When Paul Nicklen and I first settled into a blind where a salmon-filled stream fed into the sea, we had nothing but high hopes. It was a promising site, crossed with sandy paw prints and the headless remains of salmon, artifacts left behind by the local population of sea wolves. For millennia, British Columbia’s shores have been patrolled by these coastline-dwelling canines, officially classified as a subspecies of gray wolf.

Unlike their inland cousins, sea wolves tend to be smaller in stature with a lean build and depend almost exclusively on the bounty of the sea. They spend their days scouring the tidal zone for everything from barnacles to seals to shellfish. For days, we listened to the tantalizing chorus of howls traveling from beyond the tree line. We rose each morning before dawn and then hunkered down for yet another soggy vigil until the sun set again.

About three weeks in, all we had to show for our diligence and patience was a handful of images that hardly qualified a successful assignment. By this point, Paul was really beginning to feel the pressure of his deadline, and his editors at National Geographic magazine were growing impatient. When we came to the last few days of shooting, he finally caved and broke his number one rule: never leave the blind.

That morning I watched him pack up and then traipse up the beach before vanishing around the bend. Picking up my book, its pages crinkled with sea mist and rain, I read while keeping one eye on the shadowy understory where the forest met a stretch of meadow. It was at that moment, barely a few minutes after Paul had deserted his post, when the tiniest flicker of movement caught my attention.

At first I assumed it was yet another raccoon come to pick over the fish carcasses that were pearly bone by then. But after squinting through binoculars, I suddenly found myself looking into a pair of bright, golden eyes. A wolf pup had stepped out of the shaded forest and began trotting along the stream’s edge. He was immediately joined by a sibling, and then another, until a whole pack of puppies spilled onto the soft grass. Finally, materializing like a spirit from the dense brush, came their mother.

For a moment, the mother wolf and I simply stared at each other. I desperately wanted to call Paul on the radio, but knew that if I scared her off, she would be gone for good. So instead, I kept as still as I could and hoped she would understand that I was not a threat to her family. After sizing me up, she suddenly seemed to relax. She then trotted off, leaving me in stunned silence with her cubs under my supervision.

For the next 20 minutes, I got to play the part of the watchful babysitter while mama wolf foraged for whatever morsels the tides had delivered to the beach. The pups chased each other and played tug-of-war with a piece of bull kelp to keep themselves occupied, much to my delight. I sat with my book forgotten in the sand, my heart soaring in my chest, and was so absorbed in watching their antics, I nearly forgot to take photographs.

When the mother wolf finally returned, she trotted casually past to collect her family. They immediately encircled her, tails whipping and tongues lapping at her face. She lifted her nose to the air and gave me one last look, before she led her family back into the shelter of the coastal rainforest.

When Paul returned, he took one look at my poorly-concealed grin and knew instantly the mistake he had made. Still, he was happy for me, and eager to see if maybe my new friend would return with her family again the next day. And yes, she did. In the last few days, Paul won her trust and the trust of the pack that had remained stubbornly out of sight for weeks. Patience is not always rewarded in nature. But when it is, there is truly nothing more wonderful or joyful than those little moments of trust and connection between species.

Subscribe

Want to read more from me? Subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date with my current work, upcoming exhibitions, book signings, and public speaking tours.

I have just returned from Mexico City, where my photographs are currently hanging on the iron railings, the Rejas, of Parque Chapultepec, and I still cannot believe any of this is real. I was born in that amazing city, and for 10 years, before my family moved to the nearby town of Cuernavaca, the little southern neighborhood of San Jose Insurgentes was my whole world, and Chapultepec was the green heart of my city. I visited the park on school trips and on Sundays with my family where I would climb to the castle on the crown of the hill, wander around the zoo, and press my face to the glass at the Natural History Museum. I did not yet know those long afternoons were slowly assembling the person I would become.

Today, decades later, my images of the ocean line the fences facing the bustling Paseo de la Reforma, a promenade as beautiful as the Champs-Élysées in Paris, guarded by the ever-vigilant statue of the Angel of Independence and the imposing fountain of Diana, the Huntress. On any given day, nearly a quarter of a million people walk or drive past the Rejas de Chapultepec. Women selling tamales rush past at dawn, pushing carts with arms laden with boxes and bundles, and children run their hands over the worn iron on their way to school. I honestly cannot think of anywhere I would rather have my art proudly on display or anywhere more emblematic of what it means to be Mexican.

