This week Howard Ferren, our Director of Conservation at the Alaska SeaLife Center, working in partnership with the Ocean Alaska Science and Learning Center of the National Park Service and with the Anchorage Museum, is hosting acclaimed artist, Prof. Pam Longobardi. Prof. Longobardi has worked with a wide range of media throughout her remarkable career, but in recent years has focused special attention on art from marine debris. She is currently Professor of Art at Georgia State University and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Over the past few years, she has created the Drifters Project, http://www.driftwebs.com/, an ongoing collaborative interdisciplinary project focusing on marine debris and plastics pollution. The products of that work are fascinating and provocative as the image below indicates.
Prof. Longobardi gave the first of two scheduled Alaska public lectures on her work last night at the Anchorage Museum. The audience was enthralled with her creative use of a wide range of media and her passion for drawing attention to the increasingly serious issue of ocean pollution by plastics. Her next lecture is scheduled for 6pm this coming Thursday night here at the SeaLife Center and I encourage all with an interest in the future health of our oceans to attend and view her presentation and share in her goal of inspiring greater awareness of the impact of our lifestyle and consumption choices.
She demonstrates very effectively that marine debris is far more widespread than most of us imagine and that it has a dramatic impact on marine life - the image she shared of dozens of dead albatross chicks killed by discarded cigarette lighters and other drifting plastic waste will stay with me for the rest of my life.... that is a testament to the power of her art.
At this time of such widespread public concern for the future of our oceans associated with the bp well blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, I fear that too much attention will be focused on short term responses. Prof Longobardi's work is a timely reminder that our oceans are under assault from many sources and that it would be wise to take a much bigger picture and long term view of how we treat our ocean systems.
Out of sight should no longer equate to out of mind
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