Seeds for Thought: an Ecopsychology Blog

"Talking you in"

Last week, I read the most wonderful article by Diane Flacks on the website parentcentral.ca.  Its title is Storytelling in the neonatal unit.  Hm, you can go there directly right now and come back to me afterwards, ok?

"Talking you in".  What an idea!

Paradise Unpaved

I can across an extraordinary storyteller the other day: Franke James. Her stories are made of text and photographs and illustrations and they're fabulous! She calls them "Visual Essays" and they're all documents of her efforts to green her life. Here's the latest, called Paradise Unpaved. (Click on the image to read the rest of her story ..)

Eco Anxiety

Linda Buzzell Satzman made me aware of this fascinating video about eco-anxiety, and its antidote:

I was quite interested to see a number of other videos on this subject on YouTube. Have a look (under "related videos")!

Ansel's Activism

I recently posted about Ansel Adams in my own Beauty Dialogues blog, focusing on his photographic art and creative philosophy.

But Ansel Adams was more than "just" an photographer, or even "just" an artist.

Ansel Adams came to the height of his photographic career during the Great Depression, and he was often asked "What's the use of making beautiful images when the world is falling apart?" Adams' love of beauty was not devoid of social and political concern, and the question stimulated him to him articulate his sense of what was important, beyond the social and economic tragedies of the day. Nature was fundamental, he felt, and despite the permutations of the present,

"There is a deeper thing to express. The return of humanity to some sort of balanced awareness of the natural things. Some rocks and sky. We need a little earth to stand on and feel run through our fingers. Perhaps photography can do this."

Adams' photography was a glittering display of the numinous, but it also gave him a powerful platform from which to stand as an activist and conservationist. Because of the beauty of his art and his renown as an artist and spokesman Adams was eventually successful in lobbying Washington to designate great quantities of California's Yosemite Valley as a protected wilderness.

His art and what he was able to do with it remains an inspiration to me, as I'm sure it does to so many other lovers of the natural world. I constantly strive to bring some of that love forward with my own photography, and am very grateful for his example.

rejecting nature at home

A few weeks ago our regional Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals launched a public service announcement on television, informing Québeckers that, each year, 500,000 pets are abandoned in our dear province, and asking people to reflect on this fact and to rethink their behaviour.  July 1st is the date when most leases are renewed in Québec (so insane, but I'm not going to get caught up in the political reasons for this decision made a long time ago), and that is when most animals are abandoned.  Québec has a population of about 7.5 million.

Belgium has a population of just over 10 million and, it appears, only 50,000 pets are abandoned there each year, one for each 200 persons.

Cool Globes

Cool Globes is a US-wide project that was launched in Chicago last year using the power of art to bring a more positive message about the need to "cool" the planet. Here in the San Francisco bay area where I live we're gearing up for a Cool Globes exhibition in Chrissy Field. It opens this Tuesday and will be showing through October 12th.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a video of local artist Lauren Davies creating her piece for the show. It's called "The Butterfly & the Tsunami":

This blog entry re-printed from my post on the World Café Global Climate Change Blog.