The Mounds is a major outdoor arts installation by artist David Bacharach. It consists of four hugel mound sculptural installations and eight individual sculptures constructed at the Irvine Nature Center in Owings Mills, Maryland. Hugel mounds are a centuries-old technique of composting used to build rich, fertile garden beds that have numerous benefits for the earth and its climate. These land art sculptures address several specific environmental issues, including excessive greenhouse gases, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the long-term effects of industrialization and deforestation.
Each large hugel mound is created solely from invasive plant material harvested on Irvine’s campus. These invasive plants provide little sustenance or benefit to the region’s native ecology and spread indiscriminately and aggressively across the landscape, out-competing the native flora. The sculptures were created to address the harm to three elements: Air, Water, and Land.
The Mounds – AIR
The “AIR” section of “The Mounds.”
The AIR mound is a doughnut-shaped hugel mound (technically a ring torus), 185′ in circumference, comprised of three layers, each representing a layer of the atmosphere. The inner layer surrounding the donut’s hole represents the troposphere, the atmosphere closest to the Earth. It is created from sections of thick Princess Tree and Tree of Heaven trunks, both highly invasive trees from Asia. The stratosphere is the AIR mound’s middle layer, the atmosphere’s second layer above the Earth. The stratosphere is where most of the excess greenhouse gases accumulate. This layer is comprised of Multiflora Rose, Privet, Oriental Bittersweet vines and Autumn Olive trees, all also harmful invasive species. The outer layer represents Earth’s third layer of atmosphere, the mesosphere. This is created from harvested dried culms of Golden Bamboo, a highly aggressive invasive plant original imported from South and East Asia.
When a person enters the AIR mound, the viewer’s gaze is intentionally directed toward the sky with the hope that visitors will take the time to consider what we have done to the air we breathe.
The Mounds – WATER
Bird’s-eye view of the “WATER” section of “The Mounds.”
The second sculptural hugel mound, WATER, examines the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), a conglomeration of plastic pelagic refuse, gumbo consistency, adrift in the Pacific Ocean. Twice the surface area of the state of Texas and more than a mile deep, the plastic waste slowly decomposes into toxic microplastic that eventually finds its way into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Two 20’x 50′ elliptical sculptural hugel mounds of Autumn Olive, Chinese Privet, Calgary Pear (also known as Bradford Pear), Japanese Devil’s Walking Stick, and Norway Maple surround a sculpture of discarded green plastic strapping and blue cargo nets. The two elliptical mounds represent the ocean currents that collect the plastic. The installation is a conceptual investigation of the ocean-borne tumor of plastic. Microplastics, the result of decomposing the accumulated plastic waste, touches every level of human existence.
The Mounds – LAND
The third sculptural hugel mound begins as a circuitous path lined on both sides by a geometric grid of woven, rusted steel wire that barely restrains the 7′ high x 12′ wide x 100′ long mounds of invasive Oriental Privet, Japanese Barberry, Bradford Pear, Autumn Olive and Bush Honeysuckle on one side and Oriental Bittersweet, Japanese Honeysuckle, Porcelain Berry, Chinese Wisteria and English Ivy on the other side. A walk down the path leads the viewer toward a scoured landscape of bare Earth and dangling black vines to face eight free-standing sculptures. The sculptures progress past a small hugel mound of roughly slashed stumps of trees along a row of heavily rusted reclaimed steel fencing, charred wood beams, and recycled black plastic mesh toward a distant portal.
The path and the sculptures are intended to remind the viewer of the worst effects of industrialization, deforestation and the 26 billion metric tons of plastic waste expected to enter the environment by 2050. The Portal, a simple 10′ high framework of 4″x4″ wood at the path’s terminus, begs the question: do we want to live in an anthropocentric (human-centered) or ecocentric (nature-centered) world?
David Bacharach’s artist statement
I’ve worked as an artist and craftsman from my studio outside Baltimore, Maryland for over fifty years. Typically, my choice of materials is scrap and recycled copper. The inspiration for my work comes from nature and my love of the natural world. In the 1990s, I noticed changes in the natural areas surrounding my home. More and more dying tulip poplars, oaks, and dogwoods stood starkly against the background of cobalt skies. Stands of woodland ravaged by grazing deer, devoid of native undergrowth, were increasingly clogged with the green gold leaves of garlic mustard and bright green waves of stilt grass. The imperfections caused by invasive plants, disease and a general disregard for environmental change provided robustly compelling visual essays that I often incorporated into my work. But they weren’t the picture of a healthy planet.
2023 was the hottest year since the beginning of climate record-keeping in the mid-1800s.
