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, caretaker, 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 have an old Mercedes powered by bio-diesel and a VW
camper powered by hope. They specialize in under-funded,
ambitious, life-altering projects, such as their relationship.