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First Street Gallery presents A Negotiable Utopia

10/2/14

Rocky, man-made shores echo with barking dogs and squawking riparian life. Inky waters bob with seals, kayaks, porpoises and sputtering boats. Cyclists challenge 18-wheelers; hikers meet the homeless. High tide to low tide, day in and day out, Humboldt Bay is host to recreation, mariculture, economy and life.

"Simply by dint of its geographical power — its organizational reality — it's at the center of everything we do," says First Street Gallery Director Jack Bentley. "From transportation to our economy to its effects on our environment," he says, the influence of Humboldt Bay cannot be overstated.

This month, Humboldt State University's First Street Gallery presents A Negotiable Utopia, a show examining how the bay shapes life for and is shaped by the people of the North Coast, connecting us as a community and linking us with the rest of the world.

Situated a block from the bay, the First Street Gallery is in a unique position to examine these issues from an artistic perspective. A Negotiable Utopia is part of HSU's Art in the Environment series, combining the university's scientific strengths with artistic vision. Indeed, Bentley describes the work of the two featured artists as "artful design driven by careful scientific observation." Mary Mallahan's monumental sculpture details life below the surface, Cynthia Hooper's video and essay installations highlight activities above water.

Mallahan has created an interpretive sculpture that presents the bay's floor as a visual, color-coded map detailing natural and man-made fields. Over 18 feet long, 7 feet wide and 2 feet high, Mallahan's sculpture is composed of 41 individual pieces. Using satellite imagery and scientific reports, she divided the bay along its major water channels — those aqueous avenues still present during low tide — and crafted ceramic slabs to form a puzzle-like model of the bay.

With liberal artistic license, Mallahan took the generally flat profile of the bay and added a swelling undulation to reflect the local geography adjacent to it. The anticlines and synclines, mountains and valleys that outline the bay create a sloping topography for her sculpture, adding both visual interest and visceral form to her work.

Along the exposed edges of the piece, several distinct layers interpret the structure of Humboldt Bay's earthen strata. From the side, you can see protruding shell fragments, smooth clay deposits, sandy layers and rough-textured sediment. These layers, while based in science, are not accurate to scale per se, but remind us that the subterranean surface of the bay is comprised of countless levels of natural and human-made deposits.

For the top, Mallahan drew upon hard geological data to map out much more than mud. Using textured underglazes, the surface of her massive sculpture accentuates the diversity of plant life, terrestrial deposits and marine habitats on the bay, distinguishing tomato red regions of macro algae, silvery-green sections of patchy eel grass and chocolate-brown blotches of oysters and clams.

Hooper's interpretation of the bay focuses on human interaction with it — fishing cranes lining commercial docks, former pulp mills dominating the skyline and power plants anchoring the southern shores. Six documentary videos capture hard evidence of the sights and sounds that emerge from the water, and accompanying essays poetically explain how we've arrived at this historic clash of natural and economic forces.

"Humboldt Bay is this incredibly exhaustive topic," gushes Hooper. "Oh my God! There's so much to it!" Facts and figures fly from her tongue at breakneck speed and sentences barely finish before another passionate spiel spills forth. She's a voracious researcher, documenting the images and imprints that humans have made upon our waterway.

When looking at the politicized landscapes of Humboldt Bay, Hooper sees all sides. "We find common ground here and yet we find controversy in these places, as well," she says, noting that she avoids political stumping in her work, but "it's impossible to be politically neutral."

It's hard to argue with her videos, though. Averaging 10 minutes, each video documents one of six topics: water, power, transportation, conservation, shoreline and natural resources. Each topic gets its own video monitor and, to one side, an informed essay. Hooper says she's "cleaving to the factual" in her writings, yet "condensing the information in a manner that's entertaining and amusing and interesting and has my own artistic take on it."

The images can rest alone, but beg the viewer to look more closely at the explanations of how things got this way. Throughout the installation, the sounds of the bay mingle to create an aural simulation of the place and a metaphor for the overlapping intentions of those who use it.

