Giving Compass' Take:

• Atmos is a fashion magazine dedicated to climate change issues and explores solutions through sustainable means. 

• What is the intersection of fashion and environmentalism? What are examples of ways that donors can support both?

• Read about a social enterprise that is using sustainable fashion to fight human trafficking. 

On a newsstand, a new magazine called Atmos sits next to art and fashion magazines. Like the others, it covers culture. But the magazine also focuses explicitly on climate change.

“We chose to explore climate and culture because in order for us to have an impact on our changing climate, it has to start with people,” says editor-in-chief William Defebaugh. The magazine’s founder, Jake Sargent, previously ran a fashion brand but realized that he wanted to do work that better aligned with his values. Sargent cofounded a venture fund that invests in sustainable consumer product companies, but wanted to also invest in media as a way to shift culture.

The inaugural issue–book-size, at 228 pages–looks at current challenges through photography, interviews with artists such as Anonhi and Yoko Ono, and trips to rural India and the island of Kiribati to see how communities are adapting to climate change.

It explores a range of solutions of the kind that Fast Company also covers, including “clean” lab-grown meat, mushroom-grown leather, vertical farms, and robots that pollinate crops or plant trees. A poet writes about tasting Soylent; photos from Ryan McGinley point to the fallacy that humans consider themselves separate from nature. A fashion editorial includes clothing made from biosynthetic materials.

“We really wanted to create a platform where we could tell stories about the environment through an art and design lens, and actually take the space to tell them in depth,” says Defebaugh. Atmos aims to inspire leaders from the art and design world, in particular, to focus on the issue of climate change in a way that some may not have in the past.

Read the full article about a fashion magazine focusing on climate change by Adele Peters at Fast Company.