Celebrate Home!

As women, we do so much to make the place that we live a peaceful and inviting home for our families. There are countless blogs out there dedicated to decorating and home-making ideas... it's a trillion dollar industry. What can we do as women, though, do to make this earth truly feel like home?

I love to travel and I've been to almost fifty countries. In my travels, I've seen countless vistas of beauty as well as countless images that make my heart incredibly heavy. Its like the difference between walking into someone's home that is well maintained and walking into one of the homes you might see in the tv show Hoarders.

Today, is the 40th annual Earth Day, as you hopefully know. 'Saving the planet' can be a daunting task, and its fairly hubris of us to even say those words. When we think of all the problems in this world, its easy to get overwhelmed and instead do nothing (like the people who have hoarding addictions).

On this day though, I want to encourage us all to 'think little', as Wendell Berry says. Start small. Do little things that can make a difference and do them consistently.

Plant a thought, reap an act. Plant an act, reap a habit. Plant a habit, reap a character. 

Plant a character, reap a destiny." - Confucius

source (I love this guy's work!)

If you haven't seen the Documentary Home, you must see it!! If you don't celebrate earth day, please at least see this. 

Another awesome doc. I watched last week is called Cradle to Cradle.

Here's a little blurb about it: Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in na tions like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill. But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), produc tion and consumption could become beneficial for the planet. A design and production concept that they call Cradle to Cradle. A concept that is seen as the next industrial revolution. • Design every product in such a way that at the end of its lifecycle the component materials become a new resource. • Design buildings in such a way that they produce energy and become a friend to the environment. Large companies like Ford and Nike are working with McDonough and Braun gart to change their production facilities and their products. They realize that economically seen waste is destruction of capital. You make something with no value. Based on their ideas the Chinese government is working towards a circular economy where Waste = Food. An amazing story that will definitely change your way of thinking about production and consumption.

One little idea is to buy Eco-friendly items on sites such as Etsy, or at antique or vintage shops.

source

So, Happy Home Day! Let's make it a nice place to live (together).

Genesis

I recently discovered the work of Brazilian photographer/ photojournalist, Sebastião Salgado. I know I've seen his work before, but it was always one piece at a time within the context of some article or something, and I never really took note of his name or bothered to look up who he was or see many of his works all together. As I hope you agree, his work is very moving.

Salgado works in the humanitarian and social documentary vein, seeking out indigenous cultures as well as impoverished ones, with previous projects including migrant workers, displaced peoples, famine and war torn lands, and political issues. He uses photography as a means to the end, utilizing its immediate visual story telling capabilities as a tool to further urgent political and social issue based discussion. (via Photography for a Greener Planet)

His newest project is entitled 'Genesis', in which he travels to remote locations in jungles, deserts, and ocean locations. He is attempting to is piece together a visual story about the effects of modern development on the environment. Hie kind of doing this in reverse though by trying to find pockets though that are still unaffected by globalization. He says in a New York Times article, “I have named this project GENESIS because my aim is to return to the beginnings of our planet: to the air, water and the fire that gave birth to life, to the animal species that have resisted domestication, to the remote tribes whose ‘primitive’ way of life is still untouched, to the existing examples of the earliest forms of human settlement and organisation. A potential path towards humanity’s rediscovery of itself. So many times I’ve photographed stories that show the degradation of the planet, I thought the only way to give us an incentive, to bring hope, is to show the pictures of the pristine planet – to see the innocence. And then we can understand what we must preserve.”

I have included some photos from that project here, as well as some from a previous project, Migrations: Humanity in Transition.