Jules Weston / Where did the project idea come from?

fruits to seeds...

WHERE DID THE IDEA COME FROM?

WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?

Two questions I get asked all the time about the project that I’ll try to answer, at least in part…

BUT the answer to the second question really lies in the process of the project over the coming months. “It’s all about” how the process of this project affects the people taking part, how it changes the way they look at the world (theirs and others), how it changes the way they act and behave and also how they influence others’ to change. Of course we can talk about sustainable behaviour change but that must be the least inspiring combination of unimaginative words known in our language. I think it is more about the art of living, the creation and finding of meaning, rediscovering ourselves and what it means to be a human being alive in  2008 facing the pressures that we all face, yet finding that underneath our skins lies a unifying thread of humanity. Lofty ideals? Perhaps. But without lifting ourselves up to some noble aspirations, taking full responsibility and truthfully facing ourselves and where we come from as a species how can we genuinely hope to create a powerful vision of the next century for future generations of any species?

 So where did the idea for this project come from?

Well, like all ideas it is an amalgamation of thoughts, approaches, experiences, needs, creative process and partnerships. From my own perspective I can trace the birth of the idea back to about eighteen months ago when I was working up campaign and communication ideas for sustainable lifestyles for WWF and co-incidentally went on a WWF personal effectiveness course. There I was given an article called “For An Ecology of the Heart” that I will try to find for this blog. It was from Resurgence magazine, a magazine that I had (perhaps surprisingly) never heard of before, let alone read.

As soon as I read the words in “For An Ecology of the Heart” I was thrown into a storm of ideas and excitement – here, at last, was someone eloquently saying some of the things that I had been thinking and fumbling with for a while but had not yet found the means to express. I wondered if WWF could combine some form of these ideas with personal development approaches, communicate the concepts far wider and INSPIRE people to “sustainability” through a reconnection with nature and what it means to be human. For this communications project to work it would be far better to take real, interesting people on a journey spread over some time and for them to communicate it themselves. I believe there is nothing more powerful or affecting than personal experience. This led me on a personal quest to discover more about an inspiring and relatively unknown approach that combined art, nature, spirituality and psychology that I discovered mainly came under the name of eco psychology. Six months later I took part in the incredible eco therapy course run by Dave Key and Mary-Jayne Rust, upon which much of this project’s design and process is based (read Dave Key’s blog on here).

The intention is that we communicate as widely as possible about this project and research the process. The range of people taking part and the amount of time they will be thinking and creating should lead to some fascinating blogs (and potentially lifechanging experiences). For some of the blog readers the ideas and experience will resonate, for others it will leave them cold, but what this project won’t do is just leave people not knowing that this approach exists.  And just maybe…it could even create genuine, lasting change.