"When our lights fail we'll count stars.
When our aquifers empty, we'll drink love.
It'll probably be tomorrow morning,
I would wake up early just in case."
- from "Waiting For Things To Get Worse"
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Our worlds are changing so fast! Seems like each day brings more drastic news. As we learn to integrate each new change facing our generation on the planet - environmental, cultural, political, technological, and spiritual thresholds all arriving at the same time - it's a lot of transformation to imagine going through.
How's it all been going for you? How is your home shifting - or not - with the times? The choices we make around the planet THIS DECADE will touch generations to come, affect vital limbs of earthly life. But we're waiting, held down, overwhelmed, met with our most intense feelings - despair, dread, rage, guilt, shame - and so we understandably numb out, turn away again. The world is too much.
Because encouraging humanity
to focus on climate change requires
creative education,
regenerative spaces,
and radical art ~
Eco Courageous Education Creations
are currently creating CURRICULUM ~
offering three branches of engagement,
which you can support today ~
EVENTS * MEDIA MAKING * ART-ACTIVISM
ECEC is currently creating eco-curriculum ~ offering conscious, compassionate, fun, and often seriously funny educational ecological experiences.
We share skills around ecological reconnection and resilience, practice placemaking and peacemaking, and expand our connections through outdoor immersions, art, music, movement, and media making.
Importantly, we also set safe space for holding and processing what may show up as difficult, intense, frightening, or numbed feelings for our rapidly changing homescapes.
We mean home to include both house and town, body and bioregion, family and planet. We appreciate different scales and perspectives. And we give special consideration to solastalgia - the homesickness experienced as our homes disappear around us.
Right now Eco Courageous work needs your help - to encourage more communities, children and adults, to share skills for facing our climate challenges creatively and courageously - via concrete steps that catalyze collaborations, inspire climate confidence, and strengthen solidarities.
The specific projects supported through this campaign are a new album of music, a video series, and ecocourageous events and workshops. See video updates above, or text below, for more details.
NEW PRESS!
Town Topics: Princeton Native Joshua Halpern Has Unique Approach to Climate Crisis
Hub Oakland: Transforming Home Together: Solastalgia, Solidarity, and Silliness
MORE TESTIMONIALS HERE
DETAILS, BUDGET, PERKS,
and EXPERIENCE AVAILABLE BELOW
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- LEARN and SHARE SKILLS for ecological reconnection, resilience, and courage.
- HONOR our experiences of climate numbness or despair, denial or dread, and especially SOLASTALGIA - the homesickness felt as our homes disappear around us.
- FOSTER IMAGINATION, grow gratitudes, and cultivate creativity for community climate challenges.
- PRACTICE PLACEPLAYING for transforming our
homescapes together.
Upcoming Events (Dates Soon):
* Climate Fear Cafes
* Witnessing Water: Mokelumne River East Bay Water Tours
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Communities around the globe weave the cycles of life and death into their place on the body of earth, as they have for generations.
Joshua Halpern, the founder of Eco Courageous Education Creations, has traveled around the world, from Hawaii to the Himalayas, sharing stories from small family farms and community cultivated sacred sites, honoring ancestral dynamics still alive and vital.
Explore Josh's body of work, decades of multimedia explorations, at outsidejosh.com, and as more educators and art activists collaborate, they'll become available through ecocourageous.com. Producing media that feels aligned? Get in touch, we'd love to feature you!
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AN ALBUM OF SONGS AND MUSIC VIDEOS FROM HOME HOWLS
Home Howls produces seriously funny climate justice imaginings, live looped into unexpectedly sexy beats, sometimes costumed as future animals, or nuclear meltdowns, or galactic supercluster starsheds, making for astonishing live performances.
Ok, Home Howls is still all Josh so far, looping his voice and adding each instrument himself live, including drums, guitar, even glockenspeil. This campaign continues the expansion of Josh's environminstrel/edge-jester musical horizons by supporting the creation of a new band, recording an album's worth of music, and completing music videos Josh and his generous friends have already begun.
