Aging Initiative

Entries are due June 16, 2010

What's the Contest About?

The EPA, Generations United, the Dance Exchange, and the Rachel Carson Council, Inc., announce a poetry, essay, photo and dance contest. Entries must be from a team of two or more persons, a young person and an older person. The creative work should express the "Sense of Wonder" that your team feels for the sea, the night sky, forests, birds, wildlife, and all that is beautiful to your eyes. We want you to share this love of nature with a child and others around you. When we teach our eyes and ears and senses to focus on the wonders of nature, we open ourselves to the wonders around us.

Contestants will work across generations to share through one of these distinct mediums their own interactions with and reflections on the wonders of nature.

Dance video entries are not limited to the moving body. You can use live performers and/ or capture movement and change visible in nature: birds landing, trees shaking in a storm, a river flowing...

Experienced and first time dancers and video makers are encouraged to participate.

Let Rachel Carson's words inspire you. In 1951 Rachel Carson published her second book The Sea Around Us. The New York Times Book Review wrote

"Each of Miss Carson's chapters is worth sampling and savoring, and her book adds up to enjoyment that should not be passed by. Every person who reads it will look on the sea with new pleasure."

Beautifully written, in an accessible, nonscientific style, Carson describes the natural wonders of the sea. In the chapter The Birth of an Island she sums up the uniqueness and irreplaceability of the species … "In a reasonable world men would have treated these islands as precious possessions, as natural museums filled with beautiful and curious works of creation, valuable beyond price because nowhere in the world are they duplicated."

Illustrating with words, she captures and illustrates the Earth's evolution including the formation of islands, mountains, and oceans. She brings into focus the creatures of the sea that live near the surface of the sea and then dives deeper into the dark depths of the bottom of the sea.

The Sea Around Us went to the top of the nonfiction best-seller list in the United States, won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and was selected for the Book of the Month Club. It was also translated into thirty-three languages.

Read more: Carson, Rachel - sea, oceans, important, plants, marine, human  .

Let Nature Inspire You.

International Year of Biodiversity  

The UN declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB). Throughout the year countless initiatives will be organized to disseminate information, promote the protection of biodiversity and encourage organizations, institutions, companies and individuals to take direct action to reduce the constant loss of biological diversity worldwide. The celebrations for the International Year of Biodiversity are led by the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)  .