Waterville community mural project inspires hope on Earth Day (2024)

WATERVILLE — Cynthia Stancioff is concerned about the Earth’s future, but she has hope.

That is why for this year’s Earth Day, Stancioff, a member of the Mid-Maine chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, decided to help organize a community mural project that would inspire hope in the face of environmental crises.

The Citizens’ Climate Lobby describes itself as “a nonprofit, nonpartisan, grassroots advocacy climate change organization focused on national policies to address the national and global climate crisis.”

“We thought an event like this, offering the idea of hope, would give us an opportunity to show people why we have hope,” Stancioff said Sunday.

Dozens of people, from toddlers to the elderly, turned out to help create the story-based mural at Sunday’s event, held in partnership with the arts nonprofit Waterville Creates at the Paul J. Schupf Art Center in downtown Waterville.

Earth Day is observed April 22 and commemorates the founding of the modern environmental movement on that date in 1970. Communities throughout central Maine organized events this weekend to mark the day, ranging from local cleanups to dance shows.

In Waterville, those who came to the climate group’s event helped to complete an interactive mural, titled “How Humanity Managed To Save the Planet,” with the help of Burnham-based artist Lucky Platt.

The mural was inspired by a poem written by Stancioff that tells the story of how humans came to negatively impact the Earth, but ends with a positive vision of humanity’s future role in protecting the planet.

Platt said a group of students from the Waterville Alternative High School worked with her to create imagery for the mural based on the poem.

“In some cases, they put together some pretty sophisticated storyboards,” Platt, a 52-year-old artist and children’s book author and illustrator, said.

The images included electric cars, factories spewing smoke, chopped-down trees, diverse wildlife and a globe that showed the continents as made up of plants. One student, Camden Jipson, suggested the mural begin with humans living in a cave and end with people sleeping under the stars, according to Platt.

“This is a hopeful vision for human intervention in the planet’s health,” Platt said.

Based on the students’ sketches, Platt drew them onto a 24-foot-long piece of paper. Those who came Sunday colored it, using markers, crayons and colored pencils.

Organizers planned to wind the mural onto the spools of a wooden cranking device, known as “Crankie.” Using the device, the mural’s narrative would come to life as someone turned the scrolls to show each part of the mural, while other people read Stancioff’s poem aloud.

Crankies are a centuries-old form of storytelling, previously used in theater, but now used by artists for other forms of performance art, Platt said.

Sunday’s event also included seed giveaways, a film screening and a talk by Will Bonsall, a Maine farmer born in Waterville who is devoted to preserving varieties of seeds.

Serena Sanborn, manager of outreach and community partnerships at Waterville Creates, said the art project was intended to share a positive story on Earth Day, which is why the nonprofit organization partnered with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby.

The mural is a call to action. Stancioff’s poem, which inspired the mural, envisions a future in which every person does something to ensure the Earth’s health and reduce the impact of carbon emissions.

The poem ends: “Earth’s fever subsided, her struggles were done. For once again, Nature and Humans were One.”

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