SAIIER 2014:Children and Trees

Child Protection Service		Classroom-level Micro Projects
Children and Trees

This year Entity::Children and Trees placed an emphasis on research into new books and reformatting existing publications for reprinting and web uploads.

We are working on a book on kolams. Auroville Press Publications is considering a joint partnership on the kolams book, subject to approval of the texts and designs. Most of the interviews and texts have already been prepared by Marti and she has met with Grace to see what kind of collaboration can be done. Grace has many beautiful designs and has offered to help illustrate this publication. Grace is working on her own book, a much larger venture, but our book, Kolams from heart to hearth, will focus on our own local region. Marti has been photographing kolams from Auroville and Auroville’s surrounding villages. This will not be a definitive book on kolams, but rather an Auroville offering on the subject, much like the book of Marti and Carlos, This Earth of Ours (Auroville Publications, Nature and Evolution series, with a prologue by His Holiness the Dalai Lama).

We are uploading our Population book to Amazon.com, where it will be sold at cost price plus 10 percent, with proceeds going to the Children and Trees project through SAIIER. As environmental issues have reached global proportions, we are excited to start web broadcasting our environmental books, as they can then be used by people all over the world. Population is one of our key planetary issues and this little publication, which tells the story through pictures rather than words, does not need translation and is therefore universal in nature. It can be used to generate discussions in schools and community centres on the relationship between humans and nature, and in particular, our concerns for the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Indigo Spirit, a book with educational guidelines on our new generations of aware children, has also been uploaded on Amazon.com. It is not a SAIIER publication per se, but all proceeds will also go to the Children and Trees project to generate income for Children and Trees for new books and for our building storeroom maintenance.

We have just installed additional ventilation in our Children and Trees storeroom, done repairs, and done a massive reorganization of our existing books, which was very time-consuming, but necessary. Next year we will reorganize our environmental library.

The Aranya Environmental Center opened its new facility in March 2014 and Marti has given Aranya 350 books from the project, plus activity books from the Children and Trees library, which she has purchased or collected from various sources. Kundhavi and other teachers will use these materials in connection with the environmental camps that they will be running. Marti has also given Aranya a series of short practical environmental films for the Aranya teaching library.

There is likely to be close collaboration between the Aranya Environmental Center and Children and Trees, as Kundhavi is a member of both organizations and Aranya is an ideal site for the use of our publications.

Marti is currently re-editing the Aranya brochure in English.

We have just recently supplied the Sri Aurobindo Center in Katamandu, Nepal with sets of our publications. Emphasis was given for books in English and Hindi.

We have many many requests for our books in Tamil and would need a grant to be able to reprint in Tamil. If and when SAIIER has additional funds, this would be a good use of funds, as we can then supply additional books in our Auroville bioregion.

The National Book Trust (NBT) in New Delhi has just sent Marti complimentary copies of What is a Tree, which has recently been reprinted in English again. This book exists in more than 40 Indian languages, including tribal languages, and more than a million copies have been printed. It has been a huge success, as the NBT keeps reprinting in all the languages. We receive no royalties from sales, but we are sent copies that we can then distribute to our own lists.

Marti photographed the Transition School 2014 end of year festival with close up portraits of students and teachers. Two copies were given of each of the portraits, one for the parents of the students, and the other to Mary for the Transition School archives. Our kids are so beautiful and there is a striking ethnic diversity that is highlighted by all the pain-staking work on wonderful costumes. A heart-rendering event.

Marti has had meetings with Town Hall people to discuss setting up an Auroville Climate Change Task force (Toine, Luigi, Pashi) in Auroville. She is studying ways we can do simple publications with a universal value on this subject. If Auroville is to be the ‘City the Earth Needs’, we need to be in the forefront of research in this area. As the glaciers melt into the Indian central plateau and five of our seven principle rivers in India go through transition, India will suffer probable increased flooding, droughts, wind damage, and food and water shortages. Children and Trees is considering creating some small pamphlets on water collecting, new food resources, cyclone resistant architecture and collective planning. Marti is working on some ideas and simple designs for spreading the message about our need to be prepared, as India will be facing unimaginable changes in the next 10 years. The books will be oriented towards high school students and community centers to generate discussion on ways to face climate change and transitions in our new social contexts. There is an informal collaboration on this with the CIRHU.

Children and Trees does cooperative work with the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), a large network of communities throughout the world. Marti represents Auroville in this connection and connects people in the network to Auroville projects and educational workshops. We ran our own programme last year, with an emphasis on permaculture and eco-design, which was coordinated by Kundhavi and facilitated by Marti with input from more than a dozen Auroville project holders. Marti also tries to facilitate Aurovillians going to other communities to do workshops that will inevitably be useful to us here in Auroville in terms of knowledge sharing. This takes considerable time and energy, as well.

As you can see, the Children and Trees Project is a small unit, but with a large impact potential. Our activities have expanded a great deal from the old days where we did our very first little book, A Boy and a Tree, under the auspices of SAIIER through a Government of India grant. Today Children and Trees still remains true to its essential principal: educational sharing for everyone, irrespective of social, cultural, or economic background through simple and easily-accessible messages.