.
Now the team is creating visualizations of the census data and turning to Kickstarter to help fund the project. Want to get your hands on the most lovingly detailed depiction of Atlanta’s squirrel abundance ever made? Then become a backer, Ranger Rick — the Inman Park Squirrel Census is our Project of the Day.
Mother Nature needs a salesman.
Project Wild Thing is a documentary with a message: “Go play outside.”
Filmmaker David Bond wants to know what happens if an entire generation of children grows up completely disconnected from the natural world. In an era of proliferating screens, kids are spending less time outdoors than ever before — and the impact could have profound consequences on our societal well-being.
Bond’s mission takes on a sardonic edge when he enlists a team of marketing experts to help him sell nature back to the people, transforming an informative doc into a funny and provocative experience. Now all he needs is the funding to finish editing the film and deliver it to interested distributors.
With a little boost from Kickstarter backers, Bond can complete his transformation from curious filmmaker to nature marketeer. It must be working, because Project Wild Thing is our Project of the Day.
Into the wild.
Jeff Masamori is a young photographer and designer from California.
Last summer, he set out into the backcountry of Yosemite National Park with his camera and made a slew of striking photographs, capturing the wilderness in both epic and subtle moments.
He just launched a Kickstarter project to transform the images into a book, incorporating both text and his design aesthetic.
Beautiful trailer for Kurtis Hough’s Warm Earth, a 24 hour time lapse film, scored by the ever-amazing Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance).
