Earth Day is a day for worldwide celebration of Earth and the Life it supports, for protest and acknowledgment of grief over the ongoing destruction of Life at the hands of humanity, and for banding together toward actions that change our course.
In the climate tech community, we are accustomed to working together on technical solutions to the practical challenges of climate change. Earth Day presents an opportunity to also work through the broader emotional aspects of human identity in the age of the environmental crisis, remind ourselves why we do what we do, and re-center our efforts. Doing this collectively allows us to align in purpose as a community working to harmonize humanity’s actions with the Earth system, and strengthen the human relationships underlying our technical collaborations.
Arts and aesthetic experience facilitate emotional work. To enable the climate tech community to collectively encounter the joy and sadness of Earth Day, Homeworld Collective collaborated with Uzay Gallery and event producer, poet and curator Liz Cahill to host the Blue Dot Arts Salon and Afterparty on Earth Day. The party doubled as a closing event for the first ever SF Climate Week, hosted by Climatebase, which featured more than 100 events for over 7000 attendees.
For the salon, we invited artistic performances from members of the climate tech community. This included a multimedia poetry performance by Homeworld Founding Co-Director Paul Reginato, accompanied by electric violinist mot.physics and dancers Alekzeta Cantu & Natalia Uribe. The poem Eyes, heart, hands calls attention to the environmental destruction witnessed by human eyes, and calls for hearts to respond and translate love into action through hands. The poem Sand affirms the will to love in an ephemeral and imperfect world. And Soil explores the agency we have as living beings to participate in creation of a thriving world.
Violist Paula Karolak of the Santa Rosa Symphony played a beautiful solo performance of Bach cello suite in D minor. Oakland-based performing artist Blake Sugarman, formerly of Sunrise Movement, performed a spoken word poem that cheekily discusses human agency, with the refrain “The currents of history are stronger than you – that is undeniably true. You can’t control the masses. But what you can do is what you can do.” San Francisco-based writer Billy Song performed a poem about a house of roommates that gripe about how everyone in the house doesn’t do their dishes and strategizes about how to prevent the dishes from piling up, while dishes accumulate so much that the kitchen sink and even the dish rack are full, leaving residents to order take-out and rinse and fill cups in the bathroom sink. Finally, Xian Conaway, musician, technologist, and CFO of the nonprofit Veggie Mijas, performed a song about loving action toward Earth, accompanied by a novel motion-activated camera-controlled electronic instrument.
After the salon, we danced in celebration of Earth with the band Oakadelic, a pillar of Bay Area funk led by Ant Anthony whose rotating lineup on Earth Day included bassist Uriah Duffy, a former member of Sly and the Family Stone who has recorded with Alicia Keys and many others. We closed out the night with the lush beats of DJ LIFEcell, a San Francisco-based electronic artist, producer and composer of ambient, techno, and experimental music who has produced music for Yuk Jidam and Snoop Dogg.
Off to the side, Anoah hosted a tea room where people could spend quieter time in conversation or reflection.
The walls of Uzay Gallery were decorated with the paintings of Joelle Provost, a Bay Area-based painter who explores the relationship between humanity and Earth through depictions both of Life’s beauty and its destruction.
Chelsea Crandall of the Environmental Defense Fund, and an Uzay Gallery resident, prepared an epic spread of vegan eats to keep us fueled.
We give an enormous thank you to all the artists who shared their work and performed, Chelsea Crandall for wonderful work with food, Jenny Yang and Darien McMillan for their work at the bar, and also Rhea Joseph, Connie Lin, and Donald Jewkes for volunteering their work at this event!