Home Howls and a rotating crew of friends spent every Friday in June 2014 filming at stunning locations around the Bay, where the confluence of local and global ecologies are transforming most rapidly, most beautifully, or most worryingly. With this campaign, we will be able to start up filming again for JULY 2015!
WHAT YOU'RE $UPPORTING:
Joshua Halpern, MA (bio below) works for a Bay Area Honey Farm and for the last five years has been offering his eco educational art and teachings ~ in the lineage of his teacher and neighbor Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects ~ as gifts, for free. Now he's poised to expand on some huge collaborations ~ but there are several next steps that are out of Josh's reach as a honey vendor.
This campaign is an opportunity for you to support both the steps necessary for Josh's next specific projects to blossom (currently an album of music, a video series, and teaching events) as well as expanding the world of Eco Courageous collaborations and exchanges between both biologically and culturally diverse communities.
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$14,000 - Any Time Now People - Home Howls Video Series
Short videos have become a language we all speak, and are one of the primary branches of Eco Courageous Education Creations. We have a series of videos planned touring transformational ecology sites around the world.
Putting climate catastrophe questions to sexy funny beats on a tour of gorgeously transforming Bay Area sacred ecology sites, Josh Halpern has already created hours of beautiful content, just with the help of his phenomenal friends, the beauty of the shifting landscape, and almost no money whatsoever.
The videos - part musical celebration, part environmental education - are ready! Ready for (rather than Josh filling all of these roles) more amazing talent, locations, costumes, camera and sound crew, with all the professionals needed for production and postproduction - an editor, an animator, an effects person - all to pay fairly, and then produce and publish and share together, as widely as possible!
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$9,000 - Any Time Now People - Home Howls Album: Music videos depend on beautifully recorded music, which means getting Josh out of his house. This covers the costs of recording a 12 song album for an independent artist: recording, musician fees, mixing/mastering, production, design, printing, distribution, etc.
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$3,000 - Training Fees - To improve Josh's skills and resources as an educational facilitator, as well as to connect with other eco-artist-activists and communities, Josh will further explore The Work That Reconnects with Joanna Macy, take courses on planetary hospice with Stephen Jenkinson's Orphan Wisdom School, learn Ecology of Leadership with James Stark, pursue Justice And Ecology Training with Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, commit to vocal trainings for the music, and Wilderness First Aid Certifications for the nature immersions ~ with fees ranging from $250 to $1500.
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$2,400 - SONY NEX-VG30 Camera: An exceptional video camera (huge sensor, interchangeable lenses) for taking Eco Courageous media making to the next outstanding levels.
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$650 - K8 1000 Watt Speaker - Live Performances: All of Home Howls songs so far have come through a sweet but tiny box amp. Each show has featured one or two folks with the feedback "I couldn't hear all your words." We're gonna make sure you all hear all the words!
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$500 Workshop Expansion Budget: Covers initial space fees, promotional items, food and transportation, website upgrades.
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$150 - Mini Keyboard and MIDI controller: For expanding the range of howls.
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$150 - Effects Pedal: How we can be affective without effects??
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$150 - A Decent Microphone: So you can clearly hear our ecologies transforming!
Which adds up exactly to a $30,000 campaign, and then if we add the 10% that Indiegogo takes off, brings us to $33,000. Any funds received over this mark will be put towards increasing the depth and breadth of Eco Courageous Education Creations by developing:
a kids CURRICULUM, more TOURS, a traveling ROADSHOW, a television SERIES, and more creative collaborations!
Each of us learn to hold and share our experiences of the shifting planet at our own pace. Joining each other in common concern with honesty, humor, gratitude and courage opens supportive and imaginative healing space for solidarity and skill-sharing. You can help these creative courageous blossoms bloom.
Face your future! We have some ecoGORRRgeous PERKS!!!
NEW OFFERINGS:
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JOCELYN JACKSON, founder & nourisher at JUSTUS Kitchen ~ creating liberation and love with every meal ~ is graciously offering us FOUR outstanding perk options for savoring our sacred connections through food.
