A Pastel Vision of California’s Wetlands

Verdant mountains. Aegean seas. Vast, stunning deserts. In each of these specific zones of the Earth’s surface, it’s easy to comprehend beauty and bounty and the forces that threaten them: Logging scars mountains, pollution poisons ocean fish and limits recreation, rampant development alters the balance of things in all three.

Far subtler, yet no less profound, is a gray zone, an in-between transitional place where water meets land: coastal wetlands. Wetlands are more difficult to comprehend because they represent less a place than a relationship. A marsh here, an estuary there--an intertidal strip of rock and sand exposed at the beach only when the ocean is at its lowest.

Arguing the merits of such a relationship, not to mention defining its very borders, can be tricky. In the late 1980s, however, the Redwood Community Action Agency in far-north Eureka decided to do something about it and commissioned artist Erica Fielder to illustrate numerous manifestations of this non-place place called coastal wetlands.

Her 10 pastel artworks, stunning and conceptual and celebratory all, became permanent, instructive panels placed in parks and preserves throughout the San Francisco Bay region. Now they are on display at the Ventura County Maritime Museum here, in fitting tribute to this region’s vast, sinewy and delicate western border, which happens to consist largely of coastal wetlands and the greatest concentration of its residents and development. The show, presented in both English and Spanish and running through July, is titled “Life on the Edge: Preserving Our Coastal Wetlands.”

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The pastel, rough-textured images take surprising turns. A playful gang of seals and sea lions is identified as pinnipeds that probably evolved from the same ancestral lines as bears and weasels. While the elephant seal is capable of diving from the surface to 4,000 feet and staying down for one hour, it must also spend time on the beach to mate and to give birth.

Problem: Hunting, now curbed, once threatened the species. But now nets intended for other fish confuse, kill and, in some cases, thwart the breeding of the pinnipeds. So does pollution, both in the ocean and on the beaches.

Another image appears to be a stained glass window of a cathedral. It is a tiny portion of the wing of the monarch butterfly, exploded into sacred beauty and identified in accompanying text as the mysterious creature that flies 1,700 miles to breeding refuges along the California coast and into Mexico. Development of all kinds continues to trample groves known to accommodate the monarch, which eats the milkweed that makes it bitter prey--if it should come to that natural end.

Most compelling, however, is a panel devoted to something called “The Intertidal,” arguably the essence of coastal wetlands ecology. Arresting in its crazy quilt of colors and textures, Fielder’s bold image amply depicts that band of sand and rock that blips into view at low tide yet is otherwise submerged. The image is as fecund as the text accompanying it: “Living things here occur in such abundance that the limits on their numbers is simply space--space to hide, attach, group, or burrow.”

This, of course, is something lost on so many. A beach walk is a beach walk. Until the next line of text is seared into memory: “A carelessly overturned rock may expose hundreds of tiny creatures to conditions they cannot endure.”

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Matters of scale rapidly come into focus, and “Life on the Edge” works its magic. In yoking such images, to dramatic effect, and then animating them with words, “Life” helps illustrate why environmental impact statements and public debate relating to Ventura County development are impassioned and sometimes a game of great interpretation.

After all, problems more conspicuous than belly-up critters engulf the planet. Human population expands exponentially. More than 2.6 billion of the world’s 5.6 billion people were born since 1960, a virtual yesterday in time. That’s a lot more people walking on the beach.

The MIT-based Worldwatch Institute does at another level of scale what Fielder does in her art: It makes the vague clear, the theoretical concrete. It predicts, for example, food scarcity and starvation in mammoth China if that country’s development of arable lands is not abated. That development, however, is not merely a Chinese problem; if it were to come to pass, it would be a calamity upon all increasingly connected nations.

It seems perfectly appropriate, then, that “Living on the Edge,” a humble 10-piece show in a museum clotted with antique boats and maritime paintings, would bristle alive with a present-day probity and beauty. The overturned rock with the desperate critters is fitting metaphor for all the other things, perhaps more obvious, that can go wrong on Earth without some clear vision.

That, perhaps, was reason enough for Fielder to include a quotation that is as MIT-ish and modern as it is old and resonant, by Suquamish Chief Seattle: “Man did not weave thy web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”