Jaymi Heimbuch from TreeHugger.com wrote a really nice piece about the project today. It is an understatement to say we were really excited when we saw Rabbit Island on the front page! Countless people saw this piece and many offers for support and collaboration have resulted. Thanks to everyone who emailed.
What can we say… we got Gizmodo’d. 120,000 people have viewed this post and counting.
Viki Lorraine wrote a great article about the island and many of the ideas brewing.
A green blog from Santiago, Chile covered the story. Fantastico!
“Design will save the world."
A great blog about midwestern musicians edited by Steven Michael Holmes out of Houghton, Michigan. It was great meeting you Steven. I’m sure this this summer was the beginning of many interesting musical collaborations.
Josh Spear picked up our story a few days ago. He’s a really interesting guy with a well-curated website that covers a wide range of emerging content. Thanks Josh. Perhaps we can work together in the future.
Under/current is a biannual magazine that showcases work across fashion, art, music, photography, film and poetry. We’re excited to have our project featured.
The Great Lakes Echo is a publication fostering and serving a news community defined by proximity to and interest in the environment of the Great Lakes watershed. Many thanks to Laura Fosmire for the really nice interview and story. She was the first to write about our project. Update: her follow-up piece written after our successful Kickstarter funding is here.
WBEZ 91.5 re-ran the story written by Laura Fosmire in the Great Lakes Echo. The story ended up being the second most recommended by readers.
Jennifer Guerra from the Michigan NPR station called and we did a short interview which aired last week. There may be a feature length story in the works…
Our project is mentioned about halfway down the page.
Renee Prusi wrote an excellent story that goes into the backstory of the island a bit and Rob’s historical and ancestral ties to the region. There is also this column.
Gothamist we love you. But in this article you unfortunately missed the meat and potatoes of what are trying to do. What can we say. Any press is good press, right?
It is an honor to be in the Village Voice.
Notcot is a cool little arts publication.
There is a little bit of pottymouth in the title of the blog (warning!). But satire, after all, is the signature of this humorous blog that many Brooklynites follow. The article by the author Mike is satirical but respects the intent of the project. Thanks F’d. We appreciate that you walked a fine line here and had a sense of our idea which is primarily preservation and secondarily creative. We sometimes even miss living in the Slope.
The Nauru Project is and ongoing artists’ collaboration based around the gathering of information on the South Pacific Island of Nauru, the world’s smallest island nation.
A cool piece by a young woman who came across our story and blogged about it herself. Thanks!
A blog about photography + art + sometimes music
Crowd sourced journalism.
Helen is our amazing illustrator and this is her blog post about the drawing she did for us. She captured the spirit of Rabbit Island perfectly! We can’t stop looking at it and our eyes keep moving around in circles trying to take everything in… the fish, the rocks, the trees, the eagles.
Newsweek emailed us and wrote a little blurb about the island in the July 11th print edition. Newsweek!
Nice to be noted by our neighbors to the north, eh.
Renee Prusi, a reporter from the Mining Journal newspaper in Marquette, Michigan, wrote a piece about Rabbit Island in today’s paper. Many thanks Renee.
Here is an excerpt:
“Rabbit Island, some 91 acres, is located between L’Anse and the Keweenaw Peninsula or Big Bay and the Keweenaw, Gorski explained.
“Given my heritage, my ties to the local community, my family’s history, (the island) tied in perfectly.
“My grandfather called it Rabbit Island. That’s the main reason (for the name). On the map, it is Traverse Island but many locals call it Rabbit Island as it is adjacent to Rabbit Bay on the Keweenaw. I like the way it sounded and that my grandfather knew it as such, so I went with it. I think it sounds nice. That is it in a nutshell. There are also rabbits out there.
The full article can be read here.