Bakers Dozen of Customized Organic Cookies ($30) Jocelyn will call on the bounty of the season and your favorite sweet experiences to create a cookie recipe just for you. Included in the gift box is a handwritten recipe card to recreate your customized cookies at home.
Recycled Denim and African Textile Apron ($70) Jocelyn will make and send you one of her recycled denim aprons with African textile accents. She'll also include a seasonal recipe to try out the first time you wear it.
Seasonal Organic Dinner for Two ($100) Jocelyn loves love and will make a seasonal 4 course meal for you and someone you hold dear to enjoy. She'll also bring a brassicas bouquet, candle light, and a poem honoring our deep connection to the story of food and one another.
Customized Cooking Class & Seasonal Organic Dinner for Two ($275) Jocelyn agrees with the saying, "Cooking with love provides food for the soul." She looks forward to joining you at the hearth to bring the love letters between cooks she calls recipes to life. You will get to select a technique and a world cuisine to focus on during the 2 hour class. She'll leave you to enjoy your 4 course dinner with a brassicas bouquet, candle light, and a poem honoring our deep connection to the story of food and one another.
Dinners are limited to Bay Area locals, but we can send you cookies and aprons anywhere! Deep deep gratitude to Jocelyn for all the sustenance she cooks up for communities near and far, and for her generosity to this campaign. Yum yum yum!
OFFER EXPIRED:
Courageous Creativity: The Work that Reconnects, Wildness, and Music as Medicine Workshop
Lydia Harutoonian M.A., Penny Livingston M.A., and members of the musical group Rising Appalachia, Leah Song and Chloe Smith will guide us through a deep experience on the land, exploring the connections between negotiating the realities of our time, music as medicine, and reconnecting to the wild. Joanna Macy Ph.D will offer a special teaching Wednesday morning.
Lydia will be our main guide in the Work that Reconnects, Penny will guide us in observing and listening with the land, Leah and Chloe will lead us in Global Sound Movement work as we engage in the profound teachings of the Work That Reconnects, and Joanna will offer us a teaching around empowerment, trust, and deep time. There will be a private concert on Tuesday night with Leah, Chloe and special guests that will be open to the local community.
Support these amazing teachers and Eco Courageous Education Creations at the same time! Enrollment has filled up fast, but we have ONE SPOT WAITING for YOU if you grab this perk. Join us for these powerful two days ~ June 2nd and 3rd, 2015, at Commonweal Garden in Bolinas, California.
More details here!
SCOOP THIS UP TODAY! But also, if you don't get to scoop this one, don't worry! We've got plenty of perks to go around! Like...
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PHOTO BOOKS
4 different books! 4 different sizes!
Choose from:
Ecospiritual Selfies MystiCali![]()
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Share the Sacred and 12.21.12
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with MORE BOOKS of photos and POETRY becoming available over the course of this campaign!
2015 or 2016 CALENDARS: $222
Choose from:
Groves Friends that Food Fitting Into the Infinite
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PHOTO PRINTS
Choose from 12 Different Prints Here
High Quality Digital Copy: $8
Smaller High Quality Physical Print: $18
Medium High Quality Physical Print: $45
Large Poster Sized High Quality Physical Print: $165
ANY TIME NOW PEOPLE
~THE ALBUM~
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ARRIVING LATER THIS YEAR!
ALBUM MP3 Download: $14 - Get the album first, as soon as it's ready.
CD: $20 - Buy the physical CD, like, for CD players.
VINYL: $88 - limited edition vinyl, you know who you are.
OTHER SPECIAL PERKS:
$110: Be in our music video! Home Howls will be filming in stunning locations around the bay where the ecology is transforming most rapidly. (If you're local) come play with us! If you're not local, there'll be opportunities for you to be in a video too! Coming soon!
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$120 Haircut Josh will cut your hair. It's something Josh loves doing and is actually really skillful at. You can ask any of his previous haircuttees. The only bad haircut he ever gave was to his Brooklyn housemate who insisted Josh cut his hair by candlelight, listening to opera on full volume. Josh will make sure we have enough light to see what's hairpening.
