Hello, I'm Siera. I'm from Cumberland, MD. I don't really travel too often. I hope to be a jet setter one day, and go to Europe, and New Zealand. If I was given the opportunity to get out of the Cumberland/ Frostburg area I would travel. My hobbies are painting, graphic design, ceramics, and I like to make crafts. I like going canoeing, biking, camping and caving. I find public transportation to be fascinating; this is because I work at Allegany County Transit, as a Transportation Planning Assistant. My job is to find ways to increase ridership, like making easy to read schedules, and taking passenger surveys to better serve them.
I am a graduate from Fort Hill High School's class of 2004. Since I am from Cumberland I went to college to Frostburg State University because it was close, and I received Frostburg scholarships.
As an Environmental Analysis and Planning student at Frostburg State University, I am taking a Cartography Class, Fundamentals of Mapping Science. When I was a freshman at Frostburg I had the intention of being an Art and Design Major, to become an art teacher. During my first semester I was taking art-prerequisites, like Art Appreciation and I was assigned to write a paper about a form of art, I chose to write about Environmental Art. When most people hear about environmental art, they think it is about people making landscape paintings that remind people how beautiful the earth is, or people think about artists like Robert Smithson who reshapes the land, like his "Spiral Jetty."
I learned this is a broad field, some people make art to celebrate the environment, and some artists create works that make people think about environmental issues today, others try to improve the environment.
For example, Patrica Johnson, Fair Park Lagoon, 1985, she created a sculpture in the park's pond, which was environmentally degraded, "The shoreline was eroding, and the water was murky. The Parks Department had been fertilizing the lawn, and every time it rained fertilizer would wash into the lagoon, causing algal bloom. A green slime covered the water. There was no food chain; there were hardly any plants, animals, or fish. Basically the lagoon was dead. (Patrica Johnson)" So she created natural oxidation ponds and polishing pools for improving water quality. Then she planted plants on the shore line to improve the erosion problem. Plus different species of fish were introduced into an environment that could nurture them. After I wrote this paper I changed my major to Environmental Analysis and Planning, with a Fine Arts and Math minor.
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I chose Environmental Analysis and Planning as my major because I enjoy science, and later in life I would like to work on similar projects, that restore the land. I am pursuing a Fine Arts minor, because I've already taken art classes, and art classes are enjoyable. I am also pursuing a Math minor. I hope my education will give me the skills and knowledge to make wise decisions in choosing materials and methods to use in restoring our degraded environments with some aesthetic.
Other Environmental Art Projects that Improve Environmental Issues
This is a pretty cool graphic designer's website; they have created an interactive map that shows the Fatalities in Iraq.
Dr. Kessler's Geography 310 website
Contact me
ssmith013@frostburg.edu
Last Updated on September 6, 2006