A Season Greetings postcard for you... to think about environmental issues!

"It is very nice meeting friends and colleagues in this time of the year and hearing their impatience to get the handmade Season's Greeting postcard from EDEN volunteers" - expresses the EDEN staff.

The tradition of the handmade season's greetings postcards have its genesis several years ago, since 2005. The idea behind is to raise public awareness on Environmental issues even during seasons period. Together with our greetings we transmit to our friends a message on environmental protection which shows not only in words but in the entire process of making the postcard. The EDEN center volunteers make them with reusable materials and compose each material with their fantasy in order to get a unique décor and transmit an environmental message.
They reuse plastic materials to create flowers, the sea and the sky; they reuse paper to come up with beautiful landscapes; they use leftovers of gift decors to compose a mosaic of animals, forests and butterflies; they use leftovers of pasta and rice to create an energy efficiency building; they use dry plants and forest materials to give to everyone a piece of nature and in the end they use promotional magazines and paper packaging to create the envelopes for the postcards delivery. So, we must say that any material seen as unnecessary for people is something more for our volunteers to create with their hands beautiful season's greetings postcards.

The EDEN season's greeting message for 2011 will be "Let's protect our forests!", and it comes due to the high number of forest burnings and cuttings this summer in Albania. At the moment of speaking there are minimum 900 ha of burned forests in the country and it seems that no real attention is being paid to the problem from the government institutions and the general public. There are just written newspaper articles.
This year EDEN center wants everybody to dedicate a second of his/her day in the season period to the catastrophic situation with our once beautiful forests. The postcard design is not full of colors, it is in black and brown, the same way as the Albanian landscape with burned forests. The postcard design in not a variety of everyday life elements, but it is a variety of shapes and images created by the casual position of the burning woods. Please do not be surprised if these postcards look like they are burning, as this is simply a message to remember another time that we are destroying the lung of the world by cutting and burning thousands and thousands hectares of forests.

"If we manage to make our receivers think of the forest burning in the moment they are looking at our postcard, we can say that we succeeded with our mission of this year and with this work we have realized also a hidden aim. This year we are working and matching both the "International Year of Forests" and "International Year of Volunteers" - says Jonida Mamaj, project coordinator in EDEN center.

If you are interested to see our postcards of this year please visit the following link and post your comments in our facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150426446307561.371693.319334287560&type=1