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$145: Consultations For individuals, partners, houses and communities - how are the changes around us affecting your life now and your expectations for life in the future? Josh will offer a 90 min conscious, compassionate holding of the hardest parts and reassuring support for transformational imagination and agency around these challenging questions.
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$650: Design Your Own ECEC Workshop Josh will design an Eco Courageous workshop to meet your community's needs. That could mean so many things. Let's discuss!
More Perks Arriving Weekly...
ROOTS AND ORIGINS
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The art and teachings carried inside this Eco Courageous basket, while gratefully held in supportive community, have so far remained solely the soul expression of 33 year old Joshua Halpern, MA, in the direct lineage of Josh's neighbor and teacher Joanna Macy, who has stood for six decades as one of the greatest living guides for healing the woundings of our planet.
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Josh has been sharing sacred earthly relationships through art for over two decades, with a special sensitivity to the relationships that accompany transforming home. Josh was born and raised at the confluence of the Matawan and Wopowog Rivers in Princeton NJ, the son of two professors committed to both the journeys of the soul and the achievement of justice on the planet. Josh grew up playing in his father's garden and in the woods by the river, loving writing, music, and photography from a young age. He received a BFA in Film/Television from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2004.
While in school, Josh’s father Manfred died, and Josh spent the next several years making art unfolding his family’s reactions to this loss. A few of these works can be found here. Having discovered a great deal about his roots, Josh turned his attention to stories outside of himself, launched outsidejosh.com, and went WWOOFing - traveling around the world for 9 months in 2007, lending a hand on organic farms in Hawaii, the Philippines, Thailand, and India. Josh’s film about this journey WWOOF ‘n Wander (53 mins) is streaming here in seven parts.
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Upon returning to his home hemisphere, Josh worked for three years as the Organic Produce Coordinator for the best natural food store in New Jersey, the Whole Earth Center, deepening his connection with local food and food justice, and helping his mother vacate the house his family had called home for 50 years.
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Working with his heart and hands, helping tend close relationships between people and soil, Josh began to recognize planetary forces interconnecting within the choices available to neighborhoods on the ground. He became moved to really study all the strands - what's unravelling and what's weaving together around us - and add more minds to his mix of understanding.
So in 2010 Josh moved to the Bay Area to pursue a masters degree at the California Institute of Integral Studies, studying with a community of deeply caring and conscious cross-pollinating scholars, healers and activists, receiving his MA in Integral Ecologies in 2013.
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Integral Ecologists help communities and individuals regenerate mutually enhancing relationships with the Earth. This can cover a range of earthly scales - from building local systems to perpetuate what's precious to different communities - to attending to the needs of families whose homes can no longer hold them, falling into the already staggering numbers of climate-based refugees around the world. Josh doesn't have anywhere near all the answers, but in consultation work, teaching events, and creative placeplaying, he cultivates a steady ability to hold and share the questions, and integrates great diversities of perspective for deeply crucial choices, drawing from different directions depending on the details, including ~
~ ecopsychology
~ expressive arts therapy
~nature based healing modalities
somatics ~
~ permaculture ~ transition town initiatives
growing food as medicine~
~regenerative design
~integrative health
up-to-date climate science ~
~ planetary biologies
cosmology ~
~ quantum physics deep ecology ~
~ ecofeminism
environmental ethics ~
~ the spectrum of ecological humanities
~ indigenous wisdom traditions
~ cross-cultural spiritual understandings
~ immanent place-based ceremonies
~ the responsibilities of
shared solidarities in the
continuing struggles
for peace and
health and
justice.
While not creating educational art, Josh juuuuuuust gets by selling local raw honey at farmers markets all over the Bay Area for Marshall's Honey Farm, and he loves this job - the opportunity to trade fresh food with neighbors, talk about how the bees are doing, track how the drought's affecting his farmer friends at the market.
