Lincoln City sand art competition highlights sustainability, conservation

The Cascade Head Biosphere Region consists of more than 100,000 acres and has been recognized by the United Nations for its rare and diverse ecosystem. The area includes the Cascade Head Experimental Forest and Marine Reserve and Marine Protected Areas. The Cascade Head Biosphere Collaborative has organized the “Art on the Beach” sand art competition on Saturday to continue its mission of educating about the importance of protecting the biosphere. Duncan Berry is the co-director of the Cascade Head Biosphere Collaborative. He’s also an artist and will be creating some sand art. He joins us with details of the event and what he hopes Oregonians will learn about the area.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Cascade Head Biosphere Region, which includes more than 100,000 acres on Oregon’s central coast has been recognized by the United Nations for its rare and diverse ecosystem. The area encompasses an experimental forest, a marine protected area and Lincoln City. On Saturday, the Cascade Head Biosphere Collaborative will be hosting an “Art on the Beach” sand art competition to educate people about the biosphere. Duncan Berry is an artist and the co-director of the Collaborative. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.

Duncan Berry: Excited to be with you, Dave.

Miller: Before we get to this art event that’s happening this weekend, I just want to start with this designation for the area where you live and work that is unique in Oregon, the only one in Oregon. What is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve?

Berry: We get that question a lot. It’s part of a network that the UN developed back in 1976. Actually, an odd pair came up with this designation, Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon. And it was an effort at detente and to unite a lot of different countries over their love of place. And so we are one of 700 worldwide. Americans tend to think that they have that covered with their National Parks. But this is really a much different experiment, where they’re biologically sensitive places, just like parks, but they want people to be engaged and living there, so they can look at a different way of taking their place at the table with these other species.

Miller: So, I mean, it’s very different, say, from a federally designated wilderness area. And then the idea that Lincoln City is there, with homes and buildings and streets, that’s not an accident. That’s a feature of this designation.

Berry: Yeah, which most people go, wow, I’ve never heard of that before. Well, what it’s really, the attempt is to reframe the relationship between an animal, which the human is, and its habitat. So there’s what basically the UN has said is, we belong here, just like an eagle, a salmon, a whale. We are a natural creature in its habitat. How we are in our habitat and how we relate to other creatures within our habitat, they’ve created a blueprint for and one thing I’d point out Dave is we’ve stood this up within the community. This is not a federal overlay like you might see in a preserve or in a park. Basically, the UN says you’ve got something really special here in Oregon. And if you’re interested in a platform that we’re using successfully in other places around the world with sensitive areas that have cities and towns in them, we’ve got 17 sustainable development goals and a whole platform that you can adopt. So that’s what we did three years ago, after it’s been in place for over 40 years that a group of us got together and said this is an incredibly beautiful place. There’s a ton of cool research going on, but very few people are talking to each other. And so we started our pillars, which are climate, K-8 education, and these community events like this art on the beach project we’re working on.

Miller: Let’s turn to the event. What is Art on the Beach?

Berry: Yeah. So I think we’ve all taken walks on the beach at one time or another and left either footprints or picked up a stick and started to draw. So it’s essentially an incredibly plastic, cool medium, sand is. And so we have stumbled upon, what is it they say, even a blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while, Dave. We used to run a lot of science-based projects here to try to peel back the surface and explain this place to people. And what we found is that if we went lower in the body and we used art to illuminate science rather than the other way around, we were really successful. And so what we’ve done is we’ve taken the beach and said, it’s a giant canvas, right?

Miller: With a giant sandbox.

Berry: Yeah, exactly. A bunch of grown up kids, right, in our sandbox. And it also happens to be able to, if you use early light or late light, it develops contrast and you can render these football sized graphics that we’ve been doing. We did one for July 4th and there’s a lot of YouTube videos on this under ‘Art on the Beach’, but we did an interdependence day graphic, because there was a great low tide on July 4th. And then we had, ironically enough, Cris would love this, it was a 100 yard long octopus that I freehand drew and then 20 volunteers raked it out on the beach.

Miller: Well, we’ll put a link to that on our website, that video from July 4th. You said it’s an enormous octopus, on the sand, that a whole army of people raked and then you could see drone footage of it. But you’re saying you’ve free handed that on the sand?

