Vintage travel posters showed idyllic getaways with bold graphics: scenes of sunny California, underwater adventures teeming with marine life, and the crisp Alps covered in snow. But with climate change threatening all these environments, modern-day travel posters might show things a bit differently—the California countryside on fire, Queensland, Australia’s disappearing coral reefs, Switzerland’s Zermatt mountain with barely any snow, instead covered in patches of dry, brown grass.
In a new campaign from creative agency FF Los Angeles and Fridays for Future, the international movement of those striking for the climate led by Greta Thunberg, that’s exactly what we see. The campaign reimagines classic tourism posters with a climate-change twist. “You don’t believe in global warming?” the posters read. “How about local warming?”
FF Los Angeles approached Fridays for Future with the project idea. Chelsea Steiger, creative director at FF Los Angeles, said her team was inspired, simply, by the news and trends we’re already facing. “We can still see today that people don’t believe in global warming, but we are facing the effects of it, the fire in California, the flooding in Venice,” she says via email. “By using the visual language of local travel posters, we felt it was an impactful and emotional way to bring awareness from a more local standpoint.”
The agency has already received a comment that sums up, Steiger says, how they hope people will react to these images: “I thought these were beautiful, and then I took a second look . . . still beautiful + sad,” one viewer wrote. That emotional impact, and the awareness it creates, is the goal. After all, it can be hard to care about something we’re not yet affected by, but these posters show exactly what we’ll be missing out on if we don’t make an effort to curb the effects of climate change now.
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