Wish You Were Here
Sharlene Leurig and I could not be more thrilled to share the news that our project, Wish You Were Here, was featured in the Spring 2021 issue of Orion Magazine.
Sharlene opens the project with, “As I write this introduction, new fires are burning, this time in Southern California. More fires will come after them. With each, I hope you will take the time to mourn, to pay tribute, to distill your rage and despair into the far more powerful and sustaining emotion of love. - Sharlene Leurig, Austin, TX, December 2017”
For Wish You Were Here Sharlene and I invited some of the most visually-talented humans we know are thinking about climate change to lift their voices in a visual song, exalting beloved places and creatures to the people who may never know them. The collection is meant to presage their passing, to mourn them, to celebrate them while they remain... and, hopefully, to inspire changes of course in day-to-day living and in our policies and practices around fuel, energy, water, food, equity, community, and the other interlocking pieces of the climate upon which we depend for survival.
The more of us who speak out on behalf of who and what we love—for each other, for Earth, for the future — the more it will be like singing.
My postcard (front and back shown below) is based on the effect projected sea level rise will have on my family’s favorite walk at the time I made the postcard.
We now invite you to contribute your own postcards to the collection – to write to the young people you know and to the elected officials whose actions will have strong effect on those young folks’ futures here on Earth. May your written words come with commitments to leaving our planetary home as habitable and welcoming to those who come after us as we humanly may.