Environmental Art- session 2- by Anna O.

On the morning of March 24^th, Hollie Berry, local environmental artist, met with us for the second of three meetings to discuss and choose an environmental art project of our own to do. She brought many books filled with environmental art that we spent a good deal of time passing around, making sure we got to look through every one. We shared the personal art we had made with her, and discussed some of the art and artists that we had researched to build them into ideas for our own group project. We came up with lots of ideas such as:

•  floating alka-seltzer (molded into fish shapes) in the river and taking a picture to make a comment on the pH levels in some of the TN river tributaries.
• creating the shape of the river with large matches stuck in the ground. One end would be lit and the result photographed. This is a commentary on recent news of burning rivers in West Virginia.
• Ask GPS students to craft a small twig fish that would be assembled together to make a twig archway or that we would float in the river and photograph
• install a bird bath on the Terrace with suspended twig fish “swimming” toward the TN River. This was to represent the fellows experience raising baby sturgeon in fall that will be released into the river this May.
• Growing, living mural painted using moss.  
• Chattanooga map art (described below)
• bike trellis with native plants (see the next blog to see this group art piece along with the fellows statement.)

We decided on mounting old abandoned bikes to the wall of the GPS patio and growing vines up the bikes. We also decided that as a group we would like to do a Chattanooga map project, where we go create letters of the word Chattanooga as they would appear at their location on a map.   During our next and final meeting with Hollie Berry we will be mounting the bikes on the wall of the terrace, and we are all very excited. 

 By Anna O. (with some additions by Mrs. Couch) 

Learning about Environmental Art -by Hannah P.

Coolidge Park "dew"dle. Photo by Hollie Berry 

Hello. On March 12 we experienced something entirely new with the Tucker River Fellows! We talked to an Environmental artist named Ms. Hollie Berry. She shared a slide show with many interesting images about Environmental Art or Ecological Art. This art is created when a person uses materials that come from the environment to create some sort of visual.  For example, this visual could be a sculpture made entirely of twigs or it could be cave paintings. Ms. Berry is known for her “Dewdles”. She arrives to Coolidge Park early in the morning with a paint roller and a sketch of what she wants to draw. She then walks and uses the paint roller to sketch the image in the dew on the grass. The roller absorbs some of the dew, making the image appear.

tools for a "dew"dle. Photo by Hollie Berry

  When making environmental art, there are four major categories it can fall into. They are manipulation, disruption, interaction and intervention. Manipulation is using the environment as your medium, Disruption is taking something manmade and moving it into the environment, Interaction is personal interaction with the environment and is on a smaller scale, and Intervention is a change or proposed change to improve or restore the environment- so intervention art is usually educational, informative and/or restorative. Many projects convey messages about environmental issues and how they can be fixed.

            Though you are creating art, this art typically is not permanent. It could be made out of plants, which decompose or can be washed away by water and will not last. Sometimes the locations are in obscure places that the general public cannot easily access, such as the bottom of the ocean or the desert. This art also is done sometimes on a larger scale, which makes it impossible to be put in a gallery. Parks and art made by interaction or intervention cannot be framed and put on the wall of museums. However, their photos can. Since this type of art is temporary or too large to view, it is photographed in order for the public to view it. 

            My personal favorite environmental art project is using a map to pinpoint the locations of the letters spelling the name of a territory and forming the letters made out of different items from that location. One artist, John Baldessari, found the coordinates of each letter on the map that spelled California and created the letter that was on that coordinate and photographed it. When he placed the photos together, it spelled “California” with different materials. 

Some artworks bring nature into manmade places such as creating a cloud inside a building. 

Nimbus Sankt Peter, 2014, Berndaut Smilde Photo credit: http://www.berndnaut.nl/works.htm

           Ms. Berry blended up some moss and yogurt that she collect from local rocks and created a 'moss paint'. She sent this home with us for us to try and create some 'growing art'. 

Moss and Yogurt paint mixture

Moss paint ready to use

 I hope that you have been inspired to make some art of your own and stay tuned for information on our River Fellows art project that we will be working with Hollie Berry to complete! Stay tuned!

The Wild and Scenic Film Festival- by Hannah P. and Amanda M.

 On January 24, we went to the Wild and Scenic Film Festival hosted by UTC. We watched six nature and geographical documentaries and the proceeds went to the Tennessee Environmental Council. 

These short films were very informative, ranging from short films about land conservation and teaching children about ways to save water to longer documentaries about ice caves and river pollution. Our favorite documentary was about the Mobile Tensaw Delta in Alabama. It was called “America’s Amazon: Mobile Tensaw Delta.” We learned about the ecosystem involving everything from the smallest plants to the huge gators that lurked in the swamp. We learned that the pollution from cities and industry is turning our river brown and murky, which can harm the plants and fish that live in the water. We also learned that the fish could not migrate to other areas because of the dams that block the waterway resulting in the death of many types of fish and extinct species. You can watch the film through Alabama Public Television here: http://video.aptv.org/video/2365149942/

We loved seeing how much effort was put into making these films and how many people were involved. We learned so much about how nature and our ecosystems are affected by our waste and industry. If you have not seen these films we highly recommend going to their website for more showing dates and more ways to get involved. We hope you will check this out!