Gothamist picked up the Rabbit Island story today and ran it with quite a zinging headline. While we appreciate the press (thanks Gothamist!), the sensational title is misleading as is the context of the story. We do not want to recreate a Mini Manhattan! Our intention is, of course, the opposite of this but alas such nuance was lost in translation. Please see our blog for more about where we are coming from. We are simply fascinated by Manhattan, given that it was in the relatively recent past a wilderness island, and feel comfortable drawing comparisons for the sake of contrast. That’s all. We wish to learn from the past as we look to the future.
The Village Voice also ran a piece with a moderate case of headline hyperbole, though the article is degrees friendlier towards our intent, if slightly sarcastic. Many thanks V.V. We’re ok with Bon Iver too.
Needless to say we learned a LOT about web PR today and regret slightly the tack chosen by the internet. We hope our project gets covered by others who are interested and still very much appreciate any support. Many people have emailed post-Gothamist with serious offers of collaboration and we are super excited about this potential. The U.P. is a beautiful place. Thanks.
Check out our new Kickstarter Project. We’re pretty excited about the potential of bringing international artists, designers and thinkers to the northern Michigan woods. We’ve made some cool gifts for project backers (photography, Rabbit Island tee shirts, totes, art, etc.) and appreciate any support you can lend, financial or social. Help us spread the word!
Rabbit Island Artist Residency
Nice article in Design Observe titled “A Short History of Camping”. Rabbit Island will stand in contrast to “camping” in America as illustrated. ‘Perennial Frontier’ might be more like it: a few settlers, some eagles and the hardships and joys of the woods.
A nice Lake Trout taken on May 18th, 2011, just north of the island. About twenty minutes later we landed his twin. Both had smelt in their stomachs which we took as evidence of voracious spring feeding. A few of the smelt looked so fresh that they might have been able to swim away had they been given the chance.
After fishing we stopped off at the island and inspected how our shelter withstood it’s first Lake Superior winter. A small pine–about 6 inches in trunk diameter–had fallen across the roof and come to rest, which we easily cut and cleared. The structure and footings otherwise held strong. Rustic improvements and finishings to come this summer as part of the artist residency plan.
*Related trout post here.
The theory of island biogeography proposes that the number of species found on an undisturbed island is determined by: immigration, emigration and extinction. And further, that the isolated populations may follow different evolutionary routes, as shown by Darwin’s observation of finches in the Galapagos Islands. Immigration and emigration are affected by the distance of an island from a source of colonists. Usually this source is the mainland, but it can also be other islands. Islands that are more isolated are less likely to receive immigrants than islands that are less isolated.
The rate of extinction once a species manages to colonize an island is affected by island size. Larger islands contain larger habitat areas and opportunities for more different varieties of habitat. Larger habitat size reduces the probability of extinction due to chance events. Habitat heterogeneity increases the number of species that will be successful after immigration.
Over time, the countervailing forces of extinction and immigration result in an equilibrium level of species richness.*
Several ideas come to mind after reading this theory:
+ As Rabbit Island is a relatively small island it would be easy to create species extinction via the handywork of even a few men.
+ Cataloguing species that do exist on Rabbit Island will be an exciting project.
+ Capitalism historically has created islands of ever decreasing size via subdivision. See this related post.
+ Manhattan is difficult to comprehend in the context of the above theory.
+ This island should be created!
+ E.O. Wilson, the author of the book above and prime mover of contemporary biological thought, also believed that "the window on wilderness is closing fast in this country. What we secure now will be in a sense a final bequest to all future generations.“ This idea must be reconsidered. Although a retrospective glance supports his idea and it is certainly easiest to preserve land that has not been previously developed, the notion that land can be reclaimed from development for the creation of natural ecosystems larger than currently exist must be considered. As our ability to collect and visualize data rooted deeper in the past and extrapolated further into the future improves, we have no choice but to challenge this sentiment and revise our historical use of incomplete balance sheet equations in matters of land use to more accurately approximate cost/benefit. Consider this when reading the quote in the next post. He was quite right.
+ The Keweenaw Peninsula is an island.