New Orleans, Wetlands, Deltas and Artmaking
About two weeks ago, I posted to friends that I was en route to New Orleans, as a birthday present to myself, to see what Katrina had wrought with my own eyes, three years later. Many sent wonderful comments, suggestions, best wishes & contacts for my trip this week, which will be mostly by train. My email was down, an indirect consequence of renting my house to raise money for this trip, or I would have responded to them sooner. Now I have a chance to respond & follow-up. Baile Oakes, author of "Scultping with the Environment," was especially generous, making me a connection with his niece, Nell Bolton, who works on disaster relief with the Episcopal Diocese there.
In New Orleans, I shall be connecting with Len Bahr, who has done a Virtual Concert with me and was a past advisor to the Louisiana governors office on wetlands. I will have the great honor of being shepherded around by him and then we will drive together to Baton Rouge, where I will participate in the conference on Deltaic systems that he organized: "Sustainable Management pf Deltaic Ecosystems: Integration of Theory and Practice." At the conference I hope Len & I can get together with ecological economist, Bob Costanza, also a Virtual Concerts alumnae, and discuss how an artists perspective can contribute to planning and design of restoration systems.
The actual anniversary of Katrina is the 29th, when I shall be making my way back to Maine. I will have a lot to think about.
I had hoped to spend the summer working on some writing, but instead have done innumerable small studies (actually about 40 ranging from 8"x8" to 40"x40", mostly oil on linen) of the control marshes we used for the original bioengineering of the restored marsh for the Ghost Nets project as well as another about 50 prints of the Arctic in 2020, some of which will be shown locally in the New Era Gallery at the end of this month.
An interesting side has been to re-study what I know about wetlands, inc reading Bill Mitsch's textbooks carefully, which gave me a lot to think about en route to the Deltaic systems conference in Baton Rouge. For anyone interested in wetlands, I recommend the texts. I also confess to a modicum of self-righteousness & prescience over my 2006 decision to avoid flying and rely, as I will be this week, on trains where possible:
- Bradford Plumer,
The New Republic