Hooper shares a story about her project, describing how a First Street Gallery intern was unaware of the Coast Seafoods dock only a few blocks away, and how a fishermen Hooper met while filming at those docks had never heard of HSU's gallery.

A Negotiable Utopia, with its simultaneous scientific and artistic threads exposes the living organism as we've never seen it before, setting the stage for a wider discussion of our bay's historic and future significance to life on the North Coast.

A reception for the artists will be held from 6-9 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4. The gallery's South Room will feature traditional landscape works by Stock Schlueter, Kathy O'Leary, Mimi LaPlant, and Andrew Daniel.

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Thousands of pounds of cephalopods unloaded at Fisherman’s Terminal



9/12/14




Squid fishing boats docked in Eureka for the first time Thursday, unloading 124,000 pounds of squid at the Fisherman’s Terminal.


Commercial squid fishermen from Southern California were drawn to the North Coast by following squid that were driven out of their typical habitat by a rise in ocean water temperatures, said Jeff Huffman, Eureka dock manager with Wild Planet, who helped to facilitate the docking and unloading of the squid boats.


With few squid left in their typical fishing zones this year, Southern California Sea Food, Inc., has been moving up the coast. On Wednesday, two boats fished in the area between the mouth of the Mad River and the False Cape, south of the Eel River, bringing the first boat into the dock at 2 a.m. Thursday and the second at 7:30 a.m., Huffman said.

“The squid fishery has always been a Southern California fishery, but because of the warm water down south the squid are all up here,” he said. “There have always been some squid here, but not in these numbers.”

Unusual patterns in the Pacific Ocean have shifted water temperatures, creating unusually warm water both to the north and south of California’s North Coast, said Eric Bjorkstedt, research fishery biologist with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center and an adjunct professor in Humboldt State University’s fisheries biology department.

The temperatures have not grown warmer off the Northern California coast, which appears on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maps that track water temperatures as one of the only places along the West Coast that does not appear dark red — the color that indicates warming waters.

While this is not a typical El Nino year, Bjorkstedt said some patterns are consistent with the weather phenomena’s conditions.

“Normally in an El Nino, market squid do very badly — usually the catches go nearly to zero,” he said. “The reproductive success is not high, and the squid industry basically crashes for that year.”

Squid populations could be shifting north because of a change in water temperatures or shifting closer to shore because they are following a shift in nutrients and food supply, said Jeffrey Abell, chairman of HSU’s oceanography department.

Shifts in weather patterns and climate causes water temperatures and ocean nutrients patterns to change, he said.

“It manifests the shifts in ocean circulation, which alters the input of nutrients into the ecosystem, and then the organism responds to that and moves into a range where it is not usually found,” Abell said.

Either way, there is an unprecedented number of squid off the North Coast, Huffman said.

Southern California Sea Food, Inc., hopes to bring in 300 tons of squid every 24 hours, and the squid is then transported in trucks to Monterey, where it is processed at a company plant, he said.

Huffman added the company is limited by the number of squid that they can process, unload and truck, but not by the amount of squid in the bay.

“I think they can definitely catch more than we can actually get through the place and shipped out,” he said.

By Sunday the company will have five boats in the area, and they are hoping to continuing fishing for two to three weeks, Huffman said.

Having the fishermen in town will be a boost for the local economy, he said, as the crew of more than a dozen people stays in local hotels, eats, shops, buys fuel and pays for moorings at the marina.

“This is a great plus to the whole waterfront and the town,” Huffman said.

The goal of the Fisherman’s Terminal was to bring in this type of business, he said. The dock is typically used for processing crab, salmon and some other fish, but being able to unload squid there adds another avenue for profit.

“It is a unique opportunity for the city to use its loading dock. Normally this isn’t something that we get to do,” said Eureka Councilwoman Marian Brady.

“It is all money that is coming back into our economy,” she said. “We definitely need industry, and this is a form of commerce that uses our bay for its purpose. We built all this infrastructure, and it hasn’t been used optimally.”

