Cascadia Scorecard News
June 2005

Peter Donaldson explores the link between sustainability and Leonardo da Vinci

Peter Donaldson is an actor, educator, and sustainability activist who believes so deeply in NEW's mission he has joined the Cascadia Stewards Council. This spring, he donated two performances of his one-man show as Leonardo da Vinci for fellow Cascadia Stewards Council members and other special guests. Peter has honed his Leonardo show over the past nine years through hundreds of performances. (You can read more about Peter here) Peter believes Leonardo has a great deal to teach us about how to engender a new Renaissance today, one that shifts our culture in the direction of sustainability.

Peter says it best:

Leonardo's marvelous self-portrait, completed around 1512 when he was 62, shows a draftsman at the height of his powers. It also reveals an old man reflecting on the inner tension between curiosity and accomplishment. We can see in his eyes the will of a penetrating mind determined to document that which his curiosity has led him to uncover. All of it. And yet time is a thief for the most curious among us.

The angle of the portrait tells us that Leonardo has set up two mirrors to catch himself sideways, looking at himself looking at his life. With so much left to do, why take time to draw one's own face?

It is the only self-portrait we have. He spent a couple of hours on it. Five hundred years later we are privileged to eavesdrop on this private moment, this old man in the two mirrors, and reflect upon our own lives. What do we do when we unexpectedly catch ourselves as we really are? What story are we living? A Dark Age? A Renaissance? A flat spot?

The assumption here is that we are indeed moving towards a second Renaissance, a second rebirth. Five hundred years ago in Italy, conditions were ripe to rediscover insights from classical times, a rebirth of Greek and Roman ideals massaged in the burgeoning intellectual output of the humanists.

But what is the rebirth today?

The two cornerstones of the new Renaissance are civility and sustainability. Civility is the rebirth of the golden rule uniting all world religions and all experiments in democracy thousands of years in the making. Sustainability is the rebirth of ecological literacy, an indigenous wisdom uniting economic systems with Nature's way.

We feel the birth pangs quickening and the vulnerability of our own Dark Age moltings.

Are we entering a Renaissance? Inviting such an inquiry alone increases our capacity. Isn't this the Renaissance spark, human curiosity on the shoulders of experience? Thanks to Leonardo, that's what I'm curious about.

Thank you, Peter, for sharing your curiosity with us in such a compelling way.

More resources:
Join the Cascadia Stewards Council
Peter Donaldson's Leonardo performance