Planet Earth Arts was founded in 2014 out of our conviction that environmental and social justice are the most urgent issues of our time, and our belief that the arts, in collaboration with the sciences and humanities, must play a leading role in transforming the human presence on our planet from a destructive role to one that is mutually beneficial to the entire community of life.
“You cannot have climate justice without racial justice. It isn’t justice if it doesn’t include everyone.”
– Vanessa Nakata, Climate Activist
We collaborate with actors, playwrights, directors, photographers, choreographers, dancers, musicians, writers and visual artists. Planet Earth Arts supports them by commissioning, presenting and showcasing their powerful transformative work – confronting and illuminating climate change, mass extinctions, threats to oceans, habitat loss, sea rise and the struggles for environmental justice.
“So much of this book, and all of my work, is an attempt to re-story the landscape so that we can know our place in it and our responsibility to it.”
– Greg Sarris on The Forgetters
In Spring 2024, Greg Sarris, tribal leader, university professor, playwright, producer, and award-winning author, published The Forgetters – a boundary-pushing new work that explores themes of memory, survival, connection, and environmental stewardship.
Planet Earth Arts sponsored Greg as a Guest Artist at Stanford University, in a public reading and conversation with fellow writer, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain. This astonishing new collection of stories weave together elements of Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok creation stories with the contemporary world.
Greg is a remarkable Renaissance man – a brilliant artist and a remarkable leader and champion of Native American rights/sovereignty/ empowerment, LGBQTIA+ rights and environmental/social justice. He is the author of eight acclaimed, award-winning books, including How a Mountain Was Made, Becoming Story and Grand Avenue, which he adapted as an HBO film and co-produced with Robert Redford.
Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival
“Climate Change is the greatest danger the human race has ever faced.”
—Tony Kushner
Pulitzer Prize & Tony Award winning American Playwright & Screenwriter
From the Greeks to Shakespeare to August Wilson through to Dominique Morisseau, Young Jean Lee and Suzi Lori-Parks, in our own time, theater has always been a powerful forum for mirroring the human condition and exploring the urgent issues each generation faces.
In 2014 we launched the Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival at Berkeley Rep and Stanford University, in collaboration with PlayGround and the National Center for New Plays at Stanford, to inspire playwrights to create bold new works for the stage exploring planetary sustainability as well as environmental and social justice.
Planet Earth Arts has worked with 140 playwrights from PlayGround’s Writer Pool in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Our Festival has generated a living library of more than 200 short new playsabout climate change, mass extinctions, threats to our oceans, sea rise and environmental justice.
In collaboration with PlayGround, Planet Earth Arts has commissioned 15 new original full-length or one-act plays – several of which have had World Premiere productions in San Francisco at the Potrero Stage – PlayGround Center for New Plays.
Illustration: Black Boy by Goulwen Reboux. Prairie Fringed Orchid by Ananda Heller. Polar Bear by Candy Witcher. Arrangement by Vincent Terrell Durham
Polar Bears, Black Boys & Prairie Fringed Orchids
Planet Earth Arts, in collaboration with PlayGround, commissioned Los Angeles playwright Vincent Terrell Durham, to develop a play about the explosive encounter between white environmentalists and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Polar Bears, Black Boys and Prairie Fringed Orchids was first produced with Stanford Repertory Theater as part of our Environment and Social Justice Festival in 2019. Since then, the play has had professional staged readings in Albany, Ashland, Cedar City, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Sag Harbor, Seattle, and Tampa. The play also inaugurated the Juneteenth Theatre Justice Project, and a national live stream on Zoom raised $150,000 for the Fund for Black Theater in the US.
“Black boys need to be put on the endangered species list.”
This incendiary provocation, spoken by the white lover of a Black Lives Matter activist at a Harlem cocktail party, encapsulates the issues of race, class, sexual identity, biological extinction and police violence against Black bodies that are explored so powerfully in the acclaimed new play Polar Bears, Black Boys and Prairie Fringed Orchids.
“The reason I wrote the play. Is that I wanted audiences to spend an evening getting to really know the full, rich, complicated inner life of a Black man – not just what
we see on TV news.”
– Vincent Terrell Durham, Playwright
Planet Earth Arts presents and showcases the transformative work of artists who explore the future of all life as well as environmental justice.
Poet, artist and naturalist, Obi Kaufman maps the ecography of California
Our sublime but vulnerable world seen through the eyes of photographer Camille Seaman
Our sublime but vulnerable world seen through the eyes of photographer Camille Seaman
In his filmThe Human Element photographer James Balog explores the fraught relationship between humans and nature
Our sublime but vulnerable world seen through the eyes of photographer Camille Seaman
Planet Earth Arts presents and showcases the transformative work of artists who explore the future of all life as well as environmental justice.
Poet, artist and naturalist, Obi Kaufman maps the ecography of California
Our sublime but vulnerable world seen through the eyes of photographer Camille Seaman
Our sublime but vulnerable world seen through the eyes of photographer Camille Seaman
In his filmThe Human Element photographer James Balog explores the fraught relationship between humans and nature
Our sublime but vulnerable world seen through the eyes of photographer Camille Seaman
Planet Earth Arts acknowledges that we are on the ancestral and unceded land of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people. As uninvited guests on these lands, we are the beneficiaries of the ongoing displacement of the Ohlone people. We pay our respects to the Native peoples, past and present.
Planet Earth Arts supports the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust with an annual financial contribution. The Trust is an urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.
With the brutal murders of George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Maggie Long, Pak Ho and Sonya Massey, among too many others, we confront a continuum of unbearably cruel and tragic moments in the 400 + year déjà vu nightmare that continues to haunt an America plagued by the deadly cancer of racism – enforced through White Supremacy and enabled by our White Privilege.
We acknowledge the suffering and resilience of all people whose lives and livelihoods were stolen by those with power, including but not limited to the millions of enslaved African American people. The devastating effects of these injustices continue to be felt today. We acknowledge everyone who has a lived experience of oppression, be it racism or sexism, classism or ableism, transphobia or homophobia, or any other form of oppression. To ignore oppression is to assent to oppression.
PLANET EARTH ARTS
The Earth is a work of art.
Protecting her is the work of artists.
Planet Earth Arts is sponsored by Earth Island Institute, a (501)(c)(3) non-profit organization. Planet Earth Arts acknowledges the generous support of Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Planet Earth Arts New Play Festival is a collaboration with PlayGround, the National Center for New Plays and the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.
