Witness to beauty, witness to loss

I decided I might as well see Iceland on a stopover to Europe way back in 1972. I hiked up onto a glacier one evening and the Milky Way completely stunned me. It was my first trip abroad and truth be told, it was also my first spiritual experience. In a year of many life transforming experiences I purchased my first camera in Germany, and for one dollar a day rented a seaside house with friends on the Mediterranean island of Crete. In Sweden the first world conference was held to make the environment a major issue.

Ten years later I traveled to Morocco as a professional photographer. In an ancient town on the edge of the Sahara Desert, I stumbled into a restaurant crowded with men dressed from biblical times – sipping mint tea, smoking from hookahs and gathered around a small black and white TV watching Dallas. Back home, the chemical dioxin was sprayed on unpaved roads in a Missouri town and it had to be evacuated and demolished.

I photographed Portugal in 1992. In the picturesque seaside town of Nazare, known for hauling fishing nets in the sea with oxen, a team was brought onto the beach for the tourists. At the Rio World Summit in Brazil that year, the environmental agreements made were deemed non-binding.

An oil tanker broke apart off the coast of Spain in 2002, littering hundreds of kilometers of pristine beach with dead birds and fish. South Africa sold off 60 tons of stockpiled ivory. I was photographing the American Southwest, which was suffering with widespread wildfires.

I spent three months in Guatemala in 2012. I discovered that Central America has one of the largest diversities of flora and fauna on the planet, and Guatemala more helicopters per capita than any country despite widespread poverty. At home, Hurricane Sandy destroyed the Jersey shore and battered New York City.

I was finally able to travel again in 2022 after quarantining for two years due to Covid. Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe were amazing. Wildlife viewing is relegated to protected national parks where for several thousand dollars you can sit in a vehicle jockeying for position with other safari vehicles. In Zimbabwe I hooked up with a local and went to the outdoor market. Literally everyone there has a smartphone now so they’re done with having their picture taken by tourists, relinquishing control over how they get portrayed online.

For over half a century I have had the great fortune to explore much of our planet with camera in hand. Making photographs requires me to look closely and pay attention. My conclusion is that our Mother Earth is the mythical Garden of Eden. Its beauty inspires and all the greatest art is in its debt.

Unfortunately during my lifetime we, who rely on the water, air, plants and animals she provides, have not been good caretakers to our Mother. If we thought of earth as the Garden of Eden, might we have more respect for her?

I have always been a big picture kind of guy. You might have heard the history of the universe condensed into 24 hours: the Big Bang would be at midnight, the first stars would form around 3:12 a.m., and Earth would form around 11 p.m. Modern humans would appear in the last few seconds, at 11:59:56 p.m., with recorded human history happening in the final fractions of a second.

It has been an eventful “few seconds.” Over the past 70 years, 70 percent of the world’s wildlife has been lost. Scientists around the globe who study such things are calling our time the sixth mass extinction – the first to be driven by human activity, not natural calamity. With mankind’s recent development of machinery and technology we have drastically altered a majority of the earth’s habitable land. The seemingly limitless abundance of nature that surrounds us is in fact vanishing. As society detaches more and more from the natural world, denial of manmade climate change becomes easy and the existential threat of mass extinction fades into the internet’s news cycle and pop culture noise.

Jane Goodall in her last interview made it clear how the actions of each one of us make a difference. “I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. You may not know it, you may not find it, but your life matters.”

To quote late peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, “The future of all life, including our own, depends on our mindful steps.” It is my hope that our brilliant, destructive species also has within its humanity the wisdom to protect and preserve earth’s gifts.