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So far, Josh has continued to offer almost of all of the creative eco-educational art and teaching he's developed for free, as gifts to the communities he loves and is concerned for. Josh trusts this work has become the confluence of his life's rivers, and he sees helping folks deal with the changing planet as his life's work - far beyond this campaign and even beyond the places he currently wishes to hold as home. It would be helpful for this commitment to generate a livable income while the world changes and our work ramps up, but Josh will continue to show up as a bridge between generations, however strong the winds on the bridge may blow. Crowd-funding allows for the grounded and realizable steps to build this commitment to the levels where fruitful collaborations become inevitable.
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Josh is currently calling himself a Metamorphosis Ecologist (though you can call him whatever you want.) He feels this sounds poetic and honors the imaginal cells in the dying caterpillars that transform into butterflies. Most folks will not have met a Metamorphosis Ecologist before, or even want to. Josh messes up plans by truth telling. But he's learned to shake people up lovingly, and for some time he's been able to cultivate a life where community really supports and encourages new ways of relating. And there are generations of learning ahead of us. Healing relationships with the transforming earth is, as they say, a "growth industry".
Testimonials here
Challenges and Potentials
Indiegogo encourages us to be forthright with challenges our projects might face. There are personal and political challenges to the work Eco Courageous Education Creations have planned here.
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Josh is deeply committed to providing avenues where silenced voices (the oppressed, the near extinct, the magical) can sing, places where each of our neighbors is welcomed in wholeness. He is driven to make a real difference in healing people's relationships with their home. So it doesn't always feel clear how dancing in disappearing marshes, or dressing up as future animals helps anyone directly. This is a very important question for each of us. What does help? Josh is really curious. Some aspects of our lives change too quickly, others agonizingly slow. No matter what we might do, it gets grim sometimes. There's truth in that hopelessness. But doom and gloom don't inspire, won't ignite anyone's passion or agency. We each know the ways we try to help or hold back the tide. But holding and sharing our shifting worlds also seems to require letting in increasing amounts of unbearable information and persisting with courage towards what seems impossible.
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This reveals one of our main gifts of this moment - the challenge of embracing radical uncertainty. As Joanna Macy says, "If anyone tells you they know how it's going to turn out, don't believe them!" When facing the deepest unknowns we've collectively encountered, doesn't it help to feel held in the supportive arms of a rapidly expanding community of eco-activist souls rising in love and defense of the planet? We're moving through and beyond our individual separate stories, into strategies and solutions that include all of us. Supporting creativity and courage, mixing humor into our heartbreak, we learn to hold and share this sacred home together, and we imagine and commit to all the healing our particular place and position provides.
Thank you for doing everything you can today! Our brightest lights, currently throwing themselves into these climate questions, having reached the effectiveness limits of graphs and charts and lectures, all continue to call out for alternative educational models, and for radical art.
This is what Josh, through his body and soul, is able to offer today. You can help him continue bringing these offerings to the world. Josh releases expectations that Eco Courageous Education Creations will save civilization or rescue the functioning biosphere. But every chance he gets, Josh very much wants to support honesty, humor, healing, gratitude, generosity, inspiration, imagination, curiosity, and courage ~ as we unfurl our future together.
Or, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke comes through Joanna Macy's translation, to "love the things as no one has thought to love them":
Dear darkening ground,
you've endured so patiently the walls we've built,
perhaps you'll give the cities one more hour
and grant the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor—let their work
grip them another five hours, or seven,
before you become forest again, and water, and widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.
Just give me a little more time!
I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they're worthy of you and real.
- Book of Hours, I 61
Other Ways You Can Help
Deep gratitude for sharing this moment together, and of course not everyone is able to help financially. If you'd like to collaborate with us, enliven the eco courageous community, come on down! Or we can come to you! Get in touch, joshua@ecocourageous.com, for any reason in the world. We'd love if you send us a testimonial or endorsement or blurb if you've been already moved by Josh's work. But really, everything you do that encourages courage in the face of climate change is absolutely welcome. Courage grows from our togetherness.
Eco Courageous Education Creations also has a patreon page (coming soon), as well as
ecocourageous.com where you can read more details, and all shares, tweets, likes, and in person hugs are super beneficial and welcome as well.
Thanks,
Fruitful transformations!
Josh