Chapultepec is a Nahuatl word that means the hill of the grasshopper. Long before it became a park and point of national pride, it was sacred ground to the Mexica, appearing in the old codices as a prophetic site during the long migration south. It is where they constructed the aqueduct that filtered freshwater into Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec empire. Moctezuma himself kept a summer retreat within its sprawling greenery and after the conquest, the castle above became first the home of a viceroy, then a European palace for an emperor and his empress. Then it became a military Academy and now it is our beautiful National Museum of History.

But the story that resonated the most with me as a child took place in 1847. Chapultepec Castle is where the six young cadets known as the Niños Héroes valiantly stood their ground against the invading United States army marching on the city. When it became clear the tides had turned against the Mexican troops, the cadets were ordered to flee the military academy, but they refused. The youngest of the group was only 12 years old, barely a few years older than I was when I first heard the story. The eldest, Juan Escutia, wrapped himself with the flag and jumped from one of the towers. He chose to die for his country rather than surrender the Mexican flag.

The rest of the story of course changes depending on who tells it. One version places all the blame on the shoulders of a single man: the general Antonio López de Santa Anna. He is known to Mexicans as the traitor who lost half of Mexico, as if one weak-willed general had simply given the entire northern half of our country away. Others may know him best as the general who captured the Alamo mission in San Antonio, a story told a little differently in schools on either side of the border. But the start of the Mexican American war comes down to a simple and eerily familiar sequence of events.

The American president in Washington D.C wanted to find a way to expand his country’s western border all the way to California. At the time there was already revolt and unrest in the nation of Mexico, with political agendas clashing in violence. We had at this point abolished slavery, roughly 30 years before the United States, which added to the tension in states like the disputed territory of Texas. The American president marched his army straight into this territory, goading the Mexican soldiers stationed there into retaliating with spilled blood. Blood, the president claimed before congress, that was “American blood spilled on American soil.” It was enough to justify the war he was determined to wage, the one that cost us nearly half of our nation.

To this day many Mexicans still feel the wounds and the simmering rage of losing our lands to invaders. Even deeper are the wounds inflicted across generations of Indigenous peoples who were made strangers within their own ancestral territories and were massacred. History is recorded in books, taught in classrooms, and passed on through families, but it is also etched into the land and waters. New Mexico, California, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, all of these names are rooted in Indigenous and Spanish words and stories. The naming of lands has always been a way to remember, to honour, and, in some cases, to conquer with brutality.

So when a certain president decided to rename the Gulf of Mexico, old wounds came festering to the surface for many. But a signature and the ignorant words of one man cannot unwrite generations of history. There was once a time when the gulf was called The Gulf of New Spain, an attempt to erase the history of the Mexica people for which it was originally named. Similarly Lake Ontario, which the same president recently deemed “Lake America,” also has an Indigenous name from the Huron-Iroquois languages, predating the birth of Canada. And so Mexico, like the rest of the world, will continue to call the gulf its proper name, the Gulf of Mexico, and Canadians, also like the rest of the world (plus most Americans), will continue to call it Lake Ontario.

This is also why, for both Mexico and Canada, marine protected areas are far more than a way to preserve the environment. When we draw a line around our own waters, we are declaring that these waters are ours to protect. Some people find it surprising that the marine biologist who climbed the ranks of photography and devoted decades to marine conservation was born far from the sea in Mexico’s capital, but both of my home nations, Canada and Mexico, are ocean nations. Mexican waters are larger than our land and they have fed our people since before the time of the Aztecs. Our two great coasts, the Pacific and the Gulf of California on one side, the Caribbean (which comes from the Indigenous Caribs) on the other, put protein on the table of millions and are the pillars of an economy rooted in tourism, fishing, and energy.

When Mexico committed, alongside most of the world, to preserving 30% of its lands and waters by 2030, it was at once an ecological and economic decision as well as an act of pure sovereignty. Our biggest marine reserve, the Revillagigedo National Park, covers roughly 57,000 square miles or 148,000 kilometers, and it is fully protected. By some accounts we have already succeeded in protecting nearly a quarter of our seas, though admittedly the level of protection varies. Which brings us full circle to the moment I stood as an artist with more than three decades of photography and advocacy behind me at the gates of Chapultepec.

