Je Suis "A PaperMaker"

WHY I’M A PAPERMAKER

I am a science hippy, that probably best describes me. I believe in an interconnectedness of all things (quantum biology actually ROCKS my world) and I think as a scientist my role is to learn more about that and help other people realise that we are not all separate pieces on a chess board. I am interested in changing our individual and global attitudes towards the environment and hopefully promoting more happiness within ourselves at the same time. I think fighting all environmental change is fruitless because, at the end of the day, change is the only given in life and fighting it leads us nowhere but further down the crazy rabbit hole our society currently lives in. I do, however, think our behaviour toward the environment is flawed, we are disrespectful towards it and we are failing to understand that we must work in harmony with it. By increasing our awareness we will be better able to respond to the natural changing of things and understand better how we must limit our negative impacts, finding balance with the environment rather than trying to lord our “control” over it.

So I guess I feel that trying to keep things “as they are” is not what we should be spending our energy on. More that we should be working towards environmental connection, this means tackling our impacts and moving towards more sustainable and harmonious practices. As well we need to prepare for how our environment might change and how we can live with that at the same time as practicing more green living individually and globally. I suppose I have a more Buddhist approach to life and my own living. 

In terms of art and creativeness, I love flow and I love the texture of life and the natural environment. I guess I see climate change and human impacts as somehow impacting and disrupting the flow of life, altering its texture. In fact it seems that we have become so unattached from nature that we don’t even connect with flow. Being part of papermakers I hope to work with artists interested in communicating these ideas, in a way I am not able to. At the same time I hope to make the science I am familiar with more accessible. I am particularly interested in plastic rubbish and its local and global effects. More related to climate change I am interested in how the rate of change is alerting patterns in nature and how our other impacts act synergistically, causing systems to change rapidly leaving little room for them to adapt.

Ultimately I hope to connect people with their environment, not only for the environment but also for us as a species. There is happiness in connection and much less in individualistic, destructive, non-compassionate behaviour. Really I feel it is all still a big unknown and the only answer we have, that we all know inside, is that we must act more sustainably and more at one with nature. 

Jen Cooper