The time is now to transform our derelict parks, schools, communities, and cities into healthy and vibrant environments by reconnecting our fragmented local resources: human, ecological, economic, historic, technological, and aesthetic. We can use nature as a model and design elegant site and situation - specific indoor/outdoor culture-ecology arks and gardens that involve us meaningfully in their creation, use, maintenance, and communication.

These resulting enchanting places with integrated programs and curricula will bring us closer to understanding and appreciating our local place and its relationship and impact on distant cultures and ecologies. We will also understand the interconnections between systems: biological, cultural, and technological and our lives and communities will be renewed. Each of these unique environments with integrated activities can be thought of as being A Living Library of diversity. We are all part of A Living Library of diversity including our creations - birds, people, trees, air, buildings, artworks, and computers.

As a synergizing vehicle or organism, A Living Library brings the humanities, sciences, and social sciences to life through integrated elements: the built and ecological environments, plants and other living forms, the arts, programs of lectures, demonstrations, workshops, research institutes, apprenticeship programs, and state-of-the-art communications technologies. As such, it is an interactive Think Park and lifelong learning magnet that may become the school of the future, involving all sectors of the community in its ongoing processes of environmental and cultural stewardship.

A goal of A Living Library is to create electronically linked branch Living Libraries in different locales around the world forming a global network of diversity and awareness. In this way, the local ecological, cultural, and technological diversity will come into focus and together, a planetary network of diversity will emerge.

What Some Have Said About A Living Library And Other Projects By Bonnie Sherk

“It may well be that A Living Library will provide us with the most important new form for education and park design for the future. It is worthy of our support and participation now.”

-Terrence Benbow, Dean, School of Law, University of Bridgeport, Former Vice Chairman, N.Y.C. Landmarks Preservation Commission

“Bonnie Sherk's “Living Library“ is a concept of great potency. It leaps the library wall, just as the environmental art movement has escaped the gallery, to re-embody culture in the landscape. Customizing each Living Library to its locale will conserve the unique culture of place, while giving people in various locations the opportunity to learn about and from each other. Its interactive aspects, are extremely germane to our contemporary need to be involved in making the world, in Heidgigger's full sense of dwelling and being. Thus, the Living Library should be thoroughly investigated as a way to renew the park in contemporary life.”

-Susan Rademacher Frey, former editor in Chief, Landscape Architecture and Garden Design Magazines

“Bonnie Sherk's idea for A Living Library will bring to our communities and global village marvelous and rich opportunities to communicate and better understand one another while loving ourselves, each other, and our planet.”

-Judith Hollister, Founder, President Emeritus, Temple of Understanding

“From 1974 to 1980, Sherk spent all her energies founding and directing what is the most ambitious and successful work of ecological art in this country. It's called Crossroads Community (The Farm) and exists on several patches of land, 6.5 acres in all-- under and within a freeway system…”

-Lucy Lippard, Art Critic, Art In America, November, 1981

“Bonnie Sherk is one of the most creative environmentalists that I have ever known. Particularly outstanding is her talent in working with people of greatly varying ethnic and religious background and age. Most delightfully, her tremendous sense of humor is apt to appear from an unexpected juxtaposition of people and places.”

-The Very Reverend James Parks Morton, Former Dean, Cathedral of St. John the Divine