The conservation group Environmental Defense has found a creative way to use electronic media and “viral marketing” to let people express their concern about global warming. Namely, a video contest that asks them to write and perform their own songs about climate change.

It all began with Environmental Defense’s own staff, who recorded such a ditty, set to the tune of “White Christmas, and posted it to YouTube. The video went on to become one of the site’s 100 most watched (or so they say).

Now the contest has a winner: Two gals calling themselves “Madge ‘n’ Millie.” You can see their humorous entry, “It Won’t Snow,” set to the tune of “Let It Snow,” here. (Some of the other entries include “Walkin’ Through a Former Wonderland” and “Slushy the Styroman.”)

Silly as these videos are, it’s quite clever of Environmental Defense to remind people that holidays so associated with cold and snow may soon change dramatically if we don’t act — yet do it in a way that matches the season’s festive spirit.

Environmental Defense, despite being one of the most mainstream of the national environmental organizations, has developed some innovative ways to engage supporters on a very personal level. In fall 2005, as part of its campaign to maintain the Endangered Species Act, it asked people to send in stories of their personal encounters with threatened wildlife. It received some 1,200 essays about amazing encounters with grizzly bears, humpback whales, and bald eagles, some of which it published on its website.

Helping people see how environmental issues intimately touch their lives, and giving them a global forum like the Internet to express these connections, makes sense in our high-tech era of information overload. After all, abstractions rarely provoke us to write our Senator or march on Washington.

Which reminds me of Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an environmental and indigenous rights activist from Alaska’s Inuit nation. In this succinct but powerful essay in Orion magazine she tells how her world is melting out from under her. Those satirical videos per se won’t save her Arctic home, but ultimately, “Madge ‘n’ Millie” and Watt-Cloutier are leaders in the same fight: to protect the planet through both word and deed.

This entry is cross-posted at WIMN’s Voices.