The city is working on plans to get a cold storage facility in town to keep even more of the business local, she said. All the squid is currently being taken out of town to be processed.

“But these three to five ships that are in here, that is adding a spurt to our economy,” she said.

This is a positive development for the economy and the city, said Ken Bates of the Humboldt Fishermen’s Marketing Association.

“This activity at Fisherman’s Terminal is exactly the kind of thing we were hoping to see in Eureka when this facility was built,” he said. “It’s exciting.”

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Sludge, other hazardous materials await cleanup 


9/12/14



Once an imminent threat to Humboldt Bay, the 2.7 million gallons of caustic liquors and chemicals at the run-down Samoa pulp mill have been completely removed from the site after a nearly six-month effort.



Environmental Protection Agency federal on-scene coordinator Chris Weden said that the hundreds of trucks that transported the liquors — chemicals used to break down wood chips into pulp material for paper products — had no incidents even as the last shipments left the mill this week.



“There were no spills along the route, and all the liquor was recyclable,” he said. “There was no waste of material.”



The cleanup at the 72-acre pulp mill site — owned by the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District since August — began on March 28 with members of the EPA, U.S. Coast Guard and local entities contributing. The hazardous state of the mill was brought to the EPA’s attention last August by the Wiyot Tribe.



EPA officials inspected the site a year ago this month and initiated an emergency response after discovering that the containers and tanks holding the liquors were corroding and at the brink of overflowing into nearby Humboldt Bay.



Next steps

Though the liquors and 10,000 gallons of sulfuric acid have all been taken to Longview, Washington, to be reused by another pulp mill, the cleanup effort at the Samoa site is not over yet.



“There is a considerable amount of sludge in a lot of the tanks,” Weden said. “There are tanks that have 6 to 8 feet of sludge on the bottom, where the only way to feasibly remove that is to remove the tank — and we do that with boom trucks and cutting torches — and are able to recycle that material when they’re steel tanks and get a little money to pay for the cleanup.”  

The sludge results from the pulping process, Weden said. So far, five steel tanks and six poly tanks have been decontaminated and disassembled with the full process likely to be over by March. Weden said the process will take another six months because there will be fewer workers on site, fewer trucks, holiday leave for some of the workers, and that the sludge must be solidified before it can be transferred.

Once the site is determined to be free of hazardous chemicals, the EPA’s hand in the project will be over, Weden said.

“As the hazards diminish, the needs for us to do that work also diminishes,” he said. “Our deep pocket isn’t all that deep, and there are plenty of other waste sites that need to be addressed.”

Payback

With the EPA’s assistance comes a $3 million price tag, which may increase. While a previous owner of the pulp mill, Evergreen Pulp Inc., has been deemed responsible for leaving the site in its decrepit state, the harbor district now has to bear the cost as the current owner.

District Chief Executive Officer Jack Crider said they had been negotiating with the EPA about a settlement agreement in the past, but are now working on a MUNIPAY assessment that ”evaluates a municipality’s or regional utility’s ability to afford compliance costs, cleanup costs or civil penalties,” according to the EPA.

“It’s a kind of a model that pulls in demographics information and the district’s ability to repay the EPA,” Crider said. “If the numbers come out right, you don’t have to repay them. We said, ‘Time out. We just want to go through MUNIPAY.’ So they agreed.”

Efforts by the EPA to contact Evergreen Pulp, Inc., for reimbursement over the last six months had been unsuccessful, but EPA attorney advisor Andrew Helmlinger said that has changed.

“We have found some contacts for them in Colorado,” he said, adding that he could not discuss the issue in more detail.

In the meantime, the harbor commission voted to sign an agreement in April with Coast Seafoods, Inc., for a $1.25 million limited obligation note.

If the harbor district fails to pay back the loan in a timely manner, revenues from Coast Seafood’s nearly 300-acre tidelands lease with the district will be used to repay it. As part of the agreement, the district also agreed to extend the company’s tidelands lease by 40 years, starting one year from this month, which will remain in effect until the loan is repaid in full, according to a May 27 addendum. Once repaid, the lease will reduce to five years with the company retaining the option to renew it another five years.

