Readers may be interested in the following Press Release received from Radical Joy for Hard Times:

GROUPS FORMING WORLDWIDE TO SPEND TIME IN ECOLOGICALLY DAMAGED PLACES

On June 19, 2010, people around the world will gather at the kinds of places most people prefer to avoid: clear-cut forests, polluted rivers, urban development, and many more. Sponsored by Radical Joy for Hard Times, a nonprofit organization in Thompson, PA, the event, the Global Earth Exchange, aims to launch a new approach to environmental activism, one based not on guilt and fear, but on people’s love of nature and their distress when it is damaged.

Thompson, PA. May 15, 2010. On June 19, in Wyoming Country, West Virginia a small group of people will meet at the site of a mountain whose top was detonated by coal companies to facilitate mining. They won’t be there to protest, as activist groups in the region often do. There won’t be a picket sign in sight. Instead, this group will gather to share their personal feelings about how the landscape they grew up with has changed and how those changes affect their lives. They’ll also spend time sitting in silence on the land, simply absorbing what they see and hear. Finally, they will give back some “act of beauty” to the place, such as a song, a prayer, or a piece of sculpture they create together out of found materials.

Like dozens of other communities around the world, the West Virginians will be participating in the Global Earth Exchange, an event designed to encourage people to take a new, more personal look at the ecologically damaged places and endangered species in their own communities. The sponsor of the event, Radical Joy for Hard Times of Thompson, PA, is recruiting volunteers to host the free events on every one of the seven continents in the world, including Antarctica. The aim of the gatherings is not to protest what has been or might be done there to threaten the ecology, but to give people the opportunity to re-establish a connection with places that were once important to them.

Besides West Virginia, Global Earth Exchange programs are scheduled for London, at the site of the 2012 Olympics; Hessen, Germany at a mountain, sacred to pre-Christian people, where the U.S. maintained a satellite after the Cold War; the Winooski River watershed in Vermont; the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

When a park, river, feature of the landscape, or even an entire neighborhood becomes polluted, or littered, clearcut, or damaged in some other way, the tendency is to ignore it. According to Trebbe Johnson, founder and executive director of Radical Joy for Hard Times, however, “People love the natural places in their communities. When those places are destroyed, they feel sorrow, anger, guilt. The relationship doesn’t end just because the place has changed, even if it has changed drastically.” The mission of the non-profit organization, founded in 2009, is to reunite people and the damaged places in their community, so as to increase people’s emotional attachment to nature. Johnson said that the goal of the group is to have events at 100 sites that she calls “wounded places” on June 19.

Previous Earth Exchanges have been held on the Hudson River, where dredging is underway to clean up toxic PCBs; at an abandoned lot in Ojai, PA; at a coal-fired power plant near Binghamton, NY; and even at an oasis in the Sahara Desert made unsightly by litter. Before starting the non-profit, Johnson, a writer who also leads workshops and contemplative wilderness trips, held similar events at a clearcut forest in British Columbia and at Ground Zero in New York two months after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

According to a recent article in The New York Times, an Australian philosopher, Glenn Albrecht, coined the term “solastalgia,” meaning “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault.” With the Global Earth Exchanges, organizers hope that people will begin the process of resolving that pain by spending time in the very places that provoke difficult feelings. Albrecht will be hosting a Global Earth Exchange of his own in Hunter Valley, Australia, where high-tech coal mining is creating noise, air, water, and soil pollution.

Radical Joy for Hard Times is a non-profit organization founded in 2009 to find and make beauty in wounded places. Trebbe Johnson, the founder and executive director, is the author of The World Is a Waiting Lover and numerous articles on the subjects of nature, spirituality, and mythology. To learn more about Radical Joy for Hard Times, visit our website. (www.radicaljoyforhardtimes.org)

CONTACT:

For more information about the Global Earth Exchange or Radical Joy for Hard Times, contact Eugene Hughes in London (eugene.hughes@peoplebrands.com) or Trebbe Johnson in the US (trebbejohnson@gmail.com).