Eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

In the world of architecture, no name is more highly revered than Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). So, when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) recently designated eight of his buildings as World Heritage Sites it was cause for celebration.

A design genius inspired by nature to create iconic structures perfectly suited to their environments, Wright designed more than 1,000 structures.

The master builder of the 20th century, Wright changed the idea of how buildings should look with his open concept, unified approach that “brought the outdoors in.” Whether it was a home in the Midwest, the Guggenheim Museum in New York,

or the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, Wright’s innovative style became instantly recognizable.

After starting in Chicago, Wright established his renowned architectural studio Taliesen in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where much of his creative output occurred. The name of the studio is from a character in Welsh mythology.

Honoring Wright’s contributions to the human experience, UNESCO stated that his buildings have “outstanding universal value.”

“The architecture reflects functional and emotional needs; the design is rooted in nature’s forms and principles; the works align with the evolving American experience, while being universal in appeal.”

SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel are Wright admirers and have been lucky enough to see his works – including Hollyhock House (built in 1921) in Los Angeles and the Calori House (1926) in Glendale, CA.

“Hollyhock House is an architectural tour de force,” says Patti. “Massive in scale, it’s built out of hollow clay tiles and wood covered in stucco – revolutionary materials at the time. The walls are decorated with hollyhocks – the favorite flower of oil heiress Aline Barnsdall, who commissioned the house.”

Wright said that the house was inspired by Mayan temples and dubbed its style “California Romanza” – meaning “freedom to make one’s own form.”

Patti also saw the architect’s Taliesin West studio in Scottsdale, Arizona, where Wright spent the winter months. It epitomized his minimalist approach to non-essentials. The “closet” he and his wife shared was just a single rod that could only hold a few garments. Whenever they bought a new article of clothing, they discarded something on the rod to make room for it.

The eight Wright buildings designated as World Heritage Sites are: Unity Temple (Oak Park, IL), Robie House (Chicago, IL), Taliesin (Spring Green, WI), Hollyhock House (Los Angeles), Fallingwater (Mill Run, PA), Jacobs House (Scottsdale, AZ), Taliesin West (Scottsdale), and the Guggenheim Museum (New York).

Like Wright’s Fallingwater house, perched above the flowing waters, each site is unique and impressive in its own way and is well deserving of this highest honor that a cultural landmark can receive.

Representing a time of American growth and endless opportunities, Frank Lloyd Wright was as iconic as his creations.

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Focusing His Lens on Birds

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

When Chris Ulshafer introduces himself, he’s likely to say, “Hi, my name is Chris, and I’m a bird man.” Outside his home in Bear, Delaware, near Chesapeake Bay, there’s a whole world of wildlife putting on a show for his camera. Especially the birds.

From the ospreys, who he has even given names – Bonnie and Clyde, Boris and Natasha, Sonny and Cher – to Bald Eagles, blue herons, finches, wrens, vultures and more.

Now that he’s retired, Ulshafer – a former Eagle Scout and Boy Scout camp counselor – has time to pursue his outdoor interests, monitoring the birds’ comings-and-goings at nearby Locust Point, which is a haven for wildlife.

Ulshafer has come to know the ospreys, in particular, and keeps his telephoto lens trained on the new eggs and chicks in the various pairs’ nests, watching as the parents bring back food and teach their young to fly.

There’s lots to look at, too, since Chesapeake Bay is home to one of the largest concentrations of nesting ospreys in the world.

A volunteer and “resident scientist” for Cornell University’s School of Ornithology, Ulshafer works with the Audubon Society to collect data that helps to track and measure the birds’ habitats and migratory patterns.

“It puts me in my car on dirt roads where the osprey nests are,” says Ulshafer, who adds that the assignment’s “worked out quite well to relieve retirement boredom.”

In addition to the birds, Ulshafer sees other things that get his attention, including wandering turtles, butterflies…

And this horse named Bubba, who always comes to the fence to say “Hello.”

