2022 Newsletter

Here is what’s been happening with Scrappy and The Snowball Effect Project this past year. Thanks to you all, there are now over 1,000 eco-pledges!

Mattatuck Museum

After the terrific run at Highfield Hall in Falmouth, MA, in which participants had more significant and more numerous pledges than any earlier location, Scrappy, the blue fish form below, spent the last three months in the lobby of the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut. Viewers there fully covered both sides of the fish with pledges.  

Local Eco-Pledges

In Worcester last spring, the Boundless Way Temple/Worcester Zen Center reestablished their annual sculpture exhibition on their grounds. Scrappy was there for three months, inviting pledges as people started to get out into the world again. I also collected pledges during the Earth Day cleanup as well as all over the city the rest of the year.

Provincetown

In June, I spent two days collecting pledges here, and the response was overwhelming! Thanks to tourists and locals who value the environment, I ran out of plastic scraps and had to use a couple of old notebooks to collect pledges. High school and college students there were already well informed and instantly knew what their pledges would be. That was heartening.

Workshops

I consider the student workshops a significant part of the project, but Justin, my partner, cut his long ponytail, got married and took a full-time job in his professional field. Although the Worcester Education Collaborative assured me there would be WPI students who would relish taking it up as a public service project, I concluded that the hour and a half workshop was not enough time to meaningfully raise students’ awareness and that the time involved to organize the workshops was not worth the return. So, sadly, at least for the moment, I am not pursuing these.

Potential New Art Projects

Biological climate restoration approaches that interest me include

bamboo, kelp permaculture, green cement, and plastic-free fabrics. If you have additional ideas, please write me: donnahtalman@gamil.com)

Thank You

As 2023 begins, I am reading, for the first time, that, globally, the energy transition is not only happening but exceeding expectations.We nonetheless have a long, long way to go. May this newsletter remind you to keep the pledges you made and, equally important, inspire you to up your game. For one thing, we must keep pressuring the wealthy polluting corporations to do their part.