Have you ever been disenchanted with the way each day of the year is marked by a characterless number or wished your calendar provided you with more information about the seasons or the stars? Chris Hardman of Antenna Theatre group based in Marin County and creator of the ECOlogical Calendar was not satisfied with the form or content of the traditional calendar. The result of his attempt to re-imagine the calendar thinks outside the grid while providing beautiful visuals and an encyclopedic quantity of information.
Hardman questions “the authority” of the Gregorian Calendar that to him is “dysfunctional and exists only because of tradition." The months are divided inconsistantly and the latin names for some of the months are misleading. September, he points out, “means the seventh month and December means the tenth month.” For Hardman, it made more sense to divide a solar calendar according to solstices, equinoxes, and the seasons.
Because it is not realistic to overhaul the Gregorian calendar completely, Hardman designed a calendar that incorporates the traditional division of the year into a calendar that revolves around seasons rather than months. It includes information about a plethora of astronomical phenomena including moon phases, meteor showers, tidal fluctuations and seasonal constellations.
The ECOlogical calendar is both factual and poetic, as each month and day has been renamed on the calendar to reflect something about the particular season in which the unit of time resides. The evocative names conjure up images that correspond with the weather and natural phenomena associated with the seasons. January has been given the name Celeste, while the month of July is re-named Zenith. Each day bears a unique name drawn from a natural phenomena, a particular animal, or plant that is present during that time such as Goldenrod or Albedo. The colorful, illustrated panels of the calendar themselves are filled with useful pieces of information about flora, fauna, ecology, and astronomical phenomena visible from the Northern Hemisphere.