Berry: Yeah. So I had a drawing that I’d done, a maquette, and I was gonna grit it out, and then I thought, you know what, I’ve drawn so many octopuses. This is sort of your octopus show here, Dave, this is the theme here.

Miller: I didn’t realize it was gonna happen.

Berry: Yeah. I do, one of the main things I create, as an artist in my studio, is direct impressions from octopuses. And so I’d done a drawing, I gritted it, I got out there and it was just such a beautiful morning. There’s this bare canvas and I had a great drawing tool and I said, ‘I’ve drawn so many octopus, I can do this freehand’ and I noticed that the proportion was a little off, but it actually, we’ve had a really good feedback that it was striking and beautiful.

Miller: It’s impressive because I’m still at the stage of visual understanding where I could write, ‘Happy Birthday,’ and then the A and the Y of birthday is sort of squeezed in on the edge of a piece of paper, and I’m seeing the whole paper. You’re working in hundreds of square feet, so it’s more impressive to get the perspective pretty good.

I want to go back to something you said earlier, that obviously one of your larger points is to connect people to where they live, to get them to have a better understanding of human habitat and coexisting with all the other nonhumans among us. But you said that that art is a way to do that lower on the body. What do you mean?

Berry: So a good example, we were instrumental in helping establish the Marine Reserve here, giving nature a rest to see what happens over a period of time. And we would sit people down and say, we can’t wait to share the keystone species of the marine reserve with you. And so we’d start into a slide show and show them all these species and we’d look up and half of them were dozing off and we’re like, there’s gotta be a better way.

So we started doing these workshops where we did gyotaku, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, Dave, but it’s a Japanese folk art where you actually take direct impressions from sea creatures, using ink and light rice paper. And we have sold out every single workshop we’ve ever done. And while they’re in there and they’re printing a rockfish, we say, ‘Hey, did you know that they live to be 100 years old and they’re a residential fish? They’re not migratory.’ And people go, ‘No, tell me more.’ because they’re gonna go home, [and] somebody’s gonna say, ‘You made that?’ ‘Yeah, and did you know that…?’ So what we’re doing is we’re kicking out the door of all these people that are basically ambassadors after that, because they felt it. They touched it. They were in, they had a relationship with it. And science sometimes, and scientists, notwithstanding your other guest, but scientists sometimes have trouble expressing themselves and having other people relate to what they’re doing.

Miller: The theme for this year’s event is ‘upwelling.’ Why did you choose it?

Berry: Well, we’re gonna be writing a 100 yard long graphic that says ‘Your Biosphere’ with arrows to the sea, the land and the air, as well. And then underneath that, I don’t know how familiar you are with it, Dave, but most people go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard about that, that upwelling thing. Unless you’re a scientist, again, you don’t realize that much of what we enjoy here along our coastline, as a coastal state, is thanks to this amazing water based phenomenon called the Great Pacific Upwelling. And this happens along the western coast of most continents in the northern hemisphere. And what it is basically, the wind is blowing. You’ve been to the beach and had the wind blowing in the summertime out of the north and what that does is it pushes billions of gallons of water south. And as you will see if you flush your toilet, we have the coriolis in a clockwise fashion. Well, what it does is all that water goes offshore and it creates a giant pump that pulls all this cold water off the continental shelf that has everything that’s died, seaweed whales, whatever, all these nutrient rich waters right up to the shore, they warm up and suddenly it’s just it’s like you’re feeding a house plant, right, fertilizer.

We have a phytoplankton, which is the source of all Omega-3s and then zooplankton comes out of the sand and starts eating it. And then the forage fish come and then pretty soon you have one of the biggest buffets on the planet happening right offshore here. Then you have the tuna, the salmon, the whales, and so much of what we love about the fertility of our oceans comes from this one simple event of a north wind starting to blow in June and blowing until sometime in September, October, and the pump starts to work.

Miller: Duncan Berry, it was a pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much.

Berry: Thank you.

Miller: Duncan Berry is a co-director of the Cascade Head Biosphere Collaborative. He’s an artist. He’s behind the sand art competition.

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