What the Earth needs now is a good housekeeper. Habitat was lost by increments, it can be restored by increments

Leaving New York City and California in 1990, I came to live full-time on a fishing island in the Gulf of Maine. That environment became my base as a public artist and birthed "Ghost Nets", as a conceptually based ten-year art project about restoration. The project's original 2 1/2 acres of degraded coastal habitat site had been the former town dump. In 1997 it became a state of the art salt marsh restoration in collaboration with bioengineer, Wendy Goldsmith, making it a model working wetlands restoration system. That reestablished keystone linkage for 70 acres of open land in a Class A Migratory Bird Fly Zone in the middle of the Gulf of Maine, one of the richest fishing grounds in the world. The project has produced, a vast number of diverse art objects, besides the site itself a living sculpture. "Ghost Nets" also yielded important biological data and led to "Cities and Oceans of If." This new work includes an international series of coastal city re-designs with teams of scientists, city planners, activists and students. In this capacity I speak in academic settings, am involved with restoration plans, serve on public policy boards and continue to provide artifacts in this  performative mode.

ABOVE IMAGE - caption details: Image compiled by Aviva Rahmani and Irwin Novak (Department of Geoscience, University of Southern Maine) from data provided by the Planning Department of the City of Portland, Maine to Nasir Shir (GIS Laboratory, University of Southern Maine). Base aerial photography (1994, Scale: 1:12000) provided by Seth Barker (GIS Manager, Maine Dept. of Marine Resources).

Aviva Rahmani- 
has an international following. Evolving from work on feminist issues, it now focuses on environmental degradation.A California Institute of the Arts graduate with a Masters in Multi Media and Electronic Art, Rahmani's collaborations include scientists at the Wells (Maine) National Estuarine Research Reserve, Allied Whale at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and the University of Southern Maine. As an Ecoartist, Rahmani visually and poetically addresses the healing effect cumulative individual actions can have rejuvenating our world. Her current project, "Cities and Oceans of If," deals with water, urban and rural life. As land undergoes development, smaller, disrupted, areas remain viable habitat corridors and watersheds. Working on both sides of the North Atlantic, she looks at the interdependence among coastal cities, oceans and inland wild areas. Rahmani envisions ways we might redesign our failing water systems, protecting clean water for ourselves and in small, incremental steps, transforming our world. "Cities and Oceans of If" recognizes that critical areas can be identified and restored, creating an alternate future for cities and their environs.

EMAIL: ghostnet@foxislands.net
URL: http://www.ghostnets.com

Michele Dionne, Ph.D.-
has been the Research Director at the Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve for the past ten years. The Research Program that she has worked to establish (with the help of many colleagues) is actively engaged in research, monitoring, workshops, and research/resource management planning of relevance at local, regional and national levels. The Program's overall aim is to produce science-based information needed to protect, sustain and restore Gulf of Maine coastal habitats and resources, especially those found in salt marsh estuaries and watersheds. The Wells NERR research program is also committed to secondary, undergraduate and graduate level education, training, and mentoring. The efforts of hundreds of student interns, representing scores of academic institutions, have enriched the program during the past decade. Dionne has a research background and specific interests in nekton (i.e. fish and large, mobile invertebrates) community ecology, aquatic habitat structure and trophic relations. She is broadly trained as a field and experimental ecologist conversant in individual- behavioral, population, community, ecosystem and landscape approaches to the study of processes that degrade, maintain and restore coastal habitats.

michele.dionne@maine.edu or dionne@cybertours.com
Michele Dionne, Ph. D.
Research Director
Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve
342 Laudholm Farm Road
Wells, Maine 04090
Phone: (207) 646-1555 x 136
FAX: (207) 646-2930

page last modified 04/29/01