At the School of Visual Arts in New York on Friday, the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, whose ubiquitous "I (heart) NY" can be found in all corners of the world, launched a new environmental campaign, "It's not warming, it's dying," to try and bring cohesion and urgency to the movement.

"I observed that while there are a 1,000 ecological organizations, they don't ever work with each other. Of course this is true of most pro-bono organizations, but nevertheless it is too late in history to avoid the issue of working together, so I tried to develop a unifying generalized mark that all the organizations could use, without feeling it was only their membership that was interested. The mark uses a line 'It's not warming, it's dying.' Part of that was an attack on global warming, a series of words that sounds reassuring and comforting, and to counter that with the idea that there will be no more life on earth, unless we do something about it," Glaser told Latin Post.

He added, "And the subtext of that is a moment in human history, the end of the earth. So what we have is a black button, a little bit of green still left on it indicating it is not entirely dead but getting awfully close, and so it's supposed to alarm you and make you conscious of the fact that it is a shared experience. It is not only one part of the population that is concerned, this is all of us, and so what it is hopefully is an attempt to unify everybody under a common acknowledgement."

While he spoke to Latin Post, a large billboard featuring a dark globe with just a hint of green with the caption "It's not warming it's dying" was being hoisted onto the side of the School of Visual Arts on 23rd Street in New York City. It is visible for half a city block.

SVA students were handing out buttons with the dark globe -- a view of planet Earth from outer space, with only a narrow band of visible life. The launch includes a social media campaign where people can post selfies wearing the button with the hashtag #itsnotwarming and connect with supporters and access scientific data and new reports at the twitter account @ItsNotWarming.

Milton Glaser, who is 85 and has taught at the School of Visual Arts for 57 years, is also chairman of the board of directors.

"It is really a Buddhist idea. It doesn't suggest any activity, only consciousness, or acknowledgement that this issue is true. Part of that is because the nature of most advocate activity is immediately resisted by the culture. No one can say anything without someone repudiating it within minutes -- so what you have to do is provide a sense of commonality that we are all in the same boat. And there is not a unique source for this idea, that's either left or the right and ideological, but rather you have to face the fact that it exists. And that idea comes out of the National Rifle Association having so much more power than it deserves because people think it can elect the congressman if it wants to. Our suggestion is that, if two thirds of the people on earth are wearing a black button, the politicians will acknowledge that there is something to do. And what we are hoping is that out of a modest beginning, a line of copy and a little image -- that something will grow out of that."

Glaser said the launch wasn't meant to coincide with the People's Climate March in New York in September and the UN Climate Summit. "On the contrary, it wasn't meant to link to a specific group or a specific meeting, or a specific political stance. It is to provide a sense, an acknowledgement, whatever your political stance is. In an acrimonious time, everybody is waiting for someone to make a statement so they can repudiate it, and there is so much debris and dust that is thrown up by the forces that don't want this acknowledgement to occur, and will basically say everything is alright and we don't have to change anything. Those forces are so powerful and once they identify a source of an idea they jump in to kill it. We are trying to forget about an ideological stance and just acknowledge that people in the world, and all over the world, all kinds of people want something to be done."

Glaser said his own work gave him the inspiration for the campaign. "The evidence comes from out of my experience, more than anything else with I love NY, which was a design that I originated in 1977, and has found its way in every single corner of the earth, and is copied, and used, and restated every 24 hours. I have no idea why it became so pervasive and so powerful. But what it did show me was that certain ideas by virtue of either their intrinsic content or of the way they look can stick in your mind and have an enormous impact, even though they are just a trivial piece of nothing. That gave me hope because you can practically not go to any country on earth without some manifestation of I love something that arises from that original idea."

Glaser added, "Most of the time, the work we do in the graphic arts profession disappears within a matter of hours or days or weeks. And certain other things, and it is hard to understand why, persist and impact long after they are supposed to. And what I am hoping here is that from a modest source, a school interested in design, and that by definition interested in a good society, can create and circumvent the circulation of an idea that will affect people's thinking, and more than that will indicate to power and politics that they better pay attention to this because so many people care."