Most of the more than 20 million people who live in and around Mexico City will go their whole lives without putting their faces beneath the surface of the sea. That is why I brought the sea to them, hanging proudly in the high valley where I was born far from the coast. The sea is our nation’s heritage and the living force behind the rains that feed our crops, the fish that feed our families, and the very oxygen that feeds our lungs. I wanted to bring that force to eye level on the street where the people and the ones in power in this country cannot pass without catching the gaze of a whale or sea lion. You cannot fight for what you have never known to love

But I also wanted to instill within viewers and within the readers here the significance of having my work shown at Chapultepec, of all places. You now know some of the history behind it, an area of greenery and culture roughly twice the size of Central Park, and, at least in my opinion, far more beautiful. It has survived conquest, invasion, occupation, and the rise and fall of empires. My visits here as a child, especially to the museum and zoo, are why I became a naturalist in the first place.

It is important to note that the zoo has recently come under fire with concerns surrounding the treatment of its animals. Footage surfacing from organizations like PETA and visitors have revealed cramped enclosures and occupants in clear distress. I will be looking for ways to support and repair what was once so dear to me as a child, and I hope I can count on the help of Mexican corporations and the government. I truly believe a nation’s identity is reflected in how it treats its most vulnerable and marginalized communities, and in how it stewards its nature, including the animals entrusted to its conservation programs. We have to decide what kind of nation we want to leave to future generations: one defined by cruelty and neglect, or one that honours its history, its people, its land and waters, and the animals for which it is responsible.

Even in times of conflict and despair, even in moments when the tides have turned against us and our generals order us to abandon our posts, we can still choose to fight for a living legacy that will outlast us. Our lands and our ocean are the very foundations of our existence, and their health will determine the kind of world we pass on. Protecting them with pride and ferocity of spirit is what it means to be Mexican.

Subscribe

Want to read more from me? Subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date with my current work, upcoming exhibitions, book signings, and public speaking tours.

Acabo de regresar de la Ciudad de México, donde una expsicsión de mis fotografías cuelga de las famosas Rejas de Chapultepec, y todavía no puedo creer que todo esto sea real.

Nací en esta maravillosa ciudad y, durante 10 años, antes de que mi familia se mudara a la cercana ciudad de Cuernavaca, la pequeña colonia de San José Insurgentes, en el sur de la ciudad, fue mi mundo entero, y Chapultepec era el corazón verde de mi ciudad. En aquellos años visitaba el parque en excursiones escolares y los domingos con mi familia. Con mis hermanos subía al castillo en lo alto del cerro, recorría el zoológico y pegaba la cara al cristal del Museo de Historia Natural para ver los fósiles en los polvorientos estantes. Todavía no sabía que aquellas largas tardes iba, poco a poco, formando a la persona en la que me convertiría.

Hoy, décadas después, mis imágenes del océano adornan las Rejas frente al bullicioso Paseo de la Reforma, una avenida tan hermosa como los Campos Elíseos de París, custodiada por la siempre vigilante estatua del Ángel de la Independencia y la imponente fuente de la Diana Cazadora. En un día común y corriente, casi un cuarto de millón de personas caminan o transitan en auto frente a las Rejas. Vendedoras de tamales pasan apresuradas al amanecer, empujando carritos con los brazos cargados de cajas y bultos, y los niños deslizan las manos por el hierro desgastado de camino a la escuela. Sinceramente, no se me ocurre un lugar mejor para exhibir mi arte , ni uno más emblemático de lo que significa ser mexicana.

Chapultepec es una palabra náhuatl que significa “cerro del chapulín”. Mucho antes de convertirse en parque y en motivo de orgullo nacional, fue tierra sagrada para los mexicas, y aparece en los antiguos códices como un sitio profético durante su larga migración hacia el sur. Allí construyeron el acueducto que llevaba agua dulce filtrada a Tenochtitlan,la capital del imperio azteca. El propio Moctezuma tenía una residencia de verano en medio de su frondosa vegetación y, después de la conquista, el castillo en lo alto del cerro se convirtió primero en la residencia de un virrey español y luego en un palacio europeo para un emperador francés y su emperatriz. Después fue Colegio Militar y ahora es nuestro hermoso Museo Nacional de Historia.

