Can I Piss In Your Pocket?

Hundreds of people posed naked on Switzerland's shrinking Aletsch glacier today for US photographer Spencer Tunick as part of a Greenpeace campaign to raise awareness of global warming. Cripple nipple city and shrinkage central I suppose.

Tunick, perched on a ladder and using a megaphone, ("get yer knickers off!") directed nearly 600 volunteers *ugly exhibitionists* from all over Europe and photographed them on the glacier, which is the largest in the Alps. Later he took pictures of them standing in groups on the mass of ice and lying down. (God forbid . . don't ask what they were doing whilst prone on the ice - making ice angels?) Camera crews were staged at five different points on the glacier to take photographs (perverts). Glaciers are sensitive to climate change and have been receding since the start of the industrial age but the pace of shrinkage has accelerated in recent years (that wasn't the only shrinkage in evidence).

Now pardon me but, the average human body temperature is 98.6 and probably half of these people are inflicted with the flu and probably running about 100 degrees. That to me adds up to roughly 6000 degrees of human buttocks and jugs warming the surface of an otherwise pristine glacier. Probably causing over 10 years worth of melt and leaving barefoot prints down to about six inches in the ice.

The environmental group Greenpeace, which organised the shoot, said the aim was to "establish a symbolic relationship between the vulnerability of the melting glacier and the human body". (Or to help promote the photographer who is renown for shooting nudes all over the world to promote a well known brand of sunglasses)

Greenpeace just quietly have lost the plot. I'm a member of the Australian Conservation Foundation which has a peacful activist and proactive way of dealing with environmental issues. We don't go ramming Japanese whalers or taking sensational photos or throwing animal blood at fur wearers - even though we don't endorse any of these practices. We plant trees, run school educational programs, we lobby government, assist in research, sponsor university grants, attend the whaling commission, and enhance awareness and encourage a sustainable lifestyle without these dramatic and stupid theatrics.

The Aletsch descends around the south side of the Jungfrau mountain in the Upper Rhone Valley. Alpine glaciers have lost about one-third of their length and half their volume over the past 150 years. Well this one has just lost a third of it's volume thanks to the basking of warm buttocks, none of which were particularly attractive to my mind. If you want to photograph 600 people in the bollocks, do it for a sunglasses promotion in Coles car park or for the sake of art but keep their butts of the pristine ice flows. Leave nothing but footprints - made with sustainable spikes - and take nothing but photographs - preferably with your kit on! Where do you think these 600 people pee'd during the 10 hour shoot? I don't even want to think about where they took a dump!
Certainly nobody peed in their pockets!

Nudists choose a variation on the snow angel!