FOREST FOR THE TREES- an evening of talks about the rainforest with
Adriane Colburn, artist and special guests @the luggage store,
Free – $5.00 donation appreciated/suggested¦
Tropical Forest Salon
In concert with the installation Of Darkness, Adriane Colburn and The Luggage Store Gallery will be hosting an evening highlighting multiple perspectives on the Rainforest, the Amazon and beyond. The evening will include a gallery talk with the artist, Adriane Colburn, followed by food, drinks and a series of talks by scholars whose research, scholarship and activism has sought to illuminate the complex issues and incredible wealth that forests such as the Amazon is host to. Topics will include, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon, new technologies for science-based conservation, forest mapping, preservation of the rainforest ecological systems, deforestation and direct action activism.
Schedule:
6:30pm- Gallery talk and exhibition tour with artist Adriane Colburn
7pm- break (snacks and drinks)
7:30-9PM Guest speakers: Lindsey Allen from Rainforest Action Network; Greg Asner From Carnegie Institute for Science; Rhett Butler from Mongabay; Leila Salazar-Lopez from Amazon Watch; and Scott Wallace, author of The Unconquered.
THE EXHIBITION: OF DARKNESS
Of Darkness, the exhibition by artist Adriane Colburn, currently on view at the Luggage Store, combines drawings, sculpture, video, photographs and large scale cut paper in an installation that looks at the tension and complex beauty born out of the collision of wilderness and human industry.
Through a snarl of meticulously cut color-mapped images, reflected surfaces and weighty sculptures, Colburn juxtaposes the patterns of the material world with the exuberant foliage of the jungle. She explores how difficult and remote terrains are viewed through the lenses of technology such as photographs, remote sensing, and 3-d models. The works in Of Darkness, embrace abstraction through their attempt to depict the complex and unwieldy, becoming part map, part science fiction, and part psychedelic jungle.
THE SPEAKERS:
LINDSEY ALLEN- RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK
Lindsey Allen is the Forest Program Director at Rainforest Action Network.
Rainforest Action Network runs hard-hitting campaigns to break North America™s fossil fuels addiction, protect endangered forests and Indigenous rights, and stop destructive investments around the world through education, grassroots organizing, and non-violent direct action.
For more information: www.ran.org
GREG ASNER- CARNEGIE INSTITUTE FOR SCIENCE
Greg Asner is an ecologist with the Carnegie Institution for Science and Stanford University. He works at the interface of ecosystems, land use and climate change, with ongoing research and capacity building efforts focused on tropical deforestation and forest degradation, functional diversity of tropical canopies, conservation of African savannas, invasive species and climate change, and the effects of land use on the global carbon cycle. Dr. Asner develops new technologies for science-based conservation assessments of tropical regions, including their carbon emissions, hydrologic function and biological diversity. He leads the CLASlite forest change mapping project, Spectranomics biodiversity project, and the Carnegie Airborne
Observatory. More information: http://cao.stanford.edu
RHETT BUTLER- MONGABAY
Rhett Butler is the president and editor-in-chief of mongabay.com, a website founded in 1999 with the mission of raising interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging local and global trends in technology, economics, and finance on conservation and development. He is the senior writer and photographer, creating much of the site’s content, including writing more than 8,000 articles and taking more than 60,000 of the photos that appear on the site.
Rhett also runs WildMadagascar.org, a site that highlights the spectacular cultural and biological richness of Madagascar and reports on environmental news for the Indian Ocean island nation. He is the co-founder of Tropical Conservation Science, an open-access academic journal that aims to provide opportunities for scientists in developing countries to publish their research, and the Tropical Forest Network, a social network in the San Francisco Bay Area broadly interested in tropical forest conservation and ecology. He recently released RAINFORESTS (http://www.mongabay.com/book-rainforests-for-kids.html), a book about tropical forests. He is currently in the process of launching Mongabay-Indonesia, an environmental news site published in Indonesia. For more information: http://www.mongabay.com/
LEILA SALAZAR-LOPEZ- PROGRAM DIRECTOR, AMAZON WATCH
Leila serves as the Program Director at Amazon Watch overseeing it’s programs and campaigns. She has over 12 years of experience working on international campaigns to protect the world’s rainforests, in particular in the Amazon and Indonesia. Previously she was the Director of Rainforest Action Network’s Rainforest Agribusiness Campaign campaign and the Coordinator of Amazon Watch’s Clean Up Ecuador Campaign. She has also worked as an Organizer at Global Exchange, an international human rights organization based in San Francisco. She is a graduate of Green Corps, the training school for environmental leaders and is a native Spanish speaker.
Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organization founded in 1996 to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. Amazon Watch partners with indigenous and environmental organizations in campaigns for human rights, corporate accountability and the preservation of the Amazon’s ecological systems. More information: www.amazonwatch.com
SCOTT WALLACE- AUTHOR OF THE UNCONQUERED
Scott Wallace is a writer, photographer, and broadcast journalist who has covered national and international affairs for the past three decades. He gained an early reputation for exclusive reporting from the battlefronts of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Panama in the 1980s, where he filed for CBS News Radio, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Newsweek, the Independent (UK) and Guardian (UK).
Drawn to stories involving conflict over land, resources, and ideology, Wallace brings the full range of his writing and reportorial talents to bear in The Unconquered, his account of an epic journey into the deepest Amazon wilderness to track an uncontacted indigenous tribe. Part memoir, part travel tale, and part philosophical meditation, Wallace™s book brings to life a hidden world of darkness and danger, together with an unforgettable cast of Conradian characters.
Scott has also has authored two cover stories for National Geographic about the Amazon, and his writings about war, revolution, international organized crime, and vanishing cultures have appeared in Harper™s, Grand Street, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, the Village Voice, and Sports Afield, among many others. More information: http://scottwallace.com/unconquered/
ADRIANE COLBURN- ARTIST
San Francisco based artist, Adriane Colburn has spent the past several years traveling on expeditions with scientists who study climate change in remote terrains, such as the Arctic and the Amazon. Adriane™s recent work consists of large-scale installations (comprised of layers of hand cut paper, digital prints, video and projected light) that investigate the complex relationships between human infrastructure, earth systems, technology and the natural world. These works, derived from scientific data, images and video, look at how mapping is used to investigate fragile and inaccessible ecosystems along the edges of the Earth™s last vestiges of wilderness. More information: www.adrianecolburn.com