Water in the West: Arcata Marsh Project

The Arcata Marsh Project is a unique solution to urban waste water management. Conceived by Humboldt State University professor George Allen and Robert Gearheart in the late 1970's, an abandoned industrial site bordering north coast California's Humboldt Bay, was reconfigured into a series of artificial ponds that use natural processes to treat secondary sewage for the city of Arcata. The developed marsh has become a significant wildlife refuge, home to numerous resident and migrating birds, and small animals, as well as an important community recreation area. The Arcata Marsh Project has been studied by like-minded communities and emulated in diverse locations around the world.

This series of photographic collages purports to show what kind of refuge it may become in the future, following predicted changes in global climate. The collages, which draw upon 19th century bird and animal illustrations, also address the issue of the conundrum of "artificial nature." The marsh itself is an artificially constructed landscape that fools its human, animal, and bird visitors, nearly all of whom take it to be, and use it as a perfectly natural setting. The collages seamlessly conflate the artifice of flatly drawn illustrations of birds and animals, with the realism of optical photographic space. In some of these collages fossil skeletons of prehistoric animals raise the idea of reversing extinction via technological developments involving cloning excavated DNA samples.

The photographic works comprising this series derives from Land-Weber's membership in Water in the West. Water in the West is a collective of twelve photographers and a writer, involved in personal photographic projects about water in western states of the U.S. The group, which has been meeting periodically since 1989, includes Robert Dawson, Laurie Brown, Gregg Conniff, Terry Evans, Geoff Fricker, Peter Goin, Wanda Hammerbeck, Sant Khalsa, Mark Klett, Ellen Land-Weber, Ellen Manchester, Sharon Stewart, and Martin Stupich. An extensive archive of the group's work is located in the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona.

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