Radical Joy for Hard Times has never claimed that the acts of beauty we offer to hurt places can actually heal them. Rather, we focus on repairing the relationship between people and places without expectation that the place will change as a result of our attention.

Every now and then, though, something remarkable happens. In 2013 photographer Simone Lipscomb was volunteering with a team near Gulf Shores, Alabama that monitored the nesting activity of loggerhead sea turtles. The loggerhead spends almost its entire life in the water, but when it’s time for the female to lay her eggs, she comes ashore and buries them in the sand. In recent years ATVs, dogs, and human carelessness have disrupted the nesting process and pushed the turtles onto the Endangered Species List.

For her Global Earth Exchange Simone and two friends used seaweed and driftwood to make a design of a sea turtle on the beach. A few days later she reported excitedly that a female turtle had laid her eggs very close to the sand turtle. Two nights later another turtle deposited her eggs near the design. It was almost as if the gift and the good intentions had communicated to the first turtle some kind of encouragement to come ashore and lay her eggs there, and the second turtle, grasping the “rightness” of the spot, followed suit.

Some people scorn the idea that such phenomena are a matter of cause-and-effect, insisting they are simply coincidence. The late Masaru Emoto was widely criticized for his claim, which he documented with photos, that meditating on polluted water and sending it love changed deformed water droplets into symmetrical beauties. Emoto died in 2014, but he was very enthusiastic when he learned about our Global Earth Exchange. “I truly wish the success of this event,” he wrote, “because what you are doing for the Earth is wonderful!!!”

Who knows: what today seems anecdotal and mystical will one day be discovered to have a sound scientific basis! In the meantime, we celebrate the emotional and spiritual shifts in ourselves when we make beauty for the Earth.

—Trebbe Johnson