Sultana Projects will host prolific author and historian Mark Kurlansky during Downrigging Weekend, October 26, at 8 pm in the Garfield Center for the Arts in Chestertown.
For readers familiar with Mark Kurlansky’s zen-titled books Salt and Cod you would guess right that a history of the “fresh-frozen pea”—the diminutive star of his new book, Birdseye—would take the reader on an investigative excursion into the hinterland of discovery, invention and innovation along with quirky anecdotal asides and enough factoids to spur a reissue of Trivial Pursuit.
Kurlansky finds in the inventor Clarence Birdseye a fascinating historical hinge on which to swing an engaging biography about the inventor who catapulted local food industries into a global marketplace by perfecting the flash-freezing process.
A four-time NY Times bestselling author, Kurlansky uses a wide-angle lens on the mundane micro-elements of our lives to unveil connectivity to his greater themes; our relationship to the environment and more profoundly, as in his book Cod, the question of whether the ocean and therefore the human species will survive the inexorable exploitation of our natural resources.
“There is a big difference between living in a society that hunts whales and living in one that views them. Nature is being reduced to precious demonstrations for entertainment and education, something far less natural than hunting. Are we headed for a world where nothing is left of nature but parks?”
In the Chesapeake Bay region, one of the largest ecosystems in North America and sensitive to the struggle for environmental balance, protection, and the preservation of commercial and sport fishing, Kurlansky’s themes should prove to be insightful warnings about the consequences of ecological collapse.
“The problem of the Chesapeake Bay illustrates that there is no quick fix, not a single solution because it is not a single problem. We are talking about entire ecosystems with vast interconnecting issues. There are problems of fishing but also pollution which means a need to change farm practices and land planning. In short the solution lies in a deep commitment to changing the ways we do things,” he says.
In The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell (2006), another of Kurlanksy’s 25+ books, the author enlists the small marine bivalve as another vehicle to drive through the wending backstreets of history, in this case the oyster business in New York City. The lower estuary of the Hudson River, once thriving with oysters, was depleted by 1927. Fatefully, the oyster dredge boats that hastened the decline of the New York oyster moved to the Chesapeake Bay to continue their ravenous harvesting enough to precipitate ongoing and often fractious debate and legislation.
How Can the Oceans Survive All This? will be the author’s wide ranging topic when he lectures at the Garfield Center for the Arts at 8 pm, October 26 during Sultana Projects Downrigging Weekend in Chestertown.
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