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In 1973 I began searching for a bridge to spiritually connect art making with community work as a social and environmental activist. Over the years this search has evolved into an ongoing endeavor to use art as a means to explore our cultural interface with nature, investigate the meaning of watersheds, and sustain an environmentally ethical lifestyle. With an ever deepening sense of place in my own home watershed, I concluded that our environmental problems are about relationship. Thus, I began to explore artistic ways to introduce adults and children to a renewed alliance with their local watersheds, be it an inner city or rural area. Vital to this relationship is a sense of empathy and compassion for a myriad of complex systems, curiosity about a watershed's social and political history, a knowledge of the location of its headwaters and final destination, and a claim to membership in ones home ecosystem. The central question within these realms is how can I, as an artist, encourage a cultural shift to ecologically ethical behavior and nourish integrated relationships with the wild blue-green Earth? The works that arise from these questions include a series of Nature Walks with handmade Nature Guides that reveal aspects of our cultural interface with the wild, a series of maps entitled The Salmon Skin Capes, simple rituals for entering the cycles of a home watershed, interpretive panels and sculptures installed in parks and preserves along the California coast, and ecoart seminars and slide lectures. Permeating this art is the vision of a world in which every watershed holds a handful of adults and children who, as a result of their sense of ecological affinity, become guardians of that system, ensuring its health and wellbeing for the future. Such relationships to place, connected by similar relationships in neighboring watersheds, could eventually create an expansive web of lighter living and, thus, a cleaner world.
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