Hedge Society

Plastic blight to plastic use.

From Beyond magazine: Issue 14: Possible Words feature And Today  - a roundup of good things happening around the world:

Somalialand, Africa:

In Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, he describes returning to his South African village after years in prison, only to find the water polluted, the buildings run down and “the countryside littered with plastic bags and wrappers. We had not known of plastic when I was a boy, and though it surely improved life in some ways, its presence in Qunu appeared to me to be a kind of blight.”

This plastic blight can be spotted from the coasts of Mexico to the deserts of the Middle East. In the world’s oceans, one of the biggest problems is “nurdles”—a kind of plastic pellet that are both the building blocks and the end of plastic products breaking up under sunlight and water. It is estimated that there are six times as many nurdles as zooplankton in some of the world’s oceans and fish and birds that are autopsied are regularly filled with nurdles.

The government of Somalialand recently banned “the importation, production and use of plastic bags in the country”. The bags, caught in trees and shrubs, are ugly but also dangerous. Wildlife and cattle ingest them. Soil is contaminated as the plastic breaks down and discarded bags fill with rainwater providing a perfect breeding ground for malaria-carrying mosquitos.

While it remains to be seen whether the leaders of Somalialand will have the political will to follow up the ban, the attempt, the willingness to try, will continue to bring more attention to the problems of plastic.

And from Rocketboom:

How To Talk Sports to Men

From a Beyond magazine layout done in the late nineties. The Learning Annex book was published in 1984. Wow.

Stories from Beyond Magazine. Part 1: The Cat

Once upon a time, we got quite a bit of mail in the office from students looking for magazine internships. We couldn't accommodate too many, being a small office with limited space and resources. But an email from Edmonton, Alberta caught our eye when a photography student pleaded: "Please don't make me spend my intern week in a Sears portrait studio." OK, he had us there. 

So Scott drove to town. We met and talked about upcoming bits we might need for future issues. Then he wandered around taking photos and delivered all his images to us at the end of the week. These are the ones we liked the most. The first photo ended up on a page called Non-Linear Conversation in Issue 13: Beauty.

 

I don't believe Scott works in photography anymore but we hope he had a good week. Some people will always have Paris; we will always have this cat. This evil, evil cat. Here's how it turned out on the page (click for a pdf version).

(The cat illustrations, by the way, are by Aaron Leighton, who has gone on to do lovely award-winning things in Toronto. Aaron shocked and awed his way into our hearts and minds by sending us an email telling us our first design effort waaaay previous to our no-ads version needed fixing. He was right. Today, his approach is still known as the "You Suck!" method of finding freelance illustration work, second only to the "That's Pa-THET-ic!" method of finding freelance editing work.)

Back to Beyond: Our paper exchange

As you may or may not know, The Hedge Society is a blog that carries over from Beyond magazine, a no-ads arts and culture mag that produced four issues around the themes of beauty, hope, sense of place, and small. We used the motto "taste the goodness" as we shared all kinds of things that drew our interest over the last few years. (Our Hedge Society name is taken from one of the editorials that was written for Beyond.)

Having moved on now, we thought it might be fun to tell some of the stories behind the layouts and ideas that appeared in each magazine. And we thought it would also be good to keep sharing Beyond here at the hedge, since it had very little time-dated material in it and is still a beautiful piece of papercraft.

Here's the scoop. Beyond was the little magazine about a lot of things. We operated as a portable art gallery - not big enough to require a building but not small enough to be written on a grain of rice. We worked with poets, writers, thinkers, artists, and readers to create a thought-provoking magazine that also contained a good dose of silliness. Or a dollop of silliness. Dose or dollop.

And we loved the connections that developed via the Beyond community, where readers and creators from all kinds of backgrounds met both inside and outside our pages. We hope to continue those connections here at The Hedge Society.

So jump on in and jump on over to get a bit o' Beyond. Since we're doing new things now, we're offering copies of the goodness for $6 per issue, which is 50% off our last cover price. And if you follow us on twitter, we're happy to offer tweeps all 4 issues for only $20. That's pages and pages of papery goodness to enjoy while asking "Is Spring here yet?"

So - send one to your dearest friend, your fiercest enemy, a complete stranger, or yourself. (Or maybe you ARE your dearest friend.) Any way you read it, it's about sharing the goodness.