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Beloved Wild Arts Festival moves to Hillsboro this year

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Friday, November 15, 2024

Realist painter Wayne Jiang finds inspiration for his paintings that evoke stillness, solitude and mystery by spending time among Western azalea and red-flowering currant growing in his Southeast Portland backyard. “I believe in using simple, quiet scenes and objects to communicate deep emotion and relevance,” said Jiang, who will be one of 62 artists selling their work at the 44th Wild Arts Festival Dec. 7-8 in Hillsboro to benefit the Bird Alliance of Oregon’s education and conservation efforts.Wild Arts Festival, the Pacific Northwest’s premier show and sale of nature-related art and books, will be held for the first time at the Wingspan Event Center in Hillsboro. Ticket holders ($13) can meet painters, printmakers, jewelry designers and sculptors, and see works created with glass, wood, fiber art and other materials.Each piece has nature or wildlife as a subject, or the artist employed natural materials as a medium, or the art promotes environmental sustainability, say organizers.People viewing Jiang’s paintings can see influences from 17th Century Dutch genre paintings to 19th and 20th Century American Realism. “When composing my painting and choosing my subject matter, I draw inspiration from modern and documentary photographers like Walker Evan and Sally Mann,” said Jiang, who was born in Guangzhou, China, and came to the U.S. when he was 15. He earned a degree in San Jose State University’s Animation & Illustration Program, and for three decades, he has worked as a fine artist and graphic designer.Wayne Jiang is a Portland-based realist painter and teacher.Wayne JiangJiang and his wife, Patricia Delich, are avid gardeners with a special fondness for native flowers. Most of the flowers in his paintings grow in their garden, which is certified platinum with the Backyard Habitat Certification program, and most of the landscape paintings are locations near Portland.“I’m quite excited to share my love of the Pacific Northwest landscape and native flowers through my paintings at this year’s Wild Arts Festival,” Jiang told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “I’m looking forward to meeting and talking with people who also have fondness for these landscapes and native flowers.”Festival goers can hear short talks presented by artists and authors, explaining their creative process and inspirations. See the schedule of Northwest writers specializing in the natural world autographing their books. Authors focused on nature, hiking and birds, include Salem bird expert Harry Fuller, who will be signing copies of, “Birding Harney County.”People who cannot attend can bid online at the fundraising auction for art, experiences and outdoor gear donated to support the Bird Alliance of Oregon’s mission (wildartsfestival.org/silent-auction).The event, presented by Backyard Bird Shop and Sauvie Island Natives, has moved to a new location in Washington Country adjacent to light rail stop and free parking.If you go: The 44th Wild Arts Festival is 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Dec. 7-8 at the Wingspan Event & Conference Center, 801 N.E. 34th Ave., Hillsboro. Admission is $13 for adult (free for those under 18) and can be purchased at the door or in advance at wildartsfestival.org.— Janet Eastman covers design and trends. Reach her at 503-294-4072, jeastman@oregonian.com and follow her on X @janeteastman.

Festival goers can meet artists and authors who will explain their creative process and inspirations.

Wild Arts Festival, the Pacific Northwest’s premier show and sale of nature-related art and books, will be held for the first time at the Wingspan Event Center in Hillsboro. Ticket holders ($13) can meet painters, printmakers, jewelry designers and sculptors, and see works created with glass, wood, fiber art and other materials.

Each piece has nature or wildlife as a subject, or the artist employed natural materials as a medium, or the art promotes environmental sustainability, say organizers.

People viewing Jiang’s paintings can see influences from 17th Century Dutch genre paintings to 19th and 20th Century American Realism. “When composing my painting and choosing my subject matter, I draw inspiration from modern and documentary photographers like Walker Evan and Sally Mann,” said Jiang, who was born in Guangzhou, China, and came to the U.S. when he was 15. He earned a degree in San Jose State University’s Animation & Illustration Program, and for three decades, he has worked as a fine artist and graphic designer.

The 44th Wild Arts Festival Dec. 7-8 at the Wingspan Event Center in Hillsboro spotlights artists and authors. — Wayne Jiang is a Portland-based realist painter and teacher.Wayne Jiang

Jiang and his wife, Patricia Delich, are avid gardeners with a special fondness for native flowers. Most of the flowers in his paintings grow in their garden, which is certified platinum with the Backyard Habitat Certification program, and most of the landscape paintings are locations near Portland.

“I’m quite excited to share my love of the Pacific Northwest landscape and native flowers through my paintings at this year’s Wild Arts Festival,” Jiang told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “I’m looking forward to meeting and talking with people who also have fondness for these landscapes and native flowers.”