Thanks!

-Hannah and Amanda

Racoon Mountain Pump storage facility- By Daphne T.

On January 23 we got to tour the TVA Raccoon Mountain Pumped Storage Facility. After getting lost a couple of times, we finally made it! When we arrived, our tour guide familiarized us with some TVA history. We first learned that very few people got to go on this tour and we felt very lucky. Next he told us that Chattanooga was prone to flooding and used to suffer bad floods before TVA made dams in the area.  During the Great Depression, our area had a big flood and didn’t recover, but TVA helped. They began construction for some of the dams in the 1930s and 40s.  The building of this dam provided jobs for many people that would have otherwise been without work.

Now, TVA works to make sure that they are stewards of the river. They maintain aquatic life, regulate temperature, and balance demands such as how much water flows in and out of the river. This pump water storage facility also provides low cost hydro-generation electricity, which is electricity made by water. To get this special kind of energy, they pull the water from the Tennessee River (Nickajack Lake) and pump it 1 ½ miles into the mountain and 1000 feet above the river.

On the mountain, there is a reservoir where the pumped water waits to be used. When electricity is needed, the water flows out of the reservoir and down through the turbine which is attached to an electromagnet generator which is like a wheel that has magnets and copper wiring inside it to make electricity.  The stronger the magnet the more electricity.

TVA can control how much electricity is made by how much water is released. At times of high demands, such as early in the morning when people are getting ready for work and school, more electricity is needed so more water is released. Temperature also determines how much electricity is made. Sometimes if they miscalculate the temperature, they make to little or to much energy and have to buy or sell more.

This facility actually uses more energy than it produces but it can produce energy at the peak times so less energy has to be purchased from nearby areas to meet our local electricity demand.

There are not many places like this in the country. Pumped storage facilities can hold up to 16 megawatts of electricity. Now that is a lot!

After he talked to us a little bit about the dams and pumped storage facilities, we got to go inside the mountain!

               

We learned that weirs, low dams built across the water, measure the water flow in the mountain. Also, penstocks are kind of floodgates that regulate the flow of a body of water and monitor pressure in the mountain. We even saw a place where oil was seeping naturally out of the rock.

It was really neat to be able to actually go inside the mountain where electricity is generated and the Tucker River Fellows were really excited about this opportunity to learn about the Raccoon Mountain Pump Storage Plant.

            We rode the elevator from the bottom of the mountain to the top and this was the equivalent of 38 floors!  

   

10-24 Trout spawning at TNACI (by Daphne T.)

Today we had the opportunity to watch the collection of Brooke Trout’s sperm and eggs. Even though it sounds a bit gross, it was actually a really interesting process.

Brooke Trout were Native in some streams in our general area, but in the 1930s, loggers came in and ruined their habitat. Rainbow Trout were used to stock up the streams instead of Brooke Trout. Now, TNACI is experimenting to see whether or not Brooke Trout can survive in some of these same streams.

Kathlina Alford at the TNACI propagation facility captures Brooke Trout and raises them for breeding in order to increase their population in our area. To breed these fish, she collects sperm and eggs from the Brooke Trout that are kept in her tanks (which are freeeeezing by the way). These Brooke Trout were pretty young- from 2013 and 2014.

 

Collecting trout from the tanks 

First, we collected the fish from the cold tanks with nets and sorted them out  by gender. Kathalina explained that females have a rounder, fatter belly, and are dull in color while males are more colorful and have a locked jaw that juts out.

 Next, water temperature, pH level, and the dissolved oxyegen in the water of the tanks were recorded.

           

Third, each fish (we did males first) was put into a solution of Tricane, a substance that is used to drug the fish so the fish are easier to work with.

After this, the fish’s PIT tag (a small identity tag) was scanned so the fish could be recognized, and the sperm could be recorded.

 

Next, each was dried off with a towel, measured to the millimeter, and weighed to the .1 gram.

Finally, Katalina took the fish and squeezed its abdomen. If it was successful, a small white drop would come out of the fish: a sperm! But if it wasn’t successful, poop was the result. A designated person recorded whether or not the fish donated sperm.

Figure 1 you can tell this fish was successful because of the white drops inside of the bowl! 

Sperm is only good enough for about two hours so this process had to move quickly! After all the sperm of Brooke Trout from the 2013 was collected, it was put in the fridge and the 2014 fish were squeezed. The younger ones had less sperm to give, but sperm nonetheless.

After the males were squeezed, it was time for the females! The process was almost exactly the same. One difference was that the females were weighed once before they were squeezed and again after they had no more eggs left. This is because some females can give up to 40% of their body weight when losing eggs! Needless to say, after they are rid of their eggs, their bellies become puny and floppy.

When the first female was squeezed, I was shocked at how many eggs the tiny fish contained. They were yellow and round and a lot bigger than the sperm. However, some female fish that were squeezed and didn’t give any eggs. These fish are called “green”. This means that the fish has eggs, but they aren’t ready to be fertilized.

Although we were a little bit squeamish at first, this process of collecting sperm and eggs was a really cool to watch and we learned a lot! We are sad that this was our last time at the propagation facility! Thank you so much to Kathlina for letting up help out a little bit and for teaching us a lot of stuff about Sturgeon and Brooke Trout!