There’s No Place Like Home

This mural was spray-painted on the silo at the Southern Sun Pub and Brewery of Boulder, Colorado for the 2020 Street Wise Festival. Simply put, the concept is about taking care of our earth and it’s basic elements: fire, air, earth & water. The rocket ship portholes show two scenarios of the future earth based on what we choose to do. One shows a beautiful, pristine paradise, and the other shows a barren, devastated wasteland. Below is a longer explanation of the concept if you decide to dive deeper…

For as far back as I can remember I have been anxious about the declining health of the environment for us and for all creatures on earth. For way too long I was exposed to problem after problem, but could not find very many viable, long-term solutions to our impending doom. Gratefully, I found a few brilliant people doing great things for humanity and the environment like Architect Michael Reynolds with his Earthships that embrace and utilize the elements of fire, air, earth, and water in closed loop systems to make buildings that are beautiful, comfortable, and need no grid utilities to operate. Looking further into the idea of regenerative design eventually led me to take a Permaculture Design Course. Permaculture is a set of principles that plug humans back into the ecology of natural systems.

Through my architectural experiences, artistic endeavors, spiritual practices, organic gardening experiments, and permaculture design studies, I have realized that as humans, we are blessed and cursed with the necessity to make a choice. We are either protectors of life or destroyers and if we do not realize that we have a choice or opt-out of choosing all together, then by default, we are a destroyer. I believe that most of humanity right now is in this third category of not being aware of the choice or choosing not to choose and that is why we are where we are with environmental destruction, climate change, and mass extinctions.

Originally, when I applied for the Boulder Street Wise Festival, I put forth a written proposal assuming that I would be painting on a typical, flat wall. I pictured a path going down the middle of the wall that forked to the right and the left. If you followed the path to one way, you would find a post-apocalyptic scene of death and destruction. If you followed that path to the other, you would find an Eden-like paradise where humans, technology, and nature co-exist harmoniously.

So when Street Wise told me that I would be painting a brewery silo, I got simultaneously excited and a little worried about how my concept would translate to this cylindrical/conical structure. When my assistant, MJ, and I first visited the silo to get inspiration for the design, we both instantly decided it looked like a retro rocket ship so that absolutely had to be worked into the design. For me, this was a conceptual struggle because Sci-Fi is my favorite genre and I like the idea of space travel and exploring other worlds, but I do not approve of the wealthy men trying to make space travel available for other wealthy people so they can escape this planet if it becomes uninhabitable, and in the process of doing that, they are spewing tons of more toxins into the environment and making it more uninhabitable. If they have such vast resources to be playing with rockets all day to escape Earth, then that should be plenty to invest in protecting and regenerating our life-support systems here! As far as we know, Earth is the only planet that can support life, so let’s take care of this one! If we travel to any other known planet, all life-support systems will have to be completely artificial and created from resources extracted from Earth anyway. Plus, even if we do find another planet that can support life, do we deserve to go colonize and destroy that eco-system as well???

So, with all this negativity about rockets, environmental destruction, and socio-economic inequality, how could I bring a positive spin on the rocket concept? Then I got to thinking about how the Earth itself is like a giant rocket hurtling through space: Spaceship Earth! There’s a thing that happens to astronauts when they get far enough out into space to look back and see the entire planet from a distance: they basically have an eco-awakening. There’s an extremely influential photo called “Earth Rising” taken by the first astronauts to orbit the moon. In the words of documentary film-maker Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee,

 “it shifted the vision of space exploration from one that leaves Earth behind to one that marvels in the rare magnificence and beauty of our home planet. It ushered in a collective awareness of the Earth as a whole, transcending borders and boundaries, and came to be used by many to instill a sense of wonder, awe and stewardship toward the planet. It was a natural inspiration for the creation of Earth Day, and subsequently for the environmental movement as a whole.”

“There’s No Place Like Home” celebrates the sacred elements of fire, air, earth and water - the four basic ingredients required for life as we know it. They hug and wrap around the Earth rocket. As humans we must choose to be a protector or destroyer of life. At each juncture where the cylinder shifts into a cone, the elements become reflected, distorted, and discolored, symbolizing the destruction and contraction of life that happens when we pour chemicals and toxins into the environment and don't respect and protect the elements. This happens at both the top of the silo, representing those who have chosen to be destroyers at the expense of everyone else, and the bottom of the silo because, if we do not choose, we become destroyers by default, following the path of least resistance in a downward spiral. The portholes show images of earth as if looking back at it from space. The Earth shown in the portal on the middle, cylindrical part of the silo is seen as beautiful and pristine  - what we will get if we choose to be protectors, and the Earth shown in the portal on the bottom, conical portion is mostly brown and clearly devastated – what we will get if we chose to be destroyers or continue to not choose at all.

Please, make a conscious choice to protect our beautiful home! ­­

*Painted with the help of my sexy assistant, Michael Jordan