Festival goers can hear short talks presented by artists and authors, explaining their creative process and inspirations. See the schedule of Northwest writers specializing in the natural world autographing their books. Authors focused on nature, hiking and birds, include Salem bird expert Harry Fuller, who will be signing copies of, “Birding Harney County.”

People who cannot attend can bid online at the fundraising auction for art, experiences and outdoor gear donated to support the Bird Alliance of Oregon’s mission (wildartsfestival.org/silent-auction).

The event, presented by Backyard Bird Shop and Sauvie Island Natives, has moved to a new location in Washington Country adjacent to light rail stop and free parking.

If you go: The 44th Wild Arts Festival is 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Dec. 7-8 at the Wingspan Event & Conference Center, 801 N.E. 34th Ave., Hillsboro. Admission is $13 for adult (free for those under 18) and can be purchased at the door or in advance at wildartsfestival.org.

— Janet Eastman covers design and trends. Reach her at 503-294-4072, jeastman@oregonian.com and follow her on X @janeteastman.

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A Tiny, 'Endangered' Fish Delayed a Dam's Construction in the 1970s. Now, Scientists Say the Snail Darter Isn't So Rare After All

A lawsuit to protect the snail darter from the Tellico Dam in Tennessee offered the first real test of the 1973 Endangered Species Act. But a new study disputes the fish's status as a distinct species

Though small, the snail darter has played an outsize role in American law, conservation and biology. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters via Flickr Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee described an “awful beast” in 1979. That beast—which he also called “the bane of my existence, the nemesis of my golden years, the bold perverter of the Endangered Species Act”—was none other than the snail darter, a fish no more than 3.5 inches in length. Still, the tiny creature had plagued the politics of Tennessee throughout the decade. Since its discovery in the 1970s and protection under the Endangered Species Act, the snail darter has cast a long shadow over American law, conservation and biology. Against Baker’s wishes, a Supreme Court ruling about the endangered status of the little fish upended progress on a controversial dam in Tennessee for years. But now, a new study published last week in Current Biology suggests the snail darter isn’t a genetically distinct species at all—and that it was therefore never endangered in the first place. “There is, technically, no snail darter,” Thomas Near, an ichthyologist at Yale University and a senior author of the study, tells Jason Nark of the New York Times. Instead, Near and his co-authors argue, the tiny fish known as Percina tanasi that embodied a David and Goliath battle against the Tellico Dam is an eastern population of the stargazing darter—not a distinct or endangered species. The Tellico Dam in Tennessee, where the fish known as the snail darter held up construction for several years. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Headquarters via Flickr The controversy began in 1967, when the Tennessee Valley Authority initiated construction on a dam on the Little Tennessee River, some 20 miles southwest of Knoxville. Environmentalists, local farmers and the Cherokee, whose land and ancestral sites were to be flooded, opposed the project, per the New York Times. They sought a way to halt the dam, and, in 1973, a zoologist at the University of Tennessee named David Etnier found that solution. Etnier was snorkeling with a group of students in Coytee Spring, not far from the dam site, when he discovered a previously unseen fish darting across the riverbed. He called it the snail darter, because of its feeding habits, and it received endangered species protection in 1975. “Here’s a little fish that might save your farm,” Etnier reportedly told a local, according to The Snail Darter and the Dam by Zygmunt Plater. Plater, an environmental lawyer, represented the snail darter in front of the Supreme Court after its endangered status went challenged by the TVA. He was initially victorious in protecting the fish: In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that “the Endangered Species Act prohibits impoundment of the Little Tennessee River by the Tellico Dam” because of the presence of the endangered snail darters. The ruling in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill “gave teeth” to the new Endangered Species Act and “helped to shape environmental law for decades to come,” according to a statement from Yale. But lawmakers like Baker were still eager to see the dam completed and derided the decision as environmental overreach, seeing little reason to delay a major project for a seemingly minor fish. Representative John Duncan Sr., a fellow Tennessee Republican, called the snail darter a “worthless, unsightly, minute, inedible minnow,” according to the New York Times. The anti-fish brigade ultimately triumphed in 1979, however, by adding a rider that exempted the Tellico Dam from the Endangered Species Act to a spending bill. Jimmy Carter signed the whole bill into law, and the dam opened just a few months later. In the meantime, conservationists “scrambled to save the small fish by moving it to other waterways,” as David Kindy wrote for Smithsonian magazine in 2021. Their efforts resulted in a resurgence of the snail darter population that led to its removal from the endangered species list in 2022. U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland called its recovery “a remarkable conservation milestone that tells a story about how controversy and polarization can evolve into cooperation and a big conservation success,” according to the Associated Press. But Near’s new study casts this entire history into doubt. A historical range map for the snail darter (Percina tanasi) in the Tennessee River watershed is shown in red, and the stargazing darter's (Percina uranidea) historical range is shown in blue. Ghezelayagh et al., Current Biology, 2024. Photographs courtesy of Uland Thomas and Jon Michael Mollish Jeffrey Simmons, a co-author of the study and former biologist with the TVA, was wading through the creeks near the Mississippi-Alabama border in 2015, when he thought he saw a snail darter far from where it was known to dwell. This apparent discovery prompted a team of scientists led by Ava Ghezelayagh, then an ecologist at Yale, to undertake anatomical and genetic research of the fish. “Our approach combines analyses of the physical characteristics and the genetics, which scientists weren’t doing in the 1970s,” Near says in the statement. “Despite its legacy, the snail darter is not a distinct species,” the authors of the study conclude. But the disputed fish has not left its controversy behind quite yet. Plater, the lawyer who defended the fish in court, takes issue with the study, calling the researchers “lumpers” instead of “splitters,” according to the New York Times. That means they tend toward reducing species with their research rather than expanding them. “Whether he intends it or not, lumping is a great way to cut back on the Endangered Species Act,” Plater says of Near to the New York Times. Near, for his part, argues that, “while we’re losing the snail darter as a biological conservation icon, our findings demonstrate the capability of genomics, in addition to studying an organism’s observable features, to accurately delimit species,” he says in the statement. And, in other genetic and anatomical research, his teams have uncovered new species. “We’re discovering species that are truly imperiled, which helps us better understand where to devote resources to protect biodiversity,” he adds. “This is still a success story,” Simmons says to the New York Times. “Its listing under the Endangered Species Act worked, regardless of what you call this fish.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

