The 36th Annual Mill Valley Film Festival (MVFF) is hosting the world premiere of documentary filmmaker and ITP Grant Partner Casey Beck's  "The Organic Life" - Saturday, October 5th 3:15pm and Monday, October 7th, 3:00pm.  Carol Harado of the MVFF says: "This feast for the senses takes us through four seasons on the farm, following the rhythms of nature and revealing the attendant challenges and joys of locally oriented, sustainable agriculture. Austin's satisfaction in doing what he loves every day, collaborating with the earth by leading a life more fully connected to it, becomes a teaching on true abundance." 

GLOBAL ALLIANCE INCINERATOR ALTERNATIVES (GAIA) is an international alliance that works both against incinerators and for safe, sustainable and just alternatives: 

A lot of attention has been paid in media and policy circles to energy and transportation as keys to addressing climate change. But the ways that we produce, transport, use, and throw away stuff have important impacts on the climate. EPA analysis shows that the systems to make, distribute, use and waste the stuff we use and the food we eat cause 42% of U.S. greenhouse gases and that these systems are deeply intertwined with energy and transportation.  » Read More

Winters Past is an audio project from the collaborative team of Isaac Kestenbaum and Josie Holtzman.  They will use soundwalks and podcasts during the 2013-14 New England winter to create a sensory experience to preserve the memory of what winter once was. 

WINTER IS CHANGING
What does winter mean to you?  That's the question we've been posing to most of the people we interview.  I have been amazed by the responses this question has elicited.  One woman spoke about how much she enjoys the experience of being cold—and the small joy that is coming in from the outdoors and warming oneself by a hearth.  We've heard memories of sledding, ice skating and even ice sailing. » Read More

The process of bringing The Organic Life to light has been long, arduous and sometimes monotonous, but in that sense, it’s not unlike the process of organic farming, which it seeks to reveal. Our farmers start out with a seed – or, in my case, a simple idea – which they plant and cultivate, caring for it with water, compost and sun. However, despite their best efforts to nurture this plant, its success is ultimately dependent on so many factors, natural elements, over which they have no control. » Read More

This is too much fun, I worried on the second night of  The Pause.

Intro from Hidden City Diaries - Essays from Life by Gabriela Denise Frank.  A few weeks ago, I spoke with Maggie Kaplan, founder of Invoking the Pause, the environmental small grants program that funded my CityLab7 partners and I in the ideation and development of our urban mushroom farm.

It's been a year since our installation closed, marking the end of a long-term project fed by buckets of sweat equity and three grants. » Read More

This Spring, as the trees grow blossoms that will soon bear new fruit, we are happy to share news of the collaborations blooming in our Invoking the Pause community. We selected from this year's dynamic candidates three Grant Partners who will receive funding to "invoke a pause" in 2013.

• A Creative Pause to Build a Narrative Strategy: Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA)
• HighWaterLine: Eve Mosher, Heidi Quante and other collaborators
• Memorial for Winters Past: Isaac Kestenbaum and Josie Holtzman
  

» Read More

 

On a beautiful weekend in Carmel Valley, California, we came together to reflect on and discuss Change to Climate (C2C). With the inspiration of invoking the pause, the schedule of the weekend was a sound interplay of reflections, meditations, coffee, project visioning, nature walks and collective thinking.

The people involved were Bodhi Garrett, Erik Rogers, Lena Bumiller, Lilia Villa and Meghan Thomas. Together they formed a group of fellow visionaries with different backgrounds and skills, ready to face the challenges of our time. » Read More

Former ITP Grant Partner Britta Riley is featured in The Wall Street Journal.  Need the perfect Christmas gift for the urban farmer?  Look no further than Windowfarms!
Read the full WSJ article here.

In September, a group of us got together for a 'pause' to brainstorm about experimental research on climate change communications, see here.   Below, I have included some of the pictures from this retreat to share a bit more. What is on my mind though is Hurricane Sandy.  It's been mind blowing to see the images of the storm and hear about the tragic deaths and damages.  But the silver lining, if we can look for one, may be the shift the storm has produced in the conversation on climate change.  Amazingly, the topic did not enter the presidential debate.  But it has inserted itself now in the form of a giant, late season hurricane. » Read More