WHAT IS A BIOSPHERE PROJECT

 

A biosphere Project is a photographic travel project that I am starting in order to help bring the convergence of ecological crises that our planet and our society is facing to the attention of the general public.  I want to do this starting from my possibilities, my vision, and my background as an artist, but not as an 'art project'. My intention is to help sound the alarm, but also to help disseminate information in an accessible way that points in the direction of solutions, often from very different thinking patterns than we are used to. I also want to help inspire as many people as possible to take their own actions and initiatives in this regard. We cannot and must not leave this convergence of ecological and other crises to the government, to science, to a few activists. We are all part of the story and each of us can contribute, no matter how modest.

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A photographic journey across Europe to portray the climate and biodiversity crisis

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A Biosphere Project includes a number of photographic essay journeys that I plan to make in the near future to portray this global crisis, which I call the 'biosphere crisis' rather than 'climate crisis'.

My intention is to make one long journey (or cluster of journeys) to every wind direction in Europe, depicting the ecological crisis in photographic essays.  Naturally, I want to make these trips as 'climate-friendly' as possible.

Some trips will be short, to rather nearby regions and cities. Others will be long and will take several months to complete.

The journeys to the four 'wind directions' of the world, which I will also use as 'chapters' on the website, will be an open process and 'work in progress', where coincidence and synchronicity may also play a role in how the path unfolds. In a sense, the journey is the goal, and the blog will be an ongoing record of that. Possibly the journeys can culminate in exhibitions or book publications in which photography and words can complement each other. But how that will manifest itself, I would like to let it emerge organically from the travels themselves.

In doing so, I not only want to portray landscapes and biotopes (the ones that are threatened or already suffering far-reaching damage, but also the beautiful places that have not yet been lost).

I also want to portray people: those who are already suffering from the climate crisis or the loss of our natural habitat, those who are developing new ways to live, those who are searching for solutions and a new paradigm for that different, more beautiful world we can build.

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A blog as a travel report and stream of thoughts

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One of these projects is also this website itself, as a platform for my blog and essays about the total crisis that threatens our environment: the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the pollution crisis,...and all evolutions that are directly or indirectly related to this ( such as the Corona crisis, the global food crisis, the refugee crisis, the economic crisis, and first of all, the crisis in our consciousness underlying all the aforementioned.

In my blog and essays, I want to highlight connections that don't always make it into the mainstream media, and help shed light on new perspectives that can point the way to new paradigms for a new worldview. The converging of crises that we as a planetary society are confronted with is in a sense an initiation, a transition to a new phase in the consciousness of man and his relationship with her environment. New thinkers, seers, seekers and movements and perspectives are already emerging all over the world. I'd like to help spread their work, as well as my personal thoughts in this regard. Some of my insights and ideas first emerged from my artistic work, and my intention is to present these insights in a more accessible way than is possible in my visual work. My intention is to develop a 'stream of consciousness', also in dialogue with others, a stream of thoughts that can coincide with the travel reports that I want to share via this website during my 'climate travels'.

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A search for the origin of the crisis between man and nature

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It is difficult for modern western people to believe that another, more beautiful world is possible, and that we can still escape a self-inflicted demise.

It is my impression that our society harbors an unconscious belief that all this is inevitable, that no other reality and outcome is possible, that as a planetary society we are incapable of change. Due to this unconscious belief, the subject also remains somewhat taboo. A response that I often hear when I mention the biosphere crisis is invariably: “I don't want to know”.

Negative beliefs therefore keep us unaware of the causes of the crisis as well as of possible solutions.

As part of A Biosphere Project, I would therefore like to help develop an antidote to the largely unconscious negative beliefs that determine our paradigm, and that have contributed to our current situation and the loss of our biotope. For we will not be able to save the planet with all its glorious variety of life forms, many of which have already left us, if we cannot initiate a great transformation in our consciousness.

