After a summer spent  collecting interviews, we're ready to show our project, Winters Past, to the world.  We're happy to say that our website, winterspast.org, is now online.  We spent a lot of time thinking about the design behind the site, and it's really helped us hone in on what we want the "message" of our undertaking to be. The project is meant to celebrate winter, while at the same time mourning the way that winter will be forever altered due to climate change.  We hope that both our icon and our logo convey that something is being lost, something is fading away. » Read More

This year I've been working with Invoking the Pause (ITP) in the role of Grants Administrator, helping Maggie Kaplan and her Advisory Committee manage the grant-making process.  As a fundraising professional who has worked on the "other side of the table" for more than ten years it's been an interesting flip of the switch to be receiving the proposals instead of sending them. » Read More

 
        

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." 

ITP recently interviewed Grant Partner Heidi Quante of HighWaterLine.  In 2012, Heidi joined forces with artist and HighWaterLine New York creator Eve Mosher in hopes that by amplifying the original New York project concept they will help communities realize how climate change will personally impact their local area.

ITP:  You've been an activist on several different issues throughout your career. What sparked you to become involved with the HighWaterLine project, and how did your collaboration with Eve Mosher come about?

Heidi:  I had been working on environmental issues for over 14 years in different capacities. I'd done everything from lobbying in Washington, D.C. to working with grassroots environmental organizations overseas and domestically. What I heard constantly from all of these groups was their desire to go "beyond the choir". There was a shared recognition that it wasn't enough to have support from the people already on board, that reaching out to the general public was necessary for real social change to occur. Even though the groups had this recognition, I found that they kept using the same tactics.   » Read More

Walking through an organic farm one summer afternoon in Sonoma, Brock Larmer, the man who planted the kale and the cabbage, the tomatoes, onions, and other crops turned to us, laughed, and asked, "How would you feel if someone described their marriage as 'sustainable'?" We chuckled, uncertain where he was headed. "Resilient," he laughed, "that's the word you'd want." » Read More

Former ITP Grant Partner and Executive Director of  Pepperwood Preserve, Lisa Micheli has been interviewed in this recent KQED Science piece focusing on warming climate impacts on Bay Area open spaces and our ecosystem:

By the end of the century, the Bay Area's landscape could look more like Southern California's, raising tough questions for land managers trying to preserve the region's protected lands. MORE

SCIENCE, CULTURE and the PRINCIPLES OF NATURE

Among the principles of our work in the development of our "Seeding Possibilities" educational iPhone app is a desire to enhance interest and understanding of scientific research to increase youth interest in and enthusiasm for the study of science.

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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