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Turning Old Electronics Into Gold: A Recycling Breakthrough

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10m trees to be planted in US to replace ones destroyed by hurricanes

Arbor Day Foundation non-profit to plant trees in six of the worst-hit states over the next four yearsSome costs of the recently ended supercharged 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, those that can be quantified at least, are astounding.A succession of storms that ravaged large areas of the US killed at least 375 people, the most in the mainland US since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Some estimates pegged damage and economic loss at $500bn. Continue reading...

Some costs of the recently ended supercharged 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, those that can be quantified at least, are astounding.A succession of storms that ravaged large areas of the US killed at least 375 people, the most in the mainland US since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Some estimates pegged damage and economic loss at $500bn.Another eye-catching figure is 10m, which is the number of trees the non-profit Arbor Day Foundation (ADF) is planning to plant in six of the worst-hit states over the next four years to replace those destroyed by the major hurricanes Beryl, Debby, Helene and Milton, and other cyclones, in the season that concluded on 30 November.The group says it’s impossible to know exactly how many trees were lost, but the restoration program that will be executed in Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, with assistance from state and local governments, corporate sponsors, community groups and individual volunteers, will be the most ambitious undertaking of its more than 50-year existence.ADF has worked previously in other affected areas, most recently with partners along Florida’s Gulf coast, Panhandle and in Miami after Hurricanes Irma and Michael in 2017 and 2018 respectively, but nothing on this scale.“The emotion that you see from people when they get to get a tree, to take home to plant, to be an active part of recovery, bringing life and hope and healing back to their neighborhoods and to their community is inspiring,” said Dan Lambe, ADF’s chief executive.“What’s so cool about it is it’s every different part of the community you could imagine, every demographic, every age category. People are just so excited to be contributing to the recovery.“And beyond the emotional side of it, in these cities, these communities and these forests, trees are not a nice-to-have, they are a must-have.“From extreme heat, from biodiversity challenges, and ecosystem challenges to the just broader resilience and readiness for the next storm, trees just do so much for us. So it’s both an emotional and an environmental recovery, and we’re proud to get to be a part.”One of the largest areas of focus will be Florida’s heavily populated Tampa Bay region. Although it escaped direct hits from any of the state’s record-tying three landfalling major hurricanes this year, Debby, Helene and Milton, the storms’ giant wind fields still caused severe impacts.“I was born and raised here, and I’ve never before seen such devastation, so many trees down,” said Debra Evenson, executive director of the Keep Tampa Bay Beautiful environmental group that has partnered with ADF to identify the greatest areas of need and set up a replanting schedule.“They covered the streets. Just on our property, at our office, we probably had five trees down. The devastation was everywhere. It wasn’t just one specific area, it hit all of Tampa Bay, just thousands and thousands of trees.”Evenson’s group can count on more than 25,000 volunteers to assist with the project, which she expects to begin before the end of this year with community giveaways, and ramp up after new year with planting days. Schools, lower-income neighborhoods and community spaces will receive early attention.“It’s like, OK, what type of trees do we want to get? We can plant trees in parks and rights of way, but right now it’s like we really want to give trees to the community to help with the canopy,” she said.“It’s in the community, in people’s homes, where so many were lost. They’re crepe myrtles, live oak and magnolia trees … you don’t really understand everything the trees provide until they’re gone. It’s not just air quality, it’s reducing stormwater runoff, it’s providing shade that regulates temperature. We’re in Florida, it’s 100F sometimes, and it’s like ‘why is my electric bill so high?’skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s because you’re missing your shade trees now. So these trees will be substantial to the community and help with not just all of that, but the conservation and the natural beauty.”Evenson said bringing fruit trees back to deprived areas would also be a priority.“We go into areas that are food deserts, where they don’t have the funds to replant these types of big trees that grow and give shade and bear fruit. To them, this is life-changing,” she said.Lambe said Asheville, the historic North Carolina city flooded and torn apart by Hurricane Helene, was another area of great need.“We’ve already been distributing trees with community leaders there, to neighborhoods that are ready to replant,” he said.“It was shocking that a community like Asheville was being impacted by a hurricane, and they don’t have a lot of experience with recovery. We’ve been able to take lessons from elsewhere and remind partners that first of all you take an inventory, do an assessment, don’t rush the restoration.“Do it when it’s right, and know that the Arbor Day Foundation is going to be there to help with those recovery efforts as a long-term commitment, because we want to give confidence to those communities that we’re ready to help.”

