Avalon Organic Gardens & EcoVillage, in Tumacácori, hosts their fourth annual Earth Harmony Festival, October 3 and 4. The event will celebrate another year dedicated to planetary restoration, sustainability, honoring the natural world and recognizing our collective responsibility as stewards of our global home. This year’s theme is “Out of the Box, Into the Garden”, encouraging people to get back to nature to maintain balance and harmony in the age of technology.

“Avalon Gardens is, in many ways, a high-tech/grassroots organization,” says TaliSeen Combs, Avalon’s Farm Coordinator. “Our goal is to create systems which merge the best of the indigenous ways with a conscious and moral use of the gift of modern technology to cultivate a prototype society where each individual can live a nurtured and balanced life physically, emotionally, creatively, intellectually, socially and spiritually.”

A highlight of the festival is the educational and engaging Eco Tour, during which participants experience sustainable living practices in action, such as permaculture, organic gardening, seed-saving, upcycling, composting, rain and grey water harvesting, watershed management, alternative building projects, Arizona’s largest food forest system, solar and wind power, pastureland management, bee keeping and the workings of a community supported agriculture (CSA) program.

Local organic food is not just part of a healthy diet; it’s part of a healthy planet. Avalon Gardens grows year-round, providing food for its 110-member EcoVillage. They are food activists, preserving natural diversity through seed-saving and the promotion of heritage and heirloom varieties of crops.

The Earth Harmony Festival is a rejuvenating and colorful weekend full of educational speakers; yoga; live music with higher-consciousness messages; a variety of healthy, enlivening foods; a kaleidoscopic interactive Kid’s Village; a Locavore’s Vendor Village with innovative local crafters and artisans; and camping.

Live music for the festival is provided by Global Change Music Nonprofit Record Label, with performances by TaliasVan & The Bright & Morning Star Band, VansGuard, Starseed Acoustic Ensemble and Israfel Awakened. Global Change Music promotes sustainable living, which includes growing organic food, building green, sharing services and goods and having a protective environmental consciousness.

The featured act is TaliasVan & The Bright & Morning Star Band, a nine-piece performing CosmoPop music—an interuniversal experience fusing rock, jazz, Celtic, folk and other styles with spiritual lyrics and mantras which inspire sacred dance.

Avalon Gardens’ founders, Gabriel of Urantia/TaliasVan and Niánn Emerson Chase, created the Earth Harmony Festival to share the vision unfolding at the EcoVillage, and to inspire others to pursue a lifestyle of global change through sustainable living.

“The message of the festival is vital for the health and progress of our planet. Like our gardens, it is growing each year as more people awaken to the necessity for all citizens of the world to adopt a more sustainable and selfless lifestyle,” says Festival Coordinator Amadon DellErba. “We encourage people to come out of the boxes—be it city or suburb—and witness firsthand extraordinary, yet practical, solutions for new paradigm living.”

Entrance to the festival is free. Donations for camping, activities and Eco Tours are encouraged to help foster the EcoVillage’s many prototype projects for creating a more sustainable, environmentally conscious and equitable world.

For more information, to become a sponsor and for camping reservations, call 520-398-2542 or visit EarthHarmonyFestival.org. See ad, page 16.