Press Release August 9, 1998

Butterfly release to complement rainbow
at Klamath Falls

A sky filled with both rainbows and butterflies will be a visual treat for the town of Klamath Falls and conference attendees at the Oregon Institute of Technology during the Tree Island Millennium Gathering. Alan Moore, also know as the Butterfly Man, will arrange for the children of Klamath Falls to release monarch butterflies as artist Fred Stern creates a rainbow in the sky. The butterflies are only one of many millennium gifts that will be offered during the closing ceremonies.

Moore is head of the Butterfly Gardeners' Association, a Berkeley-based group that has sponsored such events throughout the United States and wants butterflies and rainbows to become leading symbols for millennium activities around the world. He has been invited to and released butterflies at the United Nations Earth Summit +5, the World Peace Festival, Woodstock 97, the Bioneers conference in San Francisco, and at numerous events and festivals throughout the world. He has coordinated simultaneous butterfly releases for Hiroshima-Nagaski Observances in cities such as Washington, DC on the Mall, Baltimore at John Hopkin University, New York City at the Buddhist Temple, and Allentown, his old home town, at Cedar Crest College.

The BGA events have been covered by many local, national and international newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media in the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Austria and Sweden. This includes the LA Times, CNN, NBC, BBC, WTN(World Television Network), and Der Spiegel. Other members of his organization have been covered in the New York Times, the San Francisco Examiner, the New York Times, People Magazine, Time Magazine, and countless others. Many of his board members are published writers whose books have made the New York Times best seller list.

He has worked with numerous organizations to make butterfly gardening and launching a part of their activities, and has worked his program into schools, women's shelters, hospitals, hospices, and prisons. As a member of the Peace & Justice Committee in Berkeley, he has worked on such issues as disarmament, nuclear proliferation, poverty, homelessness, human rights, and social and environmental justice.

Moore has found the butterfly to be a wonderful symbol for promoting world peace and environmental sustainability. By making such things as butterflies and rainbows symbols for the Millennium and global cooperation, every butterfly that goes by or rainbow in the sky becomes a messenger of peace, love, and humility. "I can't think of a more beautiful or effective way to arouse global consciousness, " he says.

He has taught thousands of children to raise butterflies in the classroom for releases at Earth Day and other festivals, the largest of which launched 2000 winged angels to the heavens. Festivals broke attendance records when butterflies highlighted the closing ceremonies. He plans to launch at least 10,000 butterflies at just one Earth Day location next year, the Concord Pavilion in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Earth Day Network has spread the idea around the world.

The success of his "Butterfly Initiative'" is also helping to bring together a coalition of environmental, peace, faith, spiritual, and civic groups to organize a Great Millennium Peace Caravan for the summer of 1999. The themes will be Transformation Through Forgiveness and Earth Day Every Day. "We will focus on creating a sustainable and peaceful world through personal and planetary transformation," says Moore. The caravan will consist of artists, musicians, educators, muralists, sculptors, story tellers, thespians, gardeners, dancers, lecturers, activists, futurists, global visionaries, and authors. Protect All Life Forms will lend the world's largest sculpture, a forty foot whale carved out of a salvaged redwood tree, to the entourage. We will celebrate the Earth's biological and cultural diversity as we visit social justice, environmental and peace festivals across the country. The 30th Woodstock Anniversary and Festival will be a major destination, as well as the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Observance in Washington, DC and the World Peace Festival in Armenia New York. He is also collaborating with other groups to make the summer of 99 a "Global Affair."

Linda Grover -Author of Tree Island

The daughter of an inventor and a poet, born in New England and raised in the military, Linda Grover graduated from Las Vegas High School and worked as a secretary for several years.

Linda Grover's interest in changing the world began with an early stint as Clerk of The House Indian Affairs Subcommittee in the U.S. Congress. She later worked with The National Committee for An Effective Congress and the International Rescue Committee. Her books and lectures have all reflected social themes. Her success led to an active role in reform politics.

