An international residency for artists and writers. Carbon positive since 2008. Climate positive and off-grid since 2006.

Joya: arte + ecología / Los Gázquez has become a manifest research project, an exploration into contemporary art, sustainability, culture and history. It has become an attempt to ameliorate old ideas in the face of climate change, a search for new strategies, an exercise in self-reliance. It has become the embodiment of their creative instincts. Their art has occupied an effective and practical role in the philosophy of living sustainably. By positioning contemporary art alongside rural culture, they have come to understand this non-tangible asset we call the natural world, how it can serve us and how we can reciprocate.

Joya: arte + ecología / AiR at Los Gázquez has become a lifelong research project that aims to use science and the humanities as a strategy to rebuild a diminished rural community in an arid zone. By utilising the intertwined realities of research, innovation, science and culture, this plan seeks to create a socio-ecological system resistant to external global influences by providing security, a sense of identity, purpose and wellbeing.

From the beginning, Sitka has been about collaboration-between art and science, diverse groups of people and with the land itself. The center occupies roughly an acre of ocean-view property donated by the developer of Cascade Head Ranch, an environmentally sensitive residential community at the mouth of the federally protected Salmon River estuary. A 270-acre Nature Conservancy preserve borders the property, which also is part of a national Scenic Research Area and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology is operated as a public educational project of the Neskowin Coast Foundation, which received its federal non-profit 501(c)(3) status in 1970. The mission of the Sitka Center is "to expand the relationships between art, nature and humanity through workshops, presentations, and individual research projects; and to maintain a facility appropriate to its needs that is in harmony with the inspirational coastal environment of Cascade Head."

The Invisible Forest

We live in an increasingly nature-disconnected world, where the average citizen can recognize over three hundred corporate logos but not three species of native trees, and where the media has taught us more about the tropical forest than the temperate forest in our own backyard.

To the vast majority of forest citizens, our native forest is invisible. Unseen are the sentinel box elders, growing in a scraggly fence row behind the urban factory. Unrecognized is the lone white oak left in the pasture to shade the cows. Unnoticed are the native honey locusts, stripped of their thorns, growing in grated holes in the asphalt of a local strip mall. Nevertheless, these are truly remnants of the temperate forest, descendents of wilderness. Even in unlikely places, the forest is with us, still growing among us, whether recognized or not.

What You Can Do

The Arc of Appalachia is one of a handful of groups working to create contiguous blocks of forest land in the east. Especially by connecting existing preserve lands with green corridors, we can reunite the large blocks of land needed to sustain a healthy forest eco-system. By increasing the acreage of preserve land that is simply left to exist and is not managed or disturbed by human activity, we also increase the ability of the Forest to recover and mature.

A platform for artists working with a wide range of ecological concerns. This archived site includes worldwide art/ecology collaboratives, organizations, collectives, individual eco-artists, newsletters, e-magazines projects dealing with ecology and art/activism.

A virtual gallery and collaborative community of eco-artists, environmental artists, land artists, eco activist artists and others who share concern and compassion for our planet.

Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization dedicated to saving and sharing heirloom seeds. Since 1975, our members have been passing on our garden heritage by collecting and distributing thousands of samples of rare garden seeds to other gardeners.