Community Pages
Please accept our new Terms & Conditions before contributing to our Community Pages. Any content you contribute will be publicly visible. We expect contributors to show respect, courtesy and an appreciation of the atmosphere we all share.
Our society was launched in 2005 by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Member 0001, to bring together people who love the sky.
We have members in 120 countries around the world, all united in the belief that clouds are the most dynamic, evocative and poetic aspect of nature. Read our manifesto to see what we stand for.
We decided from an early stage not to make the Cloud Appreciation Society a non-profit. We believe an organisation is most sustainable when it works as a business. We feel that becoming preoccupied with applying for grants and raising donations would mean we’d lose sight of our aim: to bring people together through a greater understanding and appreciation of the sky.
Every year we spend 5% of all membership revenues towards a cause we believe is worthwhile. In 2019, we helped the Canadian non-profit FogQuest supply a village in Central America with everything they needed to harvest fresh drinking water from fog. The villagers get 8000L (1760 gals) of fresh water a day during the foggy but rain-free winter months. In 2020, we helped protect the ‘river in the sky’ over the Amazon rainforests by supporting an Amazon Conservation Association project in Peru train and equip locals with drones to stop illegal logging of their land. In 2021, we’re planning to help teachers around the world encourage a greater appreciation and understanding of the sky in their pupils.
With the help of ideas contributed by our members, we are putting together a ‘Cloud Appreciation Pack’ that we’ll mail out to any school or homeschool family for free. These survival kits for the imagination will include ideas and resources to encourage an interest in both the science and the beauty of the sky. The physical packs will be backed up by digital resources appropriate for different age ranges and will include space for teachers where needed to add translations in local languages. Our free Cloud Appreciation Packs will be aimed at encouraging children to look up, to find calm and emotional resilience by engaging with the ever-changing clouds, and to become expert junior cloudspotters.
Later this year, we will start sending out our free Cloud Appreciation Packs to any school or homeschool who needs one.