Ulshafer, who grew up in Southern California and went to Culver City High School with SurfWriter Girl Patti, has adapted well to his East Coast home and he and his wife Jan enjoy the natural world around them – or, as he calls it, “my outback.”

Whether it’s from the deck of his house or on the trails of the state park steps away, Chris Ulshafer has his camera in hand and is on the lookout for his wildlife neighbors.

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Protecting Our Planet

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

Like the tree in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, who gives everything to the young boy who loves him, mangrove trees give everything to our planet and its inhabitants.

Mangrove forests, which grow along salty ocean shorelines in tropical and subtropical latitudes, are made up of some 80 different species of plants that can subsist in low-oxygen soil.

Noted for their tangle of roots that appear to grow above ground supporting the plants as if on stilts, mangrove trees oxygenate the environment and stabilize coastlines from erosion.

Mangrove trees truly are giving trees. Five times more effective than rain forests at removing carbon from the atmosphere, NASA calls them “among the world’s best carbon-scrubbers.”

Mangrove forests also provide food and shelter to sea life, including a wide variety of fish, shellfish, algae, plankton, amphibians, birds, and mammals.

Critical to the health of our planet, mangrove trees can be found along the shorelines of over 100 countries and territories, with over 40 percent of them located in Asia.

SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel learned that the world’s largest forest of mangrove trees covers an area of about 10,000 km in Bangladesh’s Sundarbans Reserve Forest between the Baleshwar River and the Bay of Bengal.

Due to coastal development, deforestation, climate change, pollution, and other factors, though, forests such as this are at extreme risk and could even become extinct unless countries come up with sustainable practices to protect them.

To create more forests, the SeaTrees Project, started by the Sustainable Surf non-profit organization, is on a mission to plant 1 million mangrove trees (with 228,000 trees planted and protected so far). 

Other organizations supporting the mangroves include Conservation International, the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Working together they hope to expand the world’s mangrove habitat 20 percent by 2030.

To save these trees that give so much, the place to start is by giving back.

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Swiss Kitties On the Prowl

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

From the beaches of Australia to the Alps in Switzerland, people and their cats are sharing each other’s lives. Aussie Robert Dollwett’s cats Didga and Boomer like to surf and skateboard.

In Brasilia, Brazil, when a stray cat kept sneaking into the offices of the Order of Attorneys building, rather than shooing him out, they named him Leon and made him an attorney.

And, in Switzerland this brave kitty rescued a lost hiker.

The Swiss, known for intricate watches and complex banking systems, have developed an ingenious way for their house cats to travel from one point to the other – cat ladders.

Offering kitties the best of both worlds – a warm, cozy home and access to the adventurous outdoors – the ladders are a common sight in Switzerland’s urban cities.

Graphic designer Brigitte Schuster has photographed them for magazines and is working on a book, Swiss Cat Ladders, that showcases the vast array of catwalks from narrow bridges to zigzag configurations and spiral staircases.

SurfWriter Girl Sunny Magdaug, who has lived in Switzerland, says the cat ladders reflect the practicality of the Swiss and their ability to find creative solutions to problems…

even something as simple as letting the cat out.

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140,000 Square Mile Coastal Haven

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that new regulations have been finalized to protect the seafloor off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California.

These would put an end to deep ocean trawling that damages the habitat of corals and sponges that provide for marine life.

The new protections that go into effect in 2020 cover 140,000 square miles of critical ocean ecosystems.

The nonprofit environmental group Oceana helped to bring about the regulations through its years of advocacy for the region and the scientific research data it gathered showing the damage being done by commercial fishing gear to the ocean floor.

Oceana’s Pacific campaign manager and senior research scientist, Ben Enticknap, said, the regulations are “a win-win for ocean conservation and fishermen.”

