Businessman Follows Passion to Create Art and Preserve ‘Arteries of the World’

GREENLAND, N.H. — RiverWorks Printing specializes in commercial advertising for clients both local and national,forging a unique, green niche in providing its many clients with myriad sustainability-driven printing alternatives.

In so doing, it is helping reshape the green conversation within its industry.

But before there was RiverWorks, there was Wall Shotz — now a division of the former — launched by RiverWorks owner Jeff Cutter as a way to render his and others’ photography into frame-able works of art.

“Wall Shotz basically started out taking people’s fishing photographs out West, and in this area, and then printing the photos large for them,” Cutter says. “There’s a market for that, and my small niche is fly fishing.”

“Wall Shotz transforms your passion into a work of art,” says its Web site, www.wallshotz.com. “Passions enrich our lives and illustrate our personalities. Share your passions by turning your photo into a large-format print, capturing a moment in time, designed to be displayed, remembered, and experienced again.”

So, while Cutter discovered after founding RiverWorks that commercial work proved more lucrative, “the passionate part for me was Wall Shotz piece. It’s more of a touchstone for people, seeing that beautiful fish we caught on that beautiful day.”

Cutter travels across the country capturing the visual essence of what he calls “the arteries of the earth” — rivers — while also advocating for their health.

“I really lobby for wild fish, too,” he says, “trying to restore, and keep going, the stocks of these beautiful fish that I travel all over the country and fish for. And now, coincidentally that we’re on top of curve with RiverWorks doing  very well and making a lot of headway, we’re picking up the Wall Shotz ball again and doing a lot more work out West again.”

Cutter recently returned from a steelhead trip on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State — using the “catch and release” technique — looking for wild steelhead, an anadromous rainbow trout, which spend their lives at sea and then return to spawn, just like salmon do in their natal streams. However, steelhead travel up river and back out to sea three more times. They live part of the year in the Sea of Japan, and they swim all the way back thousands of miles up the various rivers in which they were born.

“It is amazing,” Cutter says of the steelhead, “and they’re huge 7- to 20-pound beautiful rainbow trout, wild and beautiful.”

Cutter volunteers for conservation organizations such as Trout Unlimited, which, for example,  advocates preserving the Columbia Basin watershed, which drains most of British Columbia, Canada, all the way out to the ocean.

He also donates canvasses and Wall Shotz at functions and auctions, helping such organizations as the Coastal Conservation Association, which advocates for pelagic fish — fish that live near the surface or in the water column of coastal, ocean and lake waters — such as tuna, giant bluefins and the yellow fins on the West Coast, and also stripers out of Chesapeake Bay, because their habitat is becoming spoiled due to farm runoff and pesticides.

“It’s not all about fishing,” Cutter says. “Fly fishing makes you look at environment, temperature, the barometric pressure, what the water flow is, what bugs are hatching, what the fish are eating. It’s more of a journey figuring out matching the hatch, so to speak. You become very, very passionate, something you learn about your whole life. So, it goes hand-in-hand with the arteries of the earth, which are rivers, which I am very passionate about.”

Cutter is particularly concerned about the Pebble Mine, a British mineral exploration project investigating a huge porphyry copper, gold, and molybdenum mineral deposit in the Bristol Bay region of Southwest Alaska, near Lake Iliamna and Lake Clark. The proposal to mine the ore deposit, using large-scale operations and infrastructure, would be the largest gold and copper mine in the world.

“It’s smack-dab in the middle of the most pristine salmon and steelhead habitat in the world, and the largest drainage area,” says Cutter. “So, it’s a huge controversy. It would kill that part of the world, along with all the salmon rivers out there.”

Cutter asserts that the mining company does not care about the waste it will create. “And they’re building huge, huge, huge dams to hold back all the waste and the wastewater that comes from this mine, right above this pristine habitat. It’s not earthquake proof, and they say it’s safe, and it’s all about money and greed.”

Cutter says short-term greed too often outbids long-term ecological considerations.

“These fish have been in the watershed since the glaciers receded, thousands of years ago, and they’re the original stock. So, once they’re gone, they’re gone. We’ve already blown it out here, if you want to talk about fishing, salmon and all that, but as far as the Atlantic salmon are concerned, with the Industrial Revolution, the dams just killed all the rivers.”

But there are victories, as well, as Trout Unlimited and Coastal Conservation Association are helping to restore some rivers and tributaries to their original state.

“We’re taking down the dams, the Kennebec River being one example,” he says. “It was huge, and it opened up all sorts of habitat.”

And there are small victories closer to home.

“At the end of my road – I live on Bayside Road in Greenland — is the Winnecut River, and that dam just came down. And they did studies and found wild native brook trout up in the middle of nowhere, not far from the Stratham circle, that they didn’t know were there, that literally go back to the Ice Age. These fish are old stock. Since they opened up the waterway and they can get by the dam, you’ll see stripers going up there and all kinds of different local fish that couldn’t spawn
before.”

RiverWorks Printing is a business partner of the Green Alliance, a union of local sustainable businesses promoting environmentally sound business practices and a green co-op offering discounted green products and services to its members. GA members save 10 percent off all printing services, $10 on a $100 order and $50 on a $500 order.

For more information about RiverWorks Printing, visit www.riverworksprinting.com. And for more information about the Green Alliance, visit www.greenalliance.biz.