Elk Creek Café in Millheim to host Amazon photo and craft display and

benefit for the Center for Amazon Community Ecology

A photo exhibition called “Intimate views of Amazônia” will be displayed at the Elk Creek Café and Aleworks at 100 W. Main St. in Millheim, PA from January 5 through February 2.  The show will feature portraits of Amazon forest peoples, plants and wildlife taken by environmentalist and photographer Campbell Plowden who has visited the jungles of Brazil and Peru for over twenty years and founded the Center for Amazon Community Ecology – a non-profit conservation group based in State College, PA.   

A reception to highlight the show and raise funds for Center will be held at the Café on Sunday, January 10 from 3 to 5 pm.  The benefit will feature a display of Amazon native handicrafts and slide-show presentation by Dr. Plowden about his group’s projects to promote forest conservation and support traditional communities in the Amazon.  Proceeds from the sale of the photos, baskets, bags, jewellery, and decorative items will help fund the Center’s research, community support and education programs.  These projects include sustainably harvesting plant resins and fibers and transforming them into valuable aromatic oils and handicrafts that forest families can sell.

Plowden made his first trip to the Amazon in 1986 with the Tropical Ecosystem Research and Rescue Alliance (TERRA International) when he documented a range of causes and potential solutions to deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon and documented the wild bird trade for the Humane Society of the U.S.  He conducted undercover investigations of the illegal tiger bone trade in Indonesia and illegal logging in Honduras with the Environmental Investigation Agency and coordinated the Greenpeace International Tropical Forest Campaign from 1989 through 1992.  He lived and worked with the Tembé Indians in the eastern Brazilian Amazon for two years doing field work for a PhD in Ecology at Penn State University and founded the Center for Amazon Community Ecology in 2006.  Plowden’s photographs of people, nature, and environmental themes have appeared in more than fifty publications, exhibitions and websites.    

For more information about the Center, visit www.amazonecology.org. 

For information about the Elk Creek Café and Aleworks, visit: www.elkcreekcafe.net.