Stories of An Environment in Flux
A Speculative Atlas of California
Watershed
At first, I dwelled on how strangely and heavily all this infrastructure has come to rest upon the land. In this sense, I wasn’t interested in the story of how climate change has damaged the water system so much as how the water system itself has been an agent of ecological damage. And yet, the geography of climate disaster is inescapable.
Digging Out in the Palisades Fire Burn Zone
And Hell Followed
By the little things, he meant the psychic weight of seeing—and toiling amidst—the ruins of everything the residents of the Palisades had lost. And by extension, what we all are losing. Debris can be cleared. Houses can be rebuilt. Scars can heal over. But the lingering grief and anticipatory dread of climate disaster never really go away.
Views from Crete
Through the Gates of Horn and Ivory
As we explored Crete, gorgeous and austere and mythic, I saw echoes of the man—and the machinery of his demise—everywhere. Flesh. Metal. Water. Stone. Air. Permeable surfaces, fragile surfaces, unyielding surfaces. All acting upon each other, reshaping each other, damaging each other.
Views from An American Roadtrip
Under the Darkening Sky
We left California under a darkening sky. Traveling overland, somewhere around the million burning mirrors of Ivanpah, the smoke descended and it hounded us across the continent through Iowa and into Illinois. Finally, in Chicago, the sky went blue again. But we were already deranged.
Commercial Fishing in Northeastern Brazil
A Prayer to Iemanjá
Trawling these aquamarine waters twenty-five years ago, Brazilian fishermen rarely had a bad day. The southern Atlantic was believed to be underfished, its bounty nearly inexhaustible. But today, fishermen commonly return from long days at sea hauling just a couple baskets of shrimp and small fish. Due to overfishing and rampant destruction of the area’s mangrove forests, populations of high-value species like spiny lobsters, swordfish and tuna teeter on the brink of collapse as the entire marine ecosystem careens down a bottomless carnival ride.
A Field Survey
Oregon West
The place we now call Oregon is where the idea of manifest destiny first became manifest. On November 20, 1805, the Corps of Discovery Expedition reached the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River, where the present-day town of Astoria sits. Within five years, Astoria became the first permanent U.S. settlement on the Pacific coast—and the first sentence in an ongoing story of environmental catastrophe in the American West.
Views of the San Joaquin Valley
A New Pastoral
While I hope that these pictures shed light on what it means to farm at this industrial scale, I also hope that the pictures communicate something of the Valley’s peculiar, sometimes agoraphobic, beauty. For non-Valley dwellers, perhaps they will fill in the blanks as you reluctantly pass through this land on your way to somewhere else.
A Story of Oahu's Diverging Foodways
The Fall of King Sugar
Biotech seed companies have been pursuing a land grab, transforming a staggering amount of Hawai’i’s prime farmland into an industrial-scale GMO seed lab. Activists, organizers, policy wonks, politicians, farmers and even chefs are all pushing back against what they see as biotech’s usurpation of local efforts to establish a more sustainable food system—built on principles of economic, social and environmental justice—that might begin to move Hawai’i beyond the complex legacy of King Sugar.
Mining California
Industrial Materials
The deeper I dug, the more I came to see how essentially Californian these strange landscapes were: the incalculable volume of minerals extracted from our mountaintops and riverbeds has been refashioned into the very infrastructure that has paved the way for California’s growth.
Views from the Animal-Human Interface
Animalia
Over the past couple years, as the world has been turned inside-out, I’ve come to think more deeply about these accidental animal encounters—these glimpses I’ve had across the narrow but inviolable divide between me and them, and about how the animals might sense my lumbering, upright form staring back at them through the looking glass.
