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An Eco-Opportunity Calls

Billy Strong and Dell Cullum planned their winter voyage to Isabela, the largest of the Galapagos Islands.
Billy Strong and Dell Cullum planned their winter voyage to Isabela, the largest of the Galapagos Islands.
By
Christopher Walsh

When Dell Cullum was asked to assume leadership of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife in August, he did so with the understanding that a potential opportunity could mean an abrupt resignation.

“Well, I got the job,” he wrote to members of the media on Sept. 28.

Shortly after Christmas, Mr. Cullum and Billy Strong, an artist and activist who works to educate and empower youth through his nonprofit organization the Green Explorer, will travel to South America to make a documentary film.

“We’re going to be on the last wooden fishing vessel in the Galapagos,” Mr. Cullum, a photographer and wildlife removal, rescue, and rehabilitation specialist who lives in East Hampton, said on Monday. “We’re going to live on this, doing something special as we go around the islands.”

Mr. Cullum and Mr. Strong revealed few details of their plan, but they intend to spend 30 days on and around Isabela, the largest island of the Galapagos, 563 miles west of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean, including 15 on the vessel. The plan is to collect materials, make art, and work with the island’s children.

“It’s a huge opportunity to create a story,” Mr. Cullum said. “For me, it’s a dream come true.”

With the Green Explorer, “I try to teach kids and people that the way they treat their environment is the way they treat themselves,” Mr. Strong, who also lives in East Hampton, said. The connection between the earth and art, he wrote on his website, was essential to his artistic development. “While hiking along the coast of Costa Rica, the idea of capturing the energy from debris came to light,” he wrote. “I began there with natural materials, continued in Brazil, and by the time I reached India, the idea of adding plastics into my sculptures was realized.”

It was then, he wrote, that he also “understood the possibilities of taking debris and using it to educate people around the world about their relationship with the environment.”

Mr. Strong asked Mr. Cullum to accompany him to film his work. “I’ve done a few videos and documented some of my work in photos,” he said, “but this will be the first real movie.”

The plan, Mr. Cullum said, is to shoot and edit a film, which they intend to submit for next year’s Hamptons International Film Festival. They are also hoping to show it at the Mulford Farm in East Hampton next summer. “What he does is amazing, magic,” Mr. Cullum said of Mr. Strong. “Sometimes these kids are deaf or blind, and he really connects with them through his art.”

Mr. Cullum will take his drone and underwater video equipment to the island, which was formed by the merging of six volcanoes, five of which are active, and hopes to film the diverse wildlife of its land and sea.

“I’ve done a few films,” he said, “but this is really going to be my first serious, film festival-worthy documentary. I hope to do an episode of my TV show there as well” — “Imagination Nature,” which airs on LTV — “and am also going to record the whole experience for a book, down the road.”

 

 

 

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