This is What We Mean by Art that Matters to the Planet

We opened the 2021 exhibition season with Art of the Osprey. It featured osprey photos by Roger Tory Peterson and Dr. Jeanne Wiebenga. Taken 70 years apart, their photos bookend an exceptional tale of near-extinction and ongoing recovery. Roger was among the first to identify DDT as the reason populations of ospreys, bald eagles and many other bird species were plummeting. Along with Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, Roger successfully petitioned the United States Government to ban DDT. This initiated a slow but steady recovery of ospreys and other birds, which continues to this day. Jeanne Wiebenga captured this success story in her photos of a young osprey pair raising their first chick on a nesting platform at Loomis Goose Creek Preserve, owned and stewarded by the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy. During the run of the exhibition at RTPI, many individuals contributed to a special fund to install additional nesting platforms in the region. The first platforms were installed during the summer of 2022 at McCrea Point Park and Jones Memorial Park. From June through September 2022, Dr. Wiebenga’s osprey photos, along with information panels from the Art of the Osprey exhibition, were exhibited in the Athenaeum Hotel on the grounds of Chautauqua Institution.

At this time of rapid loss of global biodiversity due to human negligence in caring for the world, we can celebrate the story of the recovery of ospreys as the result of the acknowledgement and correction of past mistakes. This gives me hope – perhaps it is not too late to repair much of the damage done to our magnificent planet earth.

—Jeanne Wiebenga

We hate to the lose the last of the ospreys. I just could not live without birds.

—Roger Tory Peterson testimony before a Senate Subcommittee investigating the harm of DDT, 1964.

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