RadJoy member Andy Carnahan first contacted us in the spring of this year. He had heard about our work and was interested in participating in the Global Earth Exchange on behalf of his beloved Morton National Park in New South Wales, Australia. The park, which covers almost half a million acres, was badly burned during eight weeks of rampant brush fires during the Southern Hemisphere summer at the end of 2019 and in the first few weeks of this year.
Along with other volunteers from his community of Bundanoon, Andy was part of a group administering aid to wildlife in the fire-stricken park. They set up water and feed stations to provide sustenance to kangaroos, wallabies, and wombats as well as smaller arboreal animals. They also installed wildlife surveillance cameras at the stations and monitored them to determine how the system was working and what needed to be done to improve it.
For their Global Earth Exchange, the Bundanoon group arranged a picnic in the park for volunteers. People were then invited to go for a walk on the slowly recovering land and bring back some small and meaningful item for the circle. “It was very moving to stand around the circle,” Andy wrote.
This month, the Bundanoon Lions Club held their annual scarecrow contest. Andy’s group created Hope (photo above), the final being to emerge from Pandora’s mythic box of ills. She was created in honor of Morton National Park, which had been so badly damaged and out of whose ashes, as Andy reported, Hope was beginning to emerge. This exuberant Hope figure shared top prize with another scarecrow.
What better way to honor a place you love: with a combination of activism, celebration and ceremony, and art.
Trebbe is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover and 101 Ways to Make Guerrilla Beauty. Her new book, Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty, will be published in Fall 2018 by North Atlantic Books. Her articles about people’s emotional and spiritual relationship with nature have appeared in Orion, Sierra, Ecopsychology, The Ecologist, The Nation, Harper’s and other magazines. She lives with her husband, Andrew Gardner, in rural northeastern Pennsylvania, a region currently under exploitation by natural gas companies.
Image Credit:
- Hope Bundanoon: Andy Carnahan
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