Hope Despite Darkness

Hope is like the dawn. Both return despite the darkest night. The work of completing the “Ecoart in Action” book is wrapping up and now we are expanding the outreach of the ideas behind the book. The imminent publication and the process of outreach represents hope for the future at this very dark time for our planet. We are now fundraising to effect our outreach goals.

As I write today, I am listening to Suzanne Simard, author of “Finding the Mother Tree”, speaking about forest systems and Indigenous knowledge on Krista Tippett’s show, On Being.

“The ecosystem is a complex place ... more than the sum of its parts… we need to regenerate our systems so they can be whole again. … Forests are built for wisdom (and) regenerative.” -Simard

It is the day after 9/11, a time for many of us to reflect on destruction and hope and look for regeneration. I attend the local island church where today the minister, Jeffrey Lewis, read from the great anti-fascist Dietrich Bonhoeffer who resisted the Nazis.

In 1998, sitting next to Susan Steinman, a founding member of WEAD in the audience for a panel on environmental art at the Annual College Art Association (CAA) conference in Boston, I turned to Susan, until that moment a complete stranger, to complain about the content, who concurred. Out of that exchange came the invitational ecoart listserv, out of which has come “Ecoart in Action,” which will formally launch in February 2021, and coincide with a series of panels emerging from that publication.

⁠In a series of little sketches of a line where sea meets land, I've been trying to discover if I can say everything that's on my mind now with a few strokes of color on a flat surface. All art is a conversation with a stranger and an unknowable future. All art is an act of hope in defiance of darkness.

The first initiative from the editorial team for our book towards the goal of educational outreach will be a series of panels for the CAA. The composition of these panels emerged out of the book. Our fundraising now is to support these participants in expanding our influence on a more Earth-centered artworld by covering their out-of-pocket conference fees.