About Donna and Paul
Donna Sheehan
is an
artist, writer, and community/environmental activist. She founded Mow
& Sow, a grass-roots, non-profit environmentalist organization
in California. Working with the California Department of Transportation
and California Department of Parks and Recreation, she convinced them
both to alter their vegetation management guidelines to more
sustainable, less toxic practices. The ensuing EIR led to a statewide
change in mitigation techniques, as well as inspiring a national
movement for planting and mowing roadsides instead of spraying toxic
chemicals. She received the Environmental Action Committee’s
Environmentalist of the Year Award for her community activism.
Donna began a native
grass collection, propagation and planting program, using greenhouses
owned by The Audubon Society. The program was focused on roadside
planting, to reduce the need for weed and erosion control, but also
educated and inspired landowners to plant natives rather than exotics.
Donna was a founder
and board member of the ORLO Foundation of Portland, Oregon, a
non-profit organization synthesizing the arts and environmental
activism, mainly concerned with logging and grazing practices.
As curator of the first
Beyond Artifice symposium and exhibition, an interaction
between environmentalists, artists and the community, giving impetus to
the Eco-Art movement.
Her photographic show, Black
Beach, White Light, helped focus public awareness on over-fishing
issues and environmental degradation in California waters. Her print
workshops (Editions Variés) and her Point Reyes Fine Art Gallery
were the first of their kind in West Marin. She has produced several
major bodies of work, concerned with environmental issues and the human
condition. They may be seen in galleries in New York, Los Angeles and
Santa Fe.
Donna founded Citizens
for Safety; a non-profit organization dedicated to public-safety
issues in her community.
She is accredited as an
instructor of the Permaculture Design Course. She has twenty years of
experience in counseling, organizing and teaching in the fine arts,
environmental and community fields. Donna created Redefining
Seduction, a series of counseling workshops teaching women to give
themselves permission to initiate courtship, build relationship and
create partnership in issues that affect their lives.
Donna was a travel
agent, professional cyclist, and tour guide. While working her way
around the world in her twenties, she worked for the US
Counter-Intelligence Corps in Tokyo and Berlin.
She was born on April 1st.
Paul Reffell, has written poetry,
fiction, and non-fiction on Nature and human nature. He has written and
performed his works on stage and on radio.
Paul studied
architecture before becoming a blue-water sailor and charter skipper.
He has been an estate manager, building contractor, caregiver and
freelance writer.
Donna and Paul have collaborated on
many projects. These include the BrainLines book and
personality-profiling system, using physical genetic indicators of
left/right brain traits; co-founding KWMR, a community radio station in
Marin County, California; activism on private-prison issues in
California; managing a B&B; creating two outdoor interactive art
installations - Wargasm, which protested the erosion of
liberties and increase in hostilities following 9/11, and
Pro-Degradation, which exhorted humans to consume, reproduce,
battle, and pollute even more than we do already, in order to speed our
extinction for the sake of the planet’s remaining species; Baring
Witness, the global movement in which people spell out pro-peace
messages with their bodies.
Donna & Paul do not
watch television, nor do they believe everything they read. They
specialize in under-funded, ambitious, life-altering projects, such as
their relationship.