Ecollaboration

Back Cove: conservation conversation

By Chris Thompson

“Back Cove: Heart of Portland” is at USM’s Area Gallery through October 12;free tours of the Back Cove site, public art works, and the exhibition every other Saturday at 10 m.m through October 6. Call (207) 780-5008. “Return the Tides” can be accessed at www.redstartstudio.com/rtt

Back Cove Jogger A: “It’s terrible what’s happening to the rainforests — such a precious ecosystem, and they’re destroying it right under our noses.” Jogger B: “Yeah, there are species there that we haven’t even discovered yet, some plant that may be the cure for cancer.”

Jogger A: “The people destroying that ecosystem have no idea what they’re doing to the planet.” Jogger B: “Didn’t Ben and Jerry invent an ice cream to try and raise awareness about the rainforests? I wonder how much money they made from that . . .” Both laugh. Jogger A: “If something like that were to happen in our backyard, we wouldn’t just sit and watch, we’d do something about it.”

“Hey, you joggers out there,” a new exhibit at the USM Area Gallery cries, “welcome to the Back Cove.”

In the Return the Tides resource book, which accompanies the USM show, “Back Cove: Heart of Portland,” conservation lawyer Erno Bonebakker explains that “Estuaries fall just below rainforests in the eyes of most ecologists in terms of their habitat value and ecological productivity.”

Joggers A and B: “What’s an estuary?”

You’re jogging around one. A place like Back Cove is an ecological nexus, forming “natural stews” that mix species and elements from both the freshwater and saltwater worlds, many that are indigenous only to the zone where the fresh and salt water come into contact.

“Return the Tides” is the name for a project conceived by the Conservation Law Foundation, which is documenting “restrictive tidal crossings” along Maine’s coast. These are places where the construction of roadways and railways have tended to block the natural flows connecting tidal marshes and estuaries.

In one part of the “Return the Tides” Website, which they’ve developed with Bonebakker and scientist Doug Vollmer, artists Lauri Twitchell and Peter Suchecki look at the three restricted crossings around Back Cove. What look at first like pretty boulevard vistas are panoramic records of erosion, testimony to the process of strangulation the cove is undergoing.

“Return the Tides” appears again on one of the road-signs — ecological warnings and interventions — made by Twitchell’s printmaking students, in participation with the City’s Department of Traffic Engineering, and posted on Bedford Street between Back Cove’s parking area and USM’s Area Gallery. Inside the gallery, wall-mounted cards with the “Return the Tides” Web address are made available for those considering grassroots conservation action.

This activist mini-network is one of many projects that USM’s gallery director Carolyn Eyler has organized in order to engage with this unique landmark and raise awareness about the necessity of its conservation. The show is part of a larger project conceived by Eyler to examine how the Casco Bay watershed, of which Back Cove is an important part, functions as a whole. Her aim is to generate a series of events and exhibitions over the next several months (phase two is at USM’s Art Gallery in Gorham from October 25 through December 8) that will have increasingly interactive and participatory elements.

It’s difficult to say which part of the project is more striking: the range of collaborators she has managed to convene — artists, scientists, students young and old, even a lawyer or two; or the way that the show pinpoints the connections between the intricate dynamics of this ecosystem and their larger social implications, and does so with intellectual precision, aesthetic complexity, and thoughtful accessibility.

One of the most compelling works in the gallery is also its simplest: ornithologist Richard Eakin’s list of 200 names of birds spotted in Back Cove over the past thirty years. These are color-coded in accordance with their frequency and closeness to extinction. The most surprising is a single yellow word: “Cockatiel.” Have we screwed up the planet so entirely that there are now Cockatiels living at large in Portland? It seems like, at least for now, there’s still some hope that things aren’t so far gone: the key explains that birds listed in yellow were “escaped.”

Among the most charming parts of the indoor “Back Cove” show is a wall of diagrams made by 5th grade students for the “Back Cove Time Line Book Project.” These trace genealogies from Back Cove’s past through to prophetic takes on its future. Some of these entail ecological disaster. Others are more ambivalent, like one that shows a big building with “THE MALL” written across it.

SPACE COVE: an example from Lauri Twitchell’s MECA printmaking class?

In her description of Tracey Cockrell’s “WaterMark” piece, Eyler refers to this spirit as an attempt to “invoke historical imagination.” “WaterMark” conjures up Portland’s pre-colonial past using a series of small, metallic-blue, plexiglass-faced boxes placed around a route approximating Back Cove’s shoreline centuries ago. Each box has a tiny red nipple of a button, inviting users to press it and hear a twenty-second recording “of what might have been heard on the water’s edge.” You’ll have to listen hard to hear gentle sounds of water licking now nonexistent shores, just as you’ll have to work to imagine that the suggested walking path Cockrell has set up for you, one that takes you through “tree-lined neighborhoods, barren warehouse districts,” was once that coastline.

This desire to summon Back Cove’s past to an uneasy life in the present is seen also in Marcia Howell’s three comparative maps showing the development of the cove from 1781, 1871, and 2001. And Eyler’s introductory essay in the show’s brochure, a provocative piece of its own, gives a thorough account of the cove’s changing history thanks to human interaction. Her series of prints force a literal comparison between the cove and the human circulatory system, showing the sewage tubes and “Combined Sewer Overflow” pipes that empty directly into its waters.

Thanks to the 19 “CSO” pipes, whenever the system is flooded with excess storm water, the sewage is joined by unprocessed chemicals from pesticides and fertilizers. Lauren Molyneaux’s series of digital prints collectively called “Overflow” documents the garbage that the innocuous-sounding “CSO” brings into the cove: cigarette butts, fast food leftovers, tampons, assorted plastic products.

Artist Aviva Rahmani and geomorphologist Irwin Novak’s “Back Cove: Zooming in on If” uses the most technologically polished tools to take the mapping of Back Cove to the next level. Their collaboration uses the already-seductive aesthetics of satellite imagery to provide aerial views of the cove and its environs. These ask whether all of the open spaces and parks in the area could be connected up like dots, and new flowing corridors opened up for local wildlife.

Rahmani, formerly USM’s artist-in-residence, had been interested in the possibility of “redesigning the City of Portland by studying pre-European settlement large predator migration paths and waterways” — that is, she wanted to re-map the city so that people would live in accordance with natural rhythms and flows. While in residence, she met Bonebakker, who catalogued for her the numerous ways that the cove had been adversely impacted by human mismanagement. She came to think of the cove “as an acupuncture point in the larger landscape to effect healing change.”

Whether it takes the form of Jan Piribeck, Chris Hoffman, and Gary Green’s playful inquiry into the convergence of colonial European naturalists and contemporary digital photography; Mark Emerson’s panoramic photos of the cove taken from inside a moving car; or Barry Pitchforth’s ethereal sail sculptures hovering just off the cove’s shore, the work in this show generates a cohesive agenda for discussion — and for action.

In this respect, Rahmani and Novak’s project’s strange title, “Zooming in on If,” is fitting. “If” is a conditional word, usually used at the beginning of a sentence, maybe to kick off a speculation or provoke a question. Here it’s more of a conclusion. We are in a time of “If.” Our condition is also conditional. As Rahmani says of her geo-acupuncture: “if many of these points can be identified and restored, we might go a long way towards saving clean water for both ourselves and the environment.” That is, if we get our act together we might have a shot.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.