Because of the current high level of greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth’s stratosphere, heat waves were longer. Ocean temperatures are at an all-time high and sea ice is at an all-time low. Excessive heat has caused polar ice caps to melt, resulting in rising sea levels and coastal land loss. Vast pieces of land have become ecological deserts. Increased heat has caused changes in precipitation patterns, increased risk of droughts and floods, threats to biodiversity, and an overall negative impact on human health.
Simultaneously, microplastic particulates, often the product of decomposing pelagic plastic waste accumulations, have become ubiquitous in our environment. Microplastics – detectable in various concentrations – are present in marine water, wastewater, fresh water, food, drinking water (bottled and tap) and the air we breathe. Experiments demonstrate that exposure to microplastics induces a variety of toxic effects, including oxidative stress, metabolic disorders, disrupted immune response, neurotoxicity, as well as reproductive and developmental toxicity.
Much of this damage has been perpetrated in the name of progress. Since the beginning of industrialization in the mid-1850’s, the often careless and indiscriminate changes to infrastructure and technology, coupled with unrestrained urbanization utilized in the process of transitioning from an agrarian society to a primarily manufacturing one, has resulted in incalculable harm to the planet’s resources and environment.
Aquifers have been drained, canals dug, waterways dredged and rerouted, and rivers buried in culverts or thoughtlessly dammed. Cuts for new roads and fill embankments often lead to severe soil erosion. Old-growth native woodlands have been completely deforested. Industrial waste, much of it toxic, has been cavalierly dumped in the Earth’s waters and thoughtlessly deposited on expansive tracts of land. Over 6500 varieties of invasive and destructive plants, animals, and insects have been introduced in the United States alone. These invasive species have been allowed to expand their range while devastating the native species of flora, fauna, and insect life.
We are facing a biodiversity crisis of catastrophic proportions.
Globally, insect populations have declined by 45% in the last 40 years. One in every three bites of food we consume directly results from insect pollination. The large-scale death of insects poses threats to much of our agriculture as well as our ecosystems. North America’s total population of birds has decreased by 3 billion in just 50 years; climate change is an essential driver behind this trend. The symbiotic relationships between insects, animals, and plants evolved over thousands of years. Adaptation of these interrelationships cannot keep pace with climate change, so insects, birds, animals, and plant life disappear.
The enormity of the consequences of human action in the name of progress should have been recognized and corrected decades ago. It was not. Significant global environmental issues have mostly been ignored or denied despite warnings by scientists and reputable evidence explaining the dire results of avoiding immediate action.
The Mounds sculptures were months in planning and almost nine months in execution.
90% of the work was carried out by me alone. The woodland I worked in, though ravaged by invasive plants of every description, erosion of the topsoil, piles of used cinder blocks, broken slabs of concrete, and yards of twisted, crushed rusting farm fence, fence posts, and waste material was generally a peaceful, quiet location. Five white-tailed deer observed my daily progress. My constant companions were a mix of songbirds, Bard owls, a red-shouldered hawk, small mammals, rodents, and reptiles. As the hugel mounds grew, my companions immediately took up residence.
Creating The Mounds was often relaxing and always a pleasure. I constantly researched and read about environmental issues for the twelve months of the project. While the act of creation was joyful, the conclusion of my research was terrifying. If humanity does not cooperate and act immediately and decisively to solve many of the world’s environmental issues, the planet will warm by four degrees Celsius by 2100. The result will be a world-devastating “Heat Age.”
About filmmaker Jeff Bieber
Jeff Bieber’s films and social impact campaigns have cast a new lens on U.S. history and the transformation of the American identity through My Journey Home (2004), The Jewish Americans (2008), Latino Americans (2013), Italian Americans (2015), The Pilgrims (2015) and Asian Americans (2020). His work has garnered four Emmy Awards, a duPont-Columbia Award and three Peabody Awards.
As executive producer of Washington Week, Bieber produced coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, special convention coverage, and road shows during presidential elections (earning a 2009 Peabody Award). His other public affairs work has spanned Avoiding Armageddon (2003), an eight-hour series about weapons of mass destruction; America at a Crossroads (2007), a 12-hour series about America’s role post-9/11; and the timely two-hour film Korea: The Never-Ending War (2019.)
After receiving a Master of Music in Clarinet from the Peabody Conservatory in 1979 and performing with the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra, Bieber broke into television as a score reader for the first PBS Independence Day concert in 1981. That fortuitous assignment developed into a four-decade career producing award-winning series for WETA and PBS. He taught the next generation of media professionals at American and Georgetown Universities from 2009-2012.
Original production funding for American Masters Shorts is provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, the Anderson Family Charitable Fund, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Charina Endowment Fund in memory of Robert B. Menschel, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, and the Philip & Janice Levin Foundation.
