West Palm Beach Newly Renovated Waterfront – Current Art Exhibit Sends Message To Cast Out Today’s Human Race

Bart Colucci

Open Space Restoration combines nature with fiction, so to get the most out of each writing here is a brief trackline for this post:  Non-Fiction

This Sunday we spent the day  exploring the  West Palm Beach Waterfront. A newly landscaped  $30 million dollar  open space  area along Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach Florida.  This  vibrant setting  includes pedestrian friendly boat-docks, pavilions, and fountains.    The floating docks are nice to walk along or tie down to if you’re boating the intercoastal.

We finished walking along Flagler and headed west towards downtown. We happened upon Federico Uribe’s art exhibit in the new pavilion, previously the location of the old library, and were definitely impressed with his work. His use of  materials are impressive and awe inspiring for all  ages.

We were  also greeted with a glossy 5 1/2″ x 8″,  flyer  from Praxis International Art outlining Uribe’s name and calling him a “cyclic”.   Using discarded recyclable materials  is the basis of his art but the materials also repeat  thus the name “cyclic”.  This  double entendre adds to the confusing message of Uribe’s  flyer, which I  would normally ignore but for the first sentence.

Here are the contents of the flyer as they appear:

Arrogance is our doom. We divorced ourselves from nature as if we were not part of her. We are plundering her and oppressing her. We foolishly believe in our ownership and inalienable rights of and to nature as if granted to us by God. As if nature’s resources were endless.

We still blindly believe that economic power and wealth are the epitome of life and whatever collateral damage suffered by earth through our actions is justifiable.

We accumulate possessions that we don’t need. we are surrounded by disposable objects that we burn in the air, bury in the earth and throw into the sea as if nature could magically make them vanish.

We are adolescent sons offending over and over the mother who feeds us. Until nature shakes,blows, and sneezes, erasing with trembling, water and fire our creations,our sense of power and safety, reminding us of the futility of our pretensions.

Nature will always be here, with different fauna and flora….hopefully with different humans who learn at last how to live as part of creation.

Aren’t we past this senseless dribble yet.  Nothing will change until the human race has been beaten down back to the stone ages.  Are you kidding me?

I’m glad I don’t have to explain this to my kids, that they are not worthy to walk the earth.  Or that I have to explain it to the people at Ducks Unlimited a company that has conserved more than 25.4 million acres of wetlands and waterfowl habitat across North America.

Or to the Moore’s of Intel who donated  more $7046 million from 2000-2004 for environmental causes.  Or to the Land’s End Founders for their $133 million for environmental education during the same period.

I could go on and on but you get the point. Mr. Uribe stick to the art, let it speak for you, your message is in your art. Don’t use it as a venue to spew hate for the human race.

Instead look around and see for yourself that we are the “different humans” who have brought back the Eagle and Peregrine  Falcon from dismal numbers. Salmon  in abundance on the Penobscot River in New England  and swimming in Lake Erie.

Willamette River in Oregon once  a “biological cesspool” in 1967, is alive with migratory salmon and native trout.

We can’t hang our hats on accomplishments, but Americans never do, we always push forward.

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