Little Artshram
by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders.
Our Northern Michigan home place and the snowy landscape is slowly changing. We’ve heard the first of the spring birdsong coming from the treetops, and we are making note of an annual Springtime holiday that we’ve celebrated for many years with our communities in April: Earth Day!
This year In 2020 we celebrate 50 years of taking pause and making efforts to stop and turn around the destruction and lack of conscious caring for our planet home. It’s been a lot of work and effort and we surely have not accomplished all of what we’ve set out to do as caretakers and citizens of a shared place.
We are pleased to look back on 20 some years of the 49 Earth Days past having gathered together and working alongside of SO, so many talented artists and musicians, hundreds of children, teens, entire families and school classrooms, along with the City of Traverse City, the Neahtawanta Center, Art Center/Women’s Resource Center and The Circuit. This just names a few of the people and organizations who’ve been involved in helping to make the Earth Day date on our human-made calendar a worthy and real holiday!
This year, to mark the significant golden anniversary of our shared love of our life on Earth, Little Artshram will partner with Title Track a new organization that is celebrating its 1st anniversary, on Sunday April 26th, at The Circuit in Traverse City.
Little Artshram will be partnering with the Title Track Family Day at The Grand Traverse Circuit “Community Cultural Arts, Wellness, & Education”, Traverse City – session one: 3pm, session two: 5pm, variety show: 7pm.
CHECK BACK! MORE info forthcoming with an offering of becoming an Earth Day Art Ambassador and contribute your creativity to this celebration!
Last but not least, we’ve included below an excerpt from the Sierra Magazine with a little background on the birth of Earth Day:
The United States had never experienced anything like it: On April 22, 1970, nearly one in 10 Americans flooded the streets and the woods and the seashores to call for an end to the merciless pollution of the country’s air, waters, and landscapes. In the words of Senator Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin Democrat who conceived the idea of Earth Day, the goal was to force the issue of environmental protection “permanently onto the national political agenda”—and in that, the effort succeeded.
The conservation movement that existed before 1970 was largely made up of white, affluent outdoors-people who mostly focused on the protection of birds and other wildlife, the preservation of wilderness, and the establishment of parks and preserves. The environmental movement that was born on Earth Day aspired to something larger—a multiracial cause, propelled by the same passion that spurred the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements, dedicated to preserving urban environments as well as wild ones, and inspired by the ecological insight that our home is the whole planet.
Since then, the influence of Earth Day has waxed and waned; at times it has seemed little more than an occasion for corporate greenwashing. But the fieriness of the first Earth Day remains like an ember within the original idea. To mark Earth Day’s 50th anniversary, Sierra assembled a collection of activists, organizers, and authors to imagine how it can be reinvigorated and reinvented. While each contributor writes in a different key, together they form a chorus, insistently hopeful that Earth Day 2020 can be another watershed moment—one that leads to a bigger, bolder, and more lasting transformation.
READ the rest of the articles here: EARTH DAY 50 Years