That is why we need to better understand how we ended up in the current situation, on the brink of the abyss, through beliefs that have come into existence over hundreds of thousands of years. Many of the beliefs that determine our perception of reality and our relationship to our environment are unconscious. We take them for granted, and let these beliefs determine what we consider real and possible. A set of assumptions and beliefs that determine what we consider to be real is a "paradigm." And a major change in what people believe within a particular culture is called a "paradigm shift."

If we are to navigate this crisis, it will be necessary to go through a truly far-reaching 'paradigm shift' as happens only once every few centuries or even millennia.

Many visionary thinkers, seers, philosophers, artists, poets, therapists, spiritual seekers and scientists have already done much work in developing a new paradigm.

They have already lifted more than a corner of the veil of possible causes of our disturbed relationship with our environment, and search for new beliefs that can radically change our consciousness and our possibilities for action, but this work rarely enters the wider social consciousness. and debate, partly because of the dynamics and demands of today's mainstream media. I would therefore like to help spread this work in order to introduce as many people as possible to different ways of thinking than we are used to.

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A collaboration between art and science

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These journeys will require preparation, and for this I want to consult experts and people who know the field I will be entering: climatologists, biologists and people from other branches of science; activists, but also people who know well the countries or places through which I will travel and who can guide me in these different situations, cultures and domains through which my journeys will take me.

These preparations will also form part of the blog in themselves, and may give rise to other initiatives, collaborations and projects.

In this research I want to supplement the scientific perspective with other perspectives that allow a different approach. Science is an extremely important tool in the fight against the various ecological crises that threaten the planet, but science alone cannot save us. A wider perspective must be rediscovered, and different ways of 'knowing' - the scientific, the artistic, the spiritual, the mystical,... - must meet again, as was the case once. Only from a new relationship to cognition, intuition, feeling and imagination  we will be able to expand our current world view to one that re-situates ourselves as an inseparable part of an essentially sacred reality in which everything is connected to everything.

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A nomadic life project and quest in consciousness

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That is why A Biosphere Project is also a journey through my own consciousness - I expect nothing less but that my own  insights will change profoundly as my journey progresses, that my perspective will shift, and that my being will undergo a profound transformation.

It will be a journey not only to other countries but also within myself: the inner and outer journey are one and the same.

My intention is to undertake these journeys as a kind of 'pilgrimage', in a way that allows me to follow my intuition and also stay close to the elements. I see the months-long life on (and off) the road as a kind of nomadic way of life, and this can symbolize the parallel journey in consciousness, in which I also want to leave room for unexpected turns and intuitive detours, and where nothing has to be fixed in advance.

During this process I would also like to conduct my own research in my own consciousness into the reasons why it is so difficult for us to believe in anything other than our current materialistic paradigm. For I am an ordinary person, no different from anyone else; and everything I run into in my journey are obstacles that everyone runs into.

Therefore, the "stream of thought" and self-examination that I would like to develop through my blog and my essays is not intended as a mere intellectual or academic exercise, but as an examination of the nature of the self, of consciousness, of beliefs and perspectives that have brought us to our current situation. Because we need to change those beliefs. As Audre Lorde put it: 'The master's tools will not dismantle the master's house'. Or as Albert Einstein said: "No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it".

Therefore, a profound shift of consciousness and perception is needed, and I want to examine my own consciousness first of all - after all, it is the one thing I can be absolutely sure of: my own sensations, and all the creations of my consciousness: my story, my emotions, my thoughts, my fears, my traumas, my loves, my beliefs.

My consciousness is an inseparable part of the biosphere, as is the consciousness of every living being in that biosphere. The consciousness of all of us is therefore one of the most powerful actors in that biosphere: it is the human consciousness that is not in balance with the living tissue of the planet. It is our consciousness, and especially its limitations, that is the ultimate cause of the derailment of the climate, the destabilization of the impossibly complex equilibriums in our biosphere, and the loss of life on this planet.

