Blog / 2026 / Planet Earth the Beautiful

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

This painting is called Lambertville the Shadiful. It’s a play on the song title “America the Beautiful.” Lambertville is the town I live in and “shadiful” is a made-up word that comes from “shad,” which is a kind of fish that returns to the Delaware River every spring to spawn.

I made this painting for an annual art auction that supports a scholarship for local youth who want to study fine art, music, performance, or writing. Much of the work in the auction is as fishy as this piece, because the auction, the scholarship, and the town-wide party that’s grown up around them are all collectively called ShadFest.

And they all began over forty years ago, when the shad had only just started coming back to the Delaware, because the river had finally recovered from the massively polluting manufacturing that had poisoned it for years.

It’s a similar story to the bald eagles’ journey. Starting in the 40s, the widespread use of DDT was killing these birds at alarming rates. The pesticide was banned in 1972, but it wasn’t until 1995 that our nation’s symbol went from being an endangered species to a threatened one, and then it was in 2007 when the bird population was finally back to normal.

The bald eagles, like the shad, came back because humanity decided that we needed to do a better job sharing the planet with other species if we, ourselves, wanted to survive.

To be shadiful, then, is to recognize how interconnected we are, with one another as well as with all other beings on Earth.