I’m very pleased that a new project that’s been dear to my heart for over a decade is now coming to fruition. 

After many years of practice and training in traditional Byzantine Russian Iconography, because of my love for the Natural world and alarm at the mounting biodiversity crisis, I was moved to apply the liturgical method and materials I had learned to create contemporary icons of threatened and endangered species.

In addition to creating a series of 36 images (they are by far not the last), I’ve given numerous presentations about this series and the biodiversity crisis at art institutions and conferences dedicated to subjects related to art, spirituality, and ecology, including the American Teilhard Association, Harvard Divinity School’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality, and the Thomas Berry Forum for Contemplative Ecology. 

Now I’m taking this project to the wider world where reproductions of my art and an accompanying guidebook will engage the reader’s intuition and reason to stimulate empathy and meaningful action for healing the biodiversity crisis.

What’s more, readers can scan QR codes that lead to 18 organizations around the world that are helping to protect, preserve, rescue, rehabilitate, advocate, and lobby for animals and their habitats.

Click on this link to pre-order

What’s in a Name?

There was much discussion about what to name this project and how to characterize it. At first, I was hesitant to use the term “oracle” because of the idea I’d had in my mind of the oracle as a method of prediction or divination. 

However, as I explored the term more deeply, I learned that the oracle is a source of prophetic speaking.  

According to Walter Brueggemann,  author of The Prophetic Imagination, “the prophetic vision not only embraces the pain of the people but creates an energy and amazement based on the new thing that God is doing.”

The pain in the Sacred Biodiversity Oracle is the anguish of the world as it undergoes the 6th mass extinction and the holocaust of nature that is claiming 10,000-100,000 species each year to extinction. Based on these statistics, biologist E.O. Wilson estimates that if current trends continue, half of Earth's animal and plant species will be extinct by the end of this century.

The hope and amazement contained within it is in the wisdom from many ecological elders including geologian Thomas Berry,  the opportunities offered readers to engage with multiple conservation organizations and what Dr. Jane Goodall claims is the real hope for our future: “we are moving towards the ultimate destiny of our species—a state of compassion and love.”

In discovering that the meaning of “oracle” is broader than my initial understanding and that  this system helps stimulate the reader’s intuitive knowing, I realized it is partly an oracle. Because of the prophetic words from ecological elders and the exercises that activate the intuitive parts of the brain (not to mention the art itself ), the didactic, action-oriented, and oracular components combine to create a synergistic effect upon the reader, evoking strong emotions and a desire to act on behalf of all Life.