Love Your Nature 2017 Summer Family Program
For the Summer 2017 season, the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center is offering an interactive environmental education feature for kids and families designed by the curator, Bonnie Gisel, called "Love Your Nature." Visitors of all ages are tracing their hand on construction paper (of all colors), representing the diversity of people, cutting them out, and hanging their hand print on the mantel--along with all other visitor hand prints.
There is a wooden kinetic sculpture on the center table that serves as the sign to introduce the project, made out of native wood, and a sign with information available for visitors about the Sierra Club's Equity-Diversity-Inclusion campaign. This project "Love Your Nature" celebrates the Sierra Club "Equity" program and represents inclusiveness and commonality of our lives together and in relation with the nature world--urban, suburban, agricultural, rural, and wild.
We are living in an era in which the objective is to enlist everyone--regardless of gender, ethnicity, demographic, economic status or culture, to save our planet. And, in which we are called not only to be inclusive of all human beings, but inclusive of the natural world. Our approach will provide a platform for equity and justice for all and for the world in which we live And, we are responsible to reach into the future with big hearts to embrace an intergenerational ethic. The future belongs to our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and the future generations of the flora and fauna with whom we interact in ways we do not always even perceive. Here on this platform we may engage to solve the greatest environmental challenges we face, remembering this planet is our Home. "Love Your Nature"!
The "Love Your Nature" program is just one of the many summer programs provided for families at the Yosemite Conservation Heritage Center. Earlier programs include the Wilderness Qult Project, "Dr. Nature's EQ - 1-1-52," "Words for Wilderness," the "Green Shoes Project" and - still continuing this year - "Think Like a Tree."
Photos Credit: Top 2: Keith Pellemeier, Bottom image: Jeremy Evans