Pero la historia que más me marcó de niña ocurrió en 1847. En el Castillo de Chapultepec, los seis jóvenes cadetes, conocidos como los Niños Héroes, defendieron su posición con valentía frente al ejército invasor de Estados Unidos que marchaba sobre la ciudad. Cuando quedó claro que la batalla se inclinaba en contra de las tropas mexicanas, los cadetes recibieron la orden de abandonar sus puestos, pero se negaron. El más joven del grupo tenía apenas 12 años, tan solo unos años mayor que yo cuando escuché la historia por primera vez. El mayor, Juan Escutia, se envolvió en la bandera y se lanzó desde una de las torres. Eligió morir por su patria antes que entregar la bandera mexicana.

El resto de la historia, por supuesto, cambia según quién la cuente. Una versión le echa toda la culpa a un solo hombre: el general Antonio López de Santa Ana. Los mexicanos lo conocen como el traidor que perdió la mitad de México, como si un general de voluntad débil hubiera regalado sin más la mitad norte de nuestro país. Otros quizá lo conozcan mejor como el general que tomó la misión de El Álamo en San Antonio, una historia que se cuenta de manera un poco distinta en las escuelas a ambos lados de la frontera. Pero el inicio de la guerra entre México y Estados Unidos se reduce a una secuencia de hechos inquietantemente familiar.

El presidente estadounidense en Washington, D. C. quería encontrar la manera de ampliar la frontera oeste de su país hasta California. En ese momento México ya atravesaba revueltas e inestabilidad, con agendas políticas que chocaban violentamente. Para entonces ya habíamos abolido la esclavitud, unos 30 años antes que Estados Unidos, lo que aumentaba la tensión en estados como el territorio en disputa de Texas. El presidente estadounidense hizo marchar a su ejército directamente hacia ese territorio, provocando a los soldados mexicanos allí apostados a responder derramando sangre. Entonces, el presidente fue y declaró ante el Congreso:, “sangre estadounidense derramada en suelo estadounidense”. Fue suficiente para justificar la guerra que estaba decidido a librar, la que nos costó casi la mitad de nuestro territorio.

Hasta el día de hoy, muchos mexicanos siguen sintiendo las heridas y la rabia latente por haber perdido nuestras tierras a manos de invasores. Aún más profundas son las heridas infligidas a lo largo de generaciones a los pueblos nativos, convertidos en extraños dentro de sus propios territorios ancestrales y masacrados por ello. La historia se registra en libros, se enseña en las aulas y se transmite de generación en generación en las familias, pero también está grabada en la tierra y en las aguas. Nuevo México, California, Utah, Arizona, Nevada: todos estos nombres tienen raíces indígenas y españolas. Nombrar las tierras siempre ha sido una forma de recordar, de honrar y, en algunos casos, de conquistar con brutalidad.

Así que cuando cierto presidente decidió cambiarle el nombre al Golfo de México, las viejas heridas volvieron a abrirse para muchos. Pero una firma y las palabras ignorantes de un solo hombre no pueden borrar generaciones de historia. Hubo un tiempo en que al golfo se le llamaba Golfo de la Nueva España, un intento por borrar la historia del pueblo mexica, de quien recibió originalmente su nombre. De manera similar, el lago Ontario, que el mismo presidente rebautizó como “Lago América”, también tiene un nombre indígena proveniente de las lenguas iroquesas y huronas, anterior al nacimiento de Canadá. Y así, México, como el resto del mundo, seguirá llamando al golfo por su nombre propio, el Golfo de México, y los canadienses, también como el resto del mundo (más la mayoría de los estadounidenses), seguirán llamando lago Ontario al lago Ontario.

Por eso mismo, tanto para México como para Canadá, las áreas marinas protegidas son mucho más que una manera de preservar el medio ambiente. Cuando trazamos una línea alrededor de nuestras propias aguas, estamos declarando que estas aguas son nuestras y que nos corresponde protegerlas.

Las aguas mexicanas son más extensas que nuestro territorio terrestre y han alimentado a nuestro pueblo desde antes de la época