Wounding the Landscape
Research Blog | March 10, 2014
Wounded landscape: how Norway is remembering its 2011 Utøya massacre | Art and design | theguardian.com. I find the decision to wound the land itself a disturbing response to a massacre by a human. Reminds me of burning animals at the stake as proxies. I’d suggest renaming it: Wounding the Landscape
The Mississippi shimmies across the Alluvial Plain
Research Blog | December 30, 2013
Robert Krulwich for NPR writes about cartographer Harold Fisk’s visualization of the river’s historical paths here. This is a map of the Lower Mississippi’s evolving floodplains, lifted from cartographer Harold Fisk’s 1944 report, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River. You can download the report in its entirety, including numerous…
the scrubby, feral and untended
Research Blog | August 29, 2010
Important article from Nature on the importance of looking at non-native, hybrid, “impure” ecosystems: Ragamuffin Earth (July 2009). Excerpted: Most ecologists and conservationists would describe this forest in scientific jargon as ‘degraded’, ‘heavily invaded’ or perhaps ‘anthropogenic’. Less formally, they might term it a ‘trash ecosystem’. After all, what is it but a bunch of…
Rand Paul doesn’t think we’ll miss a couple of little mountaintops…
Research Blog | June 14, 2010
Words from Mr Paul on Kentucky coal mining: I think whoever owns the property can do with the property as they wish, and if the coal company buys it from a private property owner and they want to do it, fine. The other thing I think is that I think coal gets a bad name,…
Allenheads – Land inside out
Research Blog | June 28, 2009
Things of course are nothing like what they appear. Land like any other time-based and event-based instance needs to be decoded or requires literacy to understand its stories. Last week I was generously welcomed to Allenheads Contemporary Arts by founders & artist producers Alan Smith and Helen Ratcliffe, and by Hannah Marsden, curator of their…
Exmoor Wild Ponies enlisted as horticulture specialists
Research Blog | June 19, 2009
I saw wild Exmoor Ponies, a feral breed of horse, up on the moors near High Green. They’ve been brought here from Devon in a land management scheme – eating invasive grasses and bracken in the hope that rarer wildflowers will flourish. They also don’t touch the heather. Exmoor ponies are a hardy breed who…
England poised for further invasion!!
Research Blog | June 17, 2009
It’s a fever.. of xenophobia: An army of foreign mammals, birds and amphibians is poised to invade Britain – changing the countryside and threatening our best-loved native wildlife, scientists warn. They have identified 84 exotic species – from the raccoon to the snapping turtle – which could become established within the next few decades. Some,…
PROTECTED ZONE by Chus Garcia-Fraile
Research Blog | April 11, 2009
…click here to see video of Protected Zone. I’ve been intermittently reading Deep North, the document produced by Transmediale 2009, an annual festival held in Berlin that weaves media, social change and a thematic issue. This year was loosely Climate Change/Social Change (my piece The Poster Children was in the exhibition). The book contains an…
Land Arts of the American West
Research Blog | April 11, 2009
I went to a talk at Parsons today on Land Art, presented by Incubo (Chile) and Land Arts of the American West (Texas). The 2 groups worked on this, Earthworks Lab. Land Arts of the American West is “an interdisciplinary field program expanding the definition of land art through direct experience with the full range…
The Anthropocene Era (1)
Research Blog | April 11, 2009
New geological ages are characterized by changes in global environmental conditions and large scale shifts in types of species. Recently Earth has entered into a new geological age: The Anthropocene, from anthropo / man and cene / new [geological age]. Humans are now changing the world on a global scale and ushering in the new…