The climate and biodiversity crisis is not 'anybody's fault', we don't have to look for 'the bad guys' who have this on their conscience. We are all co-actors in this story, and our situation arises from the beliefs we all hold together, and from the blind spots in our awareness. We cannot save the world if we don't all take a great journey to a different way of consciousness and perception.

 

WHY I START THIS PROJECT

 

Isn't there already a growing general awareness of the ecological crisis we find ourselves in?

Our environment, our habitat, our planet is in critical condition. The realization of the true magnitude and seriousness of this crisis is only very slowly penetrating the general consciousness. Since I started building this website in the fall of 2020, the climate crisis has (finally) become a bit more prominent due to ongoing natural disasters and extreme weather in the US and Europe.

At the time of writing this text, early August 2021, the climate crisis is undeniably present in the here and now: there have just been devastating floods in Germany and Belgium resulting in more than two hundred deaths; unprecedented forest fires are raging in Turkey, Greece and Italy. In many places in Europe, heat waves and extreme precipitation alternate. The climate crisis is also in full swing in other parts of the world, and that too is finally starting to gain some attention - albeit only slowly - in our mainstream media.

And just yesterday there was the sixth report from the IPCC, which paints another bleak and alarming picture of the situation.

But even then, awareness among the wider public remains patchy and incomplete. Moreover, the climate crisis, in its increasingly tangible consequences, is not being linked to the biodiversity crisis and other ecological crises, which together pose a threat not only to the survival of our species, but also and above all to the living tissue of the entire planet, the organism Gaia, of which we are an inseparable part.

Our thinking is also generally still situated in a mechanistic framework, which sees the climate as a technical problem for which we may or may not find a technical solution. More technology as a rescue. This view can be seen as part of the problem: our view of the world and ourselves as complicated machines. Only if we go through an initiation to a different worldview, which can re-assign intrinsic value to the world and ourselves, see again as 'sacred' in and of itself and not just as a collection of resources, will we have a chance to to turn.

As Orland Bishop puts it: “If we don't initiate ourselves, nature will initiate us.” And it looks like our  initiation by nature has begun.

 

Just as my inner and outer journeys are one, we and our biosphere are one and the same organism: what we do to our planet, we do to ourselves. My journey therefore aims to touch the consciousness of as many people as possible from my experience and to inspire them to make their own journey. After all, everyone can play a part in the new world that we have to create, if we want to be able to leave our children, grandchildren and their children not an unlivable, not 'just' a livable, but a flourishing world, in which the other living beings with whom we share our planet can thrive and prosper in abundance as well.

We can't wait for a rescue from the government, from science, from a small number of activists…everyone who is part of this biosphere, meaning literally everyone, can play a part in its rescue. This role can be very modest or large-scale, it doesn't really matter. No one is powerless in this, however much we may be inclined to believe the contrary.

 

Nothing can stay the same if we want to survive and save the living tissue of our planet from catastrophic further degradation and death.

We will have to rethink everything: energy, economy, agriculture, food, money as an institution and collective agreement, international trade and the international monetary system, travel and mobility, education, social security, international solidarity, and so on and so forth. Nothing less than a whole new worldview and paradigm is needed.

I would like to touch on these aspects both in the photographic essays and in my blog, also helping to spread the work of people who have already done a lot to develop new paradigms.

A Biosphere Project is a kaleidoscopic project, which can run an open course. In that sense, it can become a kind of intuitive and open creation, which can gradually take on other forms.

Initially a project that I started myself in the form of a blog and a platform for essays and photographic documents; but possibly also a starting point for encounters, interdisciplinary collaborations and new initiatives arising from this.

The project should become an open, intuitive and lively investigation into the crisis we are in, but also into the possibilities for growth and development of humanity if we go through this initiation . We can create a better world, a more beautiful world, a more just and harmonious world.

The choice is ours.