“Healthy oceans rely on a healthy seafloor and these new conservation areas will ensure that commercially important fish and other ocean animals, like deep-sea corals, octopus, crab and sea stars, can thrive into the future.”

Environmentalists have long opposed bottom trawl fishing methods because of the destruction caused by the weighted nets that are dragged over the ocean floor to catch the fish in their path.

The protections will enable fish populations to flourish and benefit both the ocean environment and fisheries.

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Origami Artworks for the Environment

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

Japanese chocolate maker Kit Kat is swapping its plastic candy wrappers for recyclable paper ones that you can use to make origami artworks.

Kit Kat’s parent company Nestle says this should reduce the brand’s plastic waste by 380 tons a year. Nestle wants to have all its product packaging 100% recyclable by 2025.

The new candy wrapper includes instructions on how to fold the paper into a crane – a symbol of happiness and eternal youth throughout Asia.

In Japan it’s believed that if you fold a thousand origami cranes your wish will come true.

Kit Kat hopes its origami paper candy wrappers stimulate interest in origami. The Japanese paper-folding art dates back to the Edo Period (1603-1867).

SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel are Kit Kat fans and love origami. With the new candy wrappers, we can indulge in both – and help the environment, too.

That’s definitely the cat’s meow!

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Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

San Juan Capistrano’s famous cliff swallows have been taking to the sky to begin their long journey back to their wintering grounds in Argentina, some 6,000 miles south.

Each year around the Day of San Juan, October 23rd, the iconic birds leave the Southern California mission city to go back to Goya, Argentina – a trip that takes about 30 days.

Then, it’s hoped, that as the birds have done for centuries, they will faithfully return to California on St Joseph’s Day, March 19th.

Though San Juan Capistrano is much better known for the swallows’ return in the spring – a time of festivals and celebrations – their fall departure is part of the cycle of life…

and a bond that the two cities share.

SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel have seen the birds’ comings and goings firsthand.

Over the years, a few swallows have even made their way to Patti and her husband Greg’s house to build their mud nests under the eaves. And, when we’re at the mission we always raise a toast to their safe journey.

Swallows and their nests are fully protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.

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Uncovering Underwater Mysteries

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

Thanks to the pioneering work of American geologist Marie Tharp (1920 – 2006) the mysteries of the ocean’s depths are a little less mysterious.

From 1957 to 1977 Tharp turned the raw data from researchers’ seismic readings of the Atlantic Ocean sea floor into elaborate maps depicting the contours of the ocean bottom. To the surprise of everyone, the maps showed the sea floor to be diverse and multi-layered, rather than the flat, muddy surface most had thought.

Working at Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Laboratory, Tharp painstakingly drew by hand the underwater mountains, canyons and ridges that make up the Atlantic Ocean’s floor.

A woman in a man’s world, many of Tharp’s ideas about the ocean environment were initially dismissed as inconsequential “girl talk”…only to be proven true later.

She was one of the first to support the then controversial theory of continental drift – that the earth’s continents moved over geologic time.

She also identified the rift valley that runs from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge to the South Atlantic, information that would lead to today’s earthquake and tectonic plate research.

Tharp went on to map the Indian Ocean in 1964 and created a world ocean map in 1977, feats that led to her being called “the woman who discovered the backbone of Earth.”

The books Solving the Puzzle Under the Sea, by Robert Burleigh, and Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor, by Hali Felt, both tell Tharp’s story of perseverance to map an ocean landscape that had eluded everyone else.

For her accomplishments Tharp received the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal, the Society of Women Geographers Outstanding Achievement Award, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Mary Sears Woman Pioneer in Oceanography Award.

In 1997 the Library of Congress named Tharp one of the four outstanding cartographers of the 20th Century, displaying one of her maps alongside pages from explorers Lewis and Clark’s journals and a rough draft of the Declaration of Independence.

After a lifetime behind-the-scenes Marie Tharp and her maps were finally where they should be – front and center for all to see.

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