Wetland Coffee Break

After viewing 163 films that included swamps, bogs, and other types of wetlands, we analyzed how filmmakers have used wetlands as storytelling devices, potentially shaping viewers’ perceptions. Wetlands are predominantly portrayed negatively in film, often as trials and tribulations for the protagonists. Hear from Jeff Matthews, University of Illinois, about how such portrayals could influence wetland conservation by perpetuating negative attitudes about these important ecosystems.

Jeff Matthews is an Associate Professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Matthews conducts field experiments and observational studies on plant communities in both natural and restored ecosystems to identify the factors driving changes in ecological communities.

Conservation photographer Michael Forsberg spent the last five years camera-in-hand exploring the natural history of whooping cranes across the continent, meeting people who love them, and discovering how these tall, magnificent, and rarest of cranes are navigating our 21st-century world. In this multimedia presentation, Mike will take you on a wild, wonderful, and sometimes heartbreaking journey from whooping crane wintering grounds along the Texas Gulf Coast to their remote nesting grounds in northern Canada, and on migration through the heart of the Great Plains.

Michael Forsberg was born and raised in Nebraska and has been a professional photographer for 30 years. His books, articles, and films focus on wildlife and conservation stories in the Great Plains. Mike is a Senior Fellow with the International League of Conservation Photographers, co-founder of Platte Basin Timelapse, and on faculty with IANR at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Mike lives in Lincoln with his wife, Patty. They have two daughters, Elsa and Emme, and a menagerie of animals.

Histories of the fur trade typically focus on the economic rise and fall of the European fur market, intercultural connections forged between Indigenous people and Euro-Americans, or the wars between Native Nations due to economic participation and alliances. However, an important yet understudied aspect underlying all of those is the fur trade environment. Between 1630 and 1830, fur hunters exterminated more than 95 percent of the region’s beaver population. In this talk, Hayden Nelson will share how the historical overhunting of beavers substantially altered the forested wetlands around Lake Superior. He’ll also discuss the interconnected ways in which other animals responded to the decline of beaver.

Hayden L. Nelson is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Kansas, where he specializes in environmental and Indigenous history in the North American West. His dissertation, “The North Woods: An Environmental History from the Pleistocene to the Pyrocene,” investigates how both human and non-human actors interacted with and transformed the transnational forested region of the western Great Lakes and Upper Mississippi watersheds from the end of the Wisconsin glaciation to the beginnings of industrial logging. His work has been supported by the American Society for Environmental History, the Newberry Library, the United States Forest Service, and more.