About WatershedEvents / About Knowing the Watershed / About Me
Coffee Pot Crater, near Jordan Valley, Oregon – Owyhee Country
This blog developed from the confluence of a life-long passion for natural history and a chance encounter with Fanno Creek. My fate and the fate of the creek have somehow become inextricably bound up together in the overall scheme of things and I’m feeling good about that. I have come to love this poor, degraded and underappreciated urban stream with a passion, and as a result have been moved to take action on its behalf. Part of that action is embodied in a book I am writing titled Up Fanno Creek. The book will be finished before the year is out, and I will post updates and excerpts related to both its process and content from time to time. In addition to writing Up Fanno Creek I am also beginning work on a second book about watersheds. This one is located in Owyhee country over in far southeast Oregon. I’ve come to think of it as being a sister to the one I am studying right now. The working title is Finding Jack Creek and I hope to be able to move forward on the bulk of the research by the spring of 2010. This project will feature photography as well as writing. I have already collected a good portion of the imagery I’m likely to use in the piece and will be putting up some of that work, along with reflections on the process and the subject matter as the project progresses. People who know what they are talking about have told me that beginning a second book before finishing and publishing the first is not only hubris, it is crazy. It is even crazier, they’ve added, to throw production of a blog site into the equation as well. I am sure they are right. I almost certainly was crazy to begin with. But I made the move because I wasn’t feeling the kind of real panic it takes to complete a complex and difficult project. I could be wrong but I think that without a constant nagging fear-of-failure and the crush of tight deadlines most artists would never complete a project. I have several objectives for this blog. First and foremost I want to share the information I’ve gathered and the insights I’ve developed with anyone who may be interested in finding a way to help our culture evolve into one that values wetlands and natural areas as much or more than it does pop idols and cell phones. Tall order, l know, but I am convinced it can happen. Access to information is one of the most critical parts of the process. I also want to give Watershed Folk a place to think out loud about their work as well as the place where they do it. To that end I have asked some of them to post perspective – professional and personal – as well as event information, current issues and any other information that might be useful to advancing the cause. If you have material and I haven’t already asked you to send it along, please feel free to do so. This is a writer’s blog, which means that one of its most important goals is the perfection of craft. I spent several decades becoming a skilled photographer and in the process learned that nothing improves artistic skill sets in that field more effectively than (1) taking lots of pictures and (2) listening to critical feedback. “You have to get the first 10,000 bad pictures out of the way,” an instructor once told me. “Then you can really begin to consider yourself a serious student of the craft.” I suspect that the same holds true for writing and am hopeful that visitors to this site will be kind enough to help me get those first 100,000 words out of the way. Eric L. Lindstrom / Portland, Oregon – 27 June, 2009 ___________________________________________ ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHY The photographs on this site are protected from unauthorized use by multiple amendments to the Copyright Law of 1976. However for a limited time they may be available for use at the personal level (i.e., wall art) free-of-charge, so long as the user will make every effort to have them reproduced by a quality printing house. To that end I will be happy to make high resolution copies of the original files available for delivery online. I will recommend a quality printing source to you, if desired, and will also be happy to oversee the production of the print(s) if you decide to use that resource. If you are a teacher at any level I salute you. If you need materials for a course, my portfolio is yours, pro bono. It will be awhile before I can get the full complement of my images up on the web for public browsing. Until then just let me know what you have in mind and I’ll send you some candidates if I have them. If you are a non-profit organization engaged in protecting the health of the watershed – any aspect of any watershed – I will be happy to work out a low cost, or in some cases pro bono arrangement. I am always happy to exchange imagery for access to new learning experiences so if you are working on a particularly interesting watershed project and would like some quality documentation, let’s talk. If you represent a branch of government, a utility, or a for-profit enterprise and wish to use imagery from this site, or are looking for documentation of a site or project, please forward the details of use and other information and I will provide a fee schedule. Please address all inquiries or requests to the Comments section of this site for the time being. EL
