Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/tag/art/page/15/)
Paintings, books, music, plays and other arts are effective ways of communicating environmental issues.
A traveling play in Michigan is teaching kids about an ominous part of the state’s history – shipwrecks. Shipwrecked! is a play about a family caught in a storm while transporting Christmas trees in 1893.
I recently got an email about a free comedy show in Ann Arbor, Mich. Featuring Canadian stand-up comedian Derek Forgie. Derek is not a typical comedian. He’s an activist whose entire show is about the bottled water industry. He prides himself on being raised on tap water (according to one of his YouTube videos), entertains a crowd while serving up a great lesson about water quality and why tap water is (much) better than anything bottled. One of his four reasons: the price. Forgie compares paying for bottled water to buying an Oh Henry candy bar for $10,000. He asks if you would buy a dollar candy bar if someone were to charge you ten thousand times what it’s worth. The Ann Arbor show was in collaboration with Food and Water Watch, a national consumer advocacy group.
Julie Jilek loves Wisconsin. She loves it so much in fact, that she’s going to every state park to paint a scene. We caught up with Julie to talk about her art and what prompted the project.
As an angler and mandolin player, I’ve often wondered what it is about the two seemingly disparate hobbies that draws me to them. And I’m not alone. Most anglers I know have an acoustic lying around somewhere, and most guitar pickers I know have some pretty good trout stories. Well, that’s research for another day. But Bret Shaw, an environmental communication specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Extension, is looking to tap into this connection to prevent the spread of aquatic invasive species in the Great Lakes region.
If you live in Ohio and see a salamander scattering past, don’t scream and swat it. Shoot it, instead. With a camera, that is. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ Third Annual Wildlife Legacy Stamp photo contest is underway. Focusing on a different animal each year, this contest hopes to promote the diversity of Ohio’s wildlife.
Larry Lankton tracks the birth, boom and bust of the industry that once dominated the nation’s copper production. Gary Kaunonen focuses on the immigrants from Finland whoworked in the mines, and the strife between labor and management.
Detroit native Mark McInnis is giving away seeds to help introduce his new film on the explosion of urban gardening in his home city. In Urban Roots, McInnis connects the decline of the city’s auto industry to the rise of vacant lots that now provide space for gardens. McInnis’s mother worked for Ford Motor Co. in Detroit throughout his childhood. “That job put braces on my bother’s teeth, paid for our skateboards and our weekend trips up north,” he said.
LANSING–In many ways, Michigan is a state of connections, including historic links between the Ojibwe people of Minnesota and Isle Royale. Such connections can be explored in words and pictures that illuminate the linkages that bind land and water, peoples and places, present and past. Minong — The Good Place (Michigan State University Press, $24.49) provides an in-depth account of the intimate relationship between the North Shore Ojibwe people and Isle Royale, which is now a national park in Lake Superior off the west coast of the Upper Peninsula. Timothy Cochrane, the former national park historian, describes how the Grand Portage Band had used the island and its resources, including the prized siscowet trout, the caribou that became especially prized when mainland moose numbers dropped in the 1800s, the beaver whose skins were traded and the maple syrup produced in the spring. The Ojibwe were involved in copper mining on the island, as well as commercial fishing operations.
By Eric Freedman
Nov. 30, 2009
LANSING — The Edmund Fitzgerald is the best-known of the Great Lakes’ doomed ships, but the freighter’s demise with its entire crew off Whitefish Point in the Upper Peninsula is by no means the state’s only such maritime disaster. Andrew Kantar, a Ferris State University professor, tells another such story, that of the ill-fated freighter Daniel J. Morrell. It sank in 1966 off the tip of the Thumb in Lake Huron, northwest of Harbor Beach. “Each of the Great Lakes has its own tragic history, and Lake Huron’s violent moods have become legendary,” Kantar writes in “Deadly Voyage: The S.S. Daniel J. Morrell Tragedy” (Michigan State University Press, $16.95).