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English wildlife ‘could be disappearing in the dark’ due to lack of scrutiny

Conservationists issue warning as figures show three-quarters of SSSI sites have had no recent assessments Conservationists have said wildlife could be “disappearing in the dark” after figures showed that three-quarters of England’s most precious habitats, wildlife and natural features have had no recent assessment of their condition.The warning follows the publication of figures covering assessments of protected natural sites known as sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) in the last five years. SSSIs are legally protected because they contain special features such as threatened habitats or rare species, and together they cover more than 1.1m hectares (2.7m acres), about 8% of England’s land area. Continue reading...

Conservationists have said wildlife could be “disappearing in the dark” after figures showed that three-quarters of England’s most precious habitats, wildlife and natural features have had no recent assessment of their condition.The warning follows the publication of figures covering assessments of protected natural sites known as sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) in the last five years. SSSIs are legally protected because they contain special features such as threatened habitats or rare species, and together they cover more than 1.1m hectares (2.7m acres), about 8% of England’s land area.Nearly two-fifths of the habitats and other features for which SSSIs are protected were in an unfavourable condition, according to figures from the conservation agency Natural England.They also show that only 3,384 – or about 25% – of features had been assessed for their condition since the start of 2019 up to last month. It leaves 10,148, or 75%, without an up-to-date assessment of how they are faring.The figures, revealed after a request from PA Media, were described by conservationists as a reminder of the under-resourced state of environmental watchdogs.SSSIs are integral to Britain’s international commitment to protect 30% of its land and seas for nature by 2030, a pledge made by Boris Johnson as prime minister and sometimes called the 30x30 commitment.Richard Benwell, the chief executive of Wildlife and Countryside Link, said: “The protected site network is critical natural infrastructure supporting wildlife, health and wellbeing, and a resilient economy. But with over three-quarters of sites not inspected in the last five years, regulators will have no idea whether they are in good condition and the government won’t know where it should be targeting its efforts in order to reach critical 2030 targets.“Wildlife could be disappearing in the dark while ecosystems break down. It’s like shutting the door on a new power plant and not visiting for a decade.”More than 5,000 SSSI features, about 39% of the total, were in an unfavourable state in their last assessment, which could have been well before 2019. Of those, 10% were declining and 22% recovering.About 40% of features were in a favourable condition, more than a fifth were classed as “not recorded” due to incomplete data, and less than 0.5% had been destroyed.A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Protected sites are at the heart of our vision for making space for rare habitats and threatened species to thrive as well as green spaces for us all to enjoy. It’s why this government has wasted no time in establishing a rapid review of our plan to deliver on our legally binding targets for the environment, including measures to improve the condition of protected sites. We will deliver a new statutory plan that will help restore our natural environment.”skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionNatural England is developing a long-term programme to determine when SSSIs need to be assessed, as well as improving monitoring with remote sensing technology and greater use of data.The amount of land that is “effectively protected” for nature in England has declined to just 2.93%, despite government promises to conserve 30% of it by 2030, according to research published in October.The land figure was found to have been falling owing to declines in quality of SSSIs, which are changing because of the climate crisis, water pollution and overgrazing.

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