Dogwood Alliance, as you know, is a proud proponent of clean, renewable energy, forest conservation and efficiency, and taking responsibility for our planet. One of the ways you can help create a movement of environmental consciousness is through our friends and partners at Eco Arts Awards, where you can get creative and express your love for the earth through your art.

Eco Arts Awards is an international annual online arts competition that currently features four creative categories; Songwriting, Literature, Fine Art & Re-Purposed Materials in Art & Design. This is a unique venue for diverse creative expression around the meaning of the epochal topic of our time: ecology. $1,000 is awarded to the first place winner in each of those categories. A Grand Prize winner will also be selected from the four categories. Winners will be announced in January 2014 via the Eco Arts Award newsletter, so sign up! Here are just a few ideas and perspectives that can draw you deeper into this immense topic:

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  What would it be like if all seven billion of us voiced a song, wrote a poem, or painted a picture expressing our love for the planet, her creatures, and each other?

• Looking beyond our personal trials and tribulations, what is the priority for all of humanity?
• What will it take for the majority of us to make choices that promote sustainability?
• When you see the breathtaking photo of Earth from space, as you sit in quiet stillness, what moves through you?

Eco Arts Awards is in its third year, receiving entries from around the world. Whether you’re a student, an amateur, or a professional, your work is welcome! The jurors, all experts in their fields, eagerly seek inspired and original interpretations of what ecology means to you.

From the founder of Eco Arts Awards, Kathryn Edwards:

Eco Arts Awards wants to assist integrating the value spheres

The early Greeks identified three major value spheres: the Good, the True and the Beautiful. The Good refers to morals, justice and how we treat each other. The True is the objective truth of science based on empirical evidence. Beauty holds aesthetics and the expressive currents of the subjective self. Prior to the Enlightenment, Priests, Kings, and Nobility had exclusive domain over what was considered Good, True, and Beautiful, and there were no distinctions made between the value spheres. One of the major accomplishments of the Age of Enlightenment was to differentiate the three value spheres, allowing each sphere their rightful function. Science was no longer held in check by the morals of the church. Artists were allowed to include images other than archangels and the virgin mother. It was the dawning of a magnificent era for humanity that spawned tremendous growth. We made appropriate distinctions between these value spheres, but we’ve gone too far. The disassociation of goodness and beauty is now limiting progress. Science without morals, and morals without beauty cannot serve our highest evolution. Anyone who thinks deeply can sense that if the three value spheres were integrated (without losing their distinctions), more would be accomplished.

As Ken Wilber suggests, integration is the great challenge of our times. Simply put, if our interiority does not become more engaged with the exterior reality of our environmental concerns, not much is going to stick. Hence, it is time for the arts to have its say about our current state of planetary issues. Eco Arts Awards is constantly on the look out for expressions that will turn the world’s head in another, better direction. Perhaps it will be a song, a painting, a poem, or a thought-provoking apparatus made from Repurposed Materials? Perhaps it won’t be any single individual artist per se but a collective movement in the arts that catalyzes our earth’s healing? There is no question of art’s ability to influence culture, and with enough artists answering the call, who knows what the future might be? Eco Arts Awards is approaching its 3rd annual entry deadline this Nov. 4. Its distinguished panel of jurors look for excellence in ecological thematic expression in songwriting, literature, fine art, and repurposed materials in art & design. All finalists in the four creative categories are awarded a page in the online gallery, The Art of Ecology, as well as a handsome sum of cash for first place and grand prize ($6,000 in total cash and prizes).