Future developments

Crider said he is optimistic about the harbor district’s efforts by to turn the pulp mill’s abandoned machine shops and warehouses into a functioning business hub.

Recently, representatives from Mitsubishi inspected an area that may be the home of a pellet factory by the company Energistics.

“Keep your fingers crossed,” Crider said. “We’ve also got Taylor Shellfish in there now, and they’re expanding. The most serious one is Coast Seafood. They are going through a major expansion.”

The harbor district has also paid for a two-year option to purchase the nearly 80 acres of pulp mill still owned by previous mill owner Freshwater Tissue Company. Crider said the district received $12 million in new market tax credits, which can be used to improve the facilities at the site.

“It would enable us to put $3.8 million worth of improvements to the buildings on parcel A, and if we take full advantage of the entire $12 million then we should be able to generate enough capital to purchase the other two parcels, but we have to borrow money,” he said. “That’s the challenge.”

As to how the rest of the debris at the mill will be dealt with after the EPA leaves, Crider said that is something they will be working out in the future.

“With the liquors being gone, the catastrophic event that could have happened is at least gone and behind us and that’s, at least, a good feeling,” he said.

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9/5/14

The blue whale, the biggest animal on the planet, was hunted with abandon in the Pacific Ocean until the early 1970s. The species has been rebounding ever since, but a slowdown in the growth of the population frequenting waters off the California coast was a concern. Now it turns out to be a promising sign of recovery.

Scientists at the University of Washington have just published research finding that the West Coast blue whale population of around 2,200 individuals appears to be approaching its pre-slaughter size, with the slowing growth a function of the carrying capacity of the marine ecosystem. Collisions with ships remain a problem, the scientists write, but should not affect the whales’ prospects.

The paper — ”Do ship strikes threaten the recovery of endangered eastern North Pacific blue whales?” — was posted online today by the journal Marine Mammal Science. Here’s the core of the abstract:

We used a population dynamics model to assess the trends and status of ENP [eastern North Pacific] blue whales, and the effects of ship strikes. We estimate the population likely never dropped below 460 individuals, and is at 97% of carrying capacity (95% interval 62%–99%). These results suggest density dependence, not ship strikes, is the key reason for the observed lack of increase. We also estimate future strikes will likely have a minimal impact; for example, an 11-fold increase in vessels would lead to a 50% chance the long-term population would be considered depleted. Although we estimate ship strike mitigation would have minimal impacts on population trends and status, current levels of ship strikes are likely above legal limits set by the U.S. The recovery of ENP blue whales from whaling demonstrates the ability of blue whale populations to rebuild under careful management.

As the university news release noted, it’s important to keep in mind that the California recovery is a tiny bright spot given that researchers estimate (from other work) that the 3,400 whales killed in that population from 1905 to 1971 pale beside the 346,000 harpooned in Antarctic waters in the same span.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that the Southern Hemisphere population was 175,000 before the whaling binge and is about 2,000 today.

One of the paper authors, the doctoral candidate Cole Monnahan, has a fascinating piece on the North Pacific whale research on a great new blog he maintains with another author, Trevor Branch, called Blue Whale News. In the post, Monnahan stresses the big questions that remain about the more heavily hunted blue whale populations in the western North Pacific. Here’s the kicker:

So what do we know about the population structure in other areas? In the western North Pacific, we know there is at least one population that spends a significant portion of their time, including the mating season, too far west for our hydrophones to hear them. The truth is no one knows what populations exist (or existed) in the western North Pacific. Thousands of whales were caught off Japan early in the 1900s, but none have been seen since. Was that a population that was killed off forever? Where do the blue whales go during the winter months to breed? These are exciting questions for future researchers to tackle.

To get a sense of the mix of whaling-era data, tracking and modeling used to estimate past blue whale abundance, read this PloS ONE paper by an overlapping research team from last year: “Estimating Historical Eastern North Pacific Blue Whale Catches Using Spatial Calling Patterns.”

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