The House Keepers, (Harper & Row) was a humorous account of a successful seven year battle to save her Manhattan apartment building from an urban renewal project. It was excerpted in McCalls, serialized in the New York Post, optioned by CBS, featured in a New York Times editorial and became required reading for city planning courses at several universities.

Her second nonfiction work, Looking Terrific: The Language of Clothing, (Putnams and Ballantine) written with co-author Emily Cho, was a New York Times national bestseller (#4 trade paperback), became a Literary Guild selection and was translated into Hebrew and Spanish. It concerned women's identity in the wake of the sexual revolution. Linda is also the author of August Celebration, about the discovery of the wild-grown algae superfood in Klamath Lake. It has sold a half million copies to do

She also created Aaron's World for CBS-EMI and has been a New York City taxi driver, a cook at a retreat center, a water-ski instructor, a Manhattan restaurant reviewer, and an actress in Kick the Habit" anticigarette commercials.

Linda was commissioned in 1979 by CBS-EMI to create an alternative serial drama, Aaron's World, about a children's hospital. The show was optioned, developed, and scheduled, but not aired. She later became head writer of The Doctors, NBC; Search for Tomorrow, CBS; and CO-head writer of General Hospital, ABC.

Linda is also the author of August Celebration: A Molecule of Hope for a Changing World, published in both paperback and audio. (Gilbert, Hoover & Clarke.) It recounts the discovery of a wild-grown superfood in an Oregon Cascades lake and examines the resulting network of socially conscious consumers and distributors across North America. Nearly a half million copies have been sold to date.

These days, Linda makes her home in Klamath Falls, Oregon with her golden retriever/border collie, Shalise. She plans to spend the rest of her life windsurfing, promoting global partnership, and celebrating.

Norie Huddle

Norie Huddle is a published author of five books (two more in the works) and numerous articles, a professional interviewer, a popular and highly respected public speaker and an organizational and creative consultant to private industry, government and academia. She is the Chairman of the Board and Executive Director of the Center for New National Security, a nonprofit corporation established in Washington, D.C. in 1979.

Huddle is actively committed to designing and supporting projects in peacemaking on a local to global scale. In the early 1960s, she was an exchange student in Italy for a year, under the auspices of the American Field Service. Since her graduation from Brown University (1966), she has been establishing a network of cooperative working relationships with government officials, leaders in private industry, the media and academia, and creative strategists and problem-solvers around the world.

In her endeavors as a "peacemaker," Huddle has lived and traveled abroad extensively. A former Peace Corps Volunteer from Colombia, South America, Huddle worked for two years at the community level, designing and implementing training programs for women. Huddle lived in Japan for four years while she researched and wrote, with Michael Reich, Island of Dreams: Environmental Crisis in Japan. She worked closely with Japanese environmental and consumer groups, and helped organize the nonpartisan group, "Japan Plus 20." to look at long range social, political and environmental issues and trends in Japan and Southeast Asia. Huddle has also visited the Soviet Union frequently, to attend conferences and conduct interviews with a wide range of Soviet citizens concerning their perspectives on national and global security, and to meet with Soviet entrepreneurs and design joint ventures.

A lifelong student of America and the American people, Huddle has also traveled throughout the United States. In 1977, she wrote Travels with Hope, the account of "Project America 1976," a crosscountry bicycle trip which she organized upon her return from Japan in 1975. Project America involved a dozen Americans and Japanese who spent nine months bicycling across the United States from Santa Barbara to Philadelphia, during the American Bicentennial. It was during this time that Huddle began asking Americans about their lives and work, their hopes and ideas for creating a positive future.

