Global Oneness Project

PHOTO ESSAY "Kazuaki Tanahashi"
by Unnikrishnan Raveendranathen

Kazuaki Tanahashi is an accomplished Japanese calligrapher. Born and trained in Japan, Tanahashi is an active calligraphy and Zen teacher as well as an environmentalist and peace worker. His paintings have been displayed in exhibitions internationally.

This image: Tanahashi holds a red stamp or "chop". Chops are the signature of the artist.

What is lost when a language disappears?

“Language Keepers”
The Struggle for Indigenous Language Survival in California,
a Spiritual Ecology: Emergence Magazine production

There are approximately seven thousand languages in the world today; of these, the majority originated with, and are spoken by, Indigenous peoples. Up to half of the world’s languages are oral, with no orthography, no dictionaries. Knowledge is passed from person to person, through words and stories that formed and evolved alongside the places in which they have long been rooted, as diverse as the ecologies from which they come: Ainu on the island of Hokkaido in Japan, Arabela in the tropical forests of Peru along a tributary of the Arabela River, Tolowa Dee-ni’ among the redwood trees of Northern California.

Ainu, Arabela, and Tolowa Dee-ni’ are endangered and are among the roughly 40 percent of today’s languages that are at risk of vanishing altogether. Though it’s difficult to establish an exact number, it is thought that thousands of languages have disappeared from the Earth in just the last few hundred years, as the majority of the world’s population increasingly speaks only a handful of dominant languages. Half of all languages that exist today are likely to disappear by the end of this century, according to UNESCO.

Learn more about disappearing languages with our latest feature, a multimedia experience that follows the language revitalization taking place within the Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu tribes. This feature includes four films and six audio stories and was produced by Emergence Magazine, an online and print publication exploring ecology, culture, and spirituality.

https://www.globalonenessproject.org/stories/language-keepers

AUDIO SERIES
"Coming Home to the Cove"
A Story of Family, Memory, and Stolen Land

https://www.globalonenessproject.org/stories/coming-home-cove

Across the United States, Indigenous communities are calling for sweeping revisions to stories commonly told as “history”—stories that, even today, neglect and erase Indigenous peoples and serve as justification for continued ownership of stolen Indigenous lands. This three-part series is the multigenerational story of a Coast Miwok family’s eviction from their ancestral home in Northern California and one woman’s mission to bring the living history of her family back to the land.

Throughout this series, Theresa Harlan chronicles the story of her family’s displacement from their homestead on a cove in Tomales Bay and shares her grassroots efforts to involve the wider community in protecting both the history and the future of this place.

As she tells her family’s story, Theresa makes a powerful claim: remembering and retelling inclusive histories has the power to create a more just future. In this series we ask: Who gets to define history? In what ways is it our responsibility to ensure that a shared history is an accurate and just representation of the places we call home?

Produced by Spiritual Ecology: Emergence Magazine
Photo courtesy of Theresa Harlan

How can students learn from each other’s perspectives?

Our Student Gallery—a compilation of over sixty student photographs and original illustrations from around the world, is a tool to foster curiosity and inquiry with students while creating meaningful conversations in the classroom.

Each photograph and original illustration in the gallery originates from our past student contests, which are now available as student projects, accessible for use throughout the year.
You can search by theme, previous contests, or location, and you can use the gallery with our "Image Analysis Activity", which includes a Visible Thinking Routine from Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Use our Student Gallery to engage your students by following the link: https://www.globalonenessproject.org/gallery

Photo "Unsettling Evidence" by Ned Henderson from
Queens Park, Australia, who was 17 when he entered our student contest "Document Your Place on the Planet".

His artist statement reads: "I am fortunate enough to witness two worlds in my country: the continual game of monopoly within the urban sprawl of Sydney and the often forgotten rural hearts and souls. This macro perspective of the inevitable devastation of our bushfire season was a message to the world. Being located within the city of Sydney NSW during the 2019-2020 fire season, I noticed a disconnection between people around me and what was happening only a couple hours drive west. This alarmed me, as I was viewing updates hourly for months whilst the majority were not concerned. With many family members having to evacuate multiple times, and watching the map for fires near the family farm, it wasn’t the greatest summer. After a fire storm swept through the rural town of Bilpin NSW, I was eager to examine the results. It honestly shocked me, as you cannot prepare yourself for what you see. To think that this is just one handful of ash and one small town upon thousands.

The film Earthrise made me consider scale and perspective. We could see the fires from space and feel the ash in New Zealand, but my image considers the inverse of this by examining the slightest fragment of the big picture. It is important to acknowledge the close connection between cities and the bush and the world's interconnectedness of ecosystems.

The gesture in the image is a transactional exchange of what we have offered and what the natural world offered in return—45 million acres of flaming earth."

Thank you to all students who have entered our photography and original illustration contest "The Environment Is in You", and thank you to the teachers who entered the contest on behalf of their students.

Entries are now closed, and our panel of judges—a qualified panel consisting of professional filmmakers, photographers, and authorized personnel from the Global Oneness Project—will be reviewing each photograph and artwork with its artist statement to choose our finalists and winners, who will be announced and notified on May 26, 2022. Winners will be awarded $200 USD each and photographs will be published on the Global Oneness Project website.

This incredible photograph by Kathrin Swoboda Kathrin Swoboda Photography served as our hero image for this contest, inspiring students to enter their own images reflecting their relationship with our planet.
Prints of her work are available here: https://novanaturephotography.com/