Terry Bastian

I have spent my last 37 years creating an ecological restoration at Danehy Park in Cambridge Massachusetts. I had wandered onto the construction site where one of the first dumpsites was being transformed into a public park. I found myself standing beside John Kissida, the designer of the park from Camp Dresser and McKee engineering. We both looked at the 1.7-acre mudhole filled with this giant green blob of hair algae! It looked like something from a bad 1950 sci-fi movie, “The Creature that...

Why has this ecological artist been building Pterodactyl nests in the city of Cambridge for the last 20 years? It all started a few years before when I helped convened a meeting about invasive species with state and federal agencies, watershed groups, the Audubon Society, university researchers and a few like me, practitioners in the nascent field of ecological restoration and ecological design. The giant reed Phragmites were in the headlines, and someone suggested that we make a list of the...