From 1979-83, Huddle interviewed over 400 people from all walks of life about their positive visions of the future and their ideas for how to make America and the world more secure. Surviving: The Best Game on Earth, published by Schocken Books, is a compendium of 30 of these interviews. It has been widely reviewed and well received. One reviewer commented, "This is the first time I have weighed the issues of global survival without feeling futility or despair. Instead, reading this collection of interviews on the subject has been an inspiring look at the power of individual effort. If this book, and others like it, were introduced into the curricula of school systems worldwide, a shift toward more planetary cooperation might well occur." Library Journal selected Surviving as one of the top 100 books in the United States in the area of science and technology (1984); Surviving also was on the New York Time's longer bestseller list.

Creative cooperation is the key to Norie Huddle's success as she engages with individuals, groups and organizations in alliances to forward their work and create new agendas in the pursuit of personal and global excellence. Huddle conducts seminars in teambuilding, problem-solving, communications skills, values and goals clarification, productive relationship skills and stress management. She employs state-of-the-art video feedback and learning techniques. She teaches the interdisciplinary KEEPRAH Holistic Approach to Community Development, mindmapping, goal setting, values clarification, strategic planning, leadership training, personal and group dynamics, creative problem solving and designing and facilitating meetings.

Huddle has shared her skills and thought-provoking perspectives on television and radio in the United States, Japan (in Japanese) and the Soviet Union (in Russian). In Japan, she has spoken to radio and television audiences of over 10 million and to live audiences of up to 10,000. She has been interviewed for and has written feature articles for all the leading Japanese daily newspapers and many of their weekly and monthly magazines, as well as for several leading Soviet publications. She has led seminars or made presentations to such diverse organizations as the United Nation's Conference on Population (NGO Forum) held in Bucharest, the Commonwealth Club (San Francisco), the Women's Executive Club (Washington, D.C.), the National Organization of Women, the United States Army, Lorton Prison, the Whole Life Expo (New York and San Francisco), Princeton University, Villanova, the University of California (Riverside), Catholic University and The American University (Washington, D.C.), and to a variety of church congregations and schools (first through 12th grades). She is a warm, humorous and genuine individual who inspires her audiences with her enthusiasm, intelligence and determination to contribute to the wellbeing of all. She gives presentations in a variety of languages including Japanese, Russian, Spanish and Italian.

From 1988-1992, Huddle was the Vice President of Special Projects and a Board Member of Journal Graphics, Inc., a privately held Denver- and New York-based corporation which is the nation's largest producer of television transcripts. She helped JG develop a variety of new information products and reposition itself in the marketplace, represented JG at trade shows, helped negotiate contracts with clients, and assisted with employee and client relations. In 1987-1988, Huddle helped Journal Graphics negotiate (in Russian) a major deal involving Vneshtorghizdat (USSR) and Rank Xerox (England).

In March of 1990, Huddle set up Huddle Books as the publishing division of CNNS, for the purpose of publishing future works related to national and global security. On Earth Day 1990, she published her fourth book, Butterfly, a "tiny tale of great transformation" which sets forth a global myth for our times. Butterfly is beautifully illustrated by artist Charlene Madland. In June of 1991, Huddle Books published Huggles, an environmental coloring book for children, also written by Huddle and illustrated by Madland. Huddle is currently completing Money, Power and Purpose, which presents bold new ideas for redesigning economic and social systems.

Huddle is the founder of The Best Game on Earth, an experiment in "electronic democracy" designed to support collaborative and innovative approaches to solving global problems. Beginning in 1992, Huddle has been a frequent interviewer and guest host on The Best Game on Earth, a weekly cable television show produced in Salina, KS.

Huddle began an eight-year project to conduct a Global Oral History on video, launching this at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Brazil, in June of 1992. In preparation for this, she conduced similar interviews with Ministers of the Environment from the Carribbean region at a conference sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency in Puerto Rico (March, 1992) and again with top environmental managers from around the world at an EPA-sponsored conference in Vienna (August, 1992) .

In August of 1993, Huddle bought 12 acres of land in a beautiful part of West Virginia. She has designed and been building her own house, with the help of neighbors and friends. She continues to maintain an active consulting and writing schedule, as she builds and gardens.

Fred Stern / The Artist (a Brief Biography)

Fred Stern is an acknowledged innovator in environmental art. He has served as Associate Professor of Sculpture and Engineering at Pratt Institute, and as Associate Professor of Visual Arts at New York University, the University of Maryland and The Instituto De Allende in Mexico.

Stern has received five major awards from the National Endowment for The Arts and grants from many local and private agencies to support his work. He was the first artist to receive an Art in Public Places Individual Artist Award from the National Endowment for the Arts, for his rainbow work.

He has created Natural Man Made Real Rainbows as large as 2000 feet across for the cities of New York, Baltimore, Chicago, Miami, Austin, Salt Lake City, and Santa Fe. In 1992 Stern created a series of rainbows at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In 1995 he presented his rainbow work, "Keshet Sheket," a Holocaust Memorial, as the opening piece for the Eutopia Festival in Potsdam Germany. On Flag Day, he created a rainbow for the town of Silver City, New Mexico as a planetary flag standing above all other flags and symbolizing the need for global unity.

This past summer he realized a two year dream through the creation of a natural rainbow over the United Nations Building. In this piece the planets flag was flown above the flags of the world's nations

An artificial rainfall is created by fire trucks or fire boats, pumping water into the air. The water drops refract the sunlight and establish the rainbow. A computer program determines the optimal time, position and spray parameters for rainbow generation.

Although his rainbow work began as Conceptual Sculptural Pieces they have moved into the arena of Public Art works as a symbol of peace and unity in support of our planet. As an artist Stern combines a visual sensibility with an ethical responsibility in the realization of his pieces. He has committed to only present his work for organizations and events in support of the planet and peace issues.

Stern has coordinated groups of artists in the presentation of environmental works for The International Sculpture Conference in Washington, D.C. and The Primer Gran Festival De Dos Culturas in Mexico. He served as an advisor and participant to the New York Annual Avant Garde Festival for more than 10 years.

DELTA WILLIS

An author and free-lance journalist, Willis was commissioned to design Year 2000 safaris for Park East Tours, one of the only operators with permits to climb Kilimanjaro to reach the highest peak in Africa on January 1,2000.

Because of her expertise on Africa, Willis was commissioned to write the introduction to the Fodor's Guide to Kenya and Tanzania and served as Chief Contributor for five years.

In 1979 she helped organize a WWF/London Zoological Society expedition across the Sahara. That same year she planned a New Zealand tour for a film crew from ABC-TV, and began to lead tours into the People's Republic of China for Lindblad. Willis has also worked for La Mer Diving Seafaris, which had charter boats around the world for scuba divers, the London-based WEXAS, and Discovery Tours at the American Museum of Natural History. By invitation Willis has twice been an honored guest at the Annual Dinner of The Explorer's Club.

Working as a freelance journalist, she has published more than 30 magazine articles, many covering sophisticated travel with such operators as Abercrombie & Kent. For a decade she has contributed to DIVERSION, the travel magazine for physicians. In addition to her assignments in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zaire, Willis has covered ecotourism in Papua New Guinea and Australia.

In 1972, Willis became the first U.S. representative for a division of British television, Survival Anglia Ltd., handling all the press and promotion for the award winning Survival series. She was named a vice-president of the company at the age of 28.

By invitation, Willis was one of five science writers selected (alongside Pulitzer Prize winner John Nobel Wilford) to speak at a symposium on media coverage at The American Museum of Natural History. She has also been interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered.

Her most recent book, The Sand Dollar & The Slide Rule, was excerpted for the Discovery Channel Online and in Natural History magazine. Her first book, on fossil discoveries made by the Leakey family, was introduced by Stephen Jay Gould. the paperback edition of The Hominid Gang sold out.

Since 1996, Willis has worked as a consultant to Park East Tours, planning travel programs for 1999/2000 celebrations, FIT sales and brochure production.

She received a degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas and worked as a volunteer on the 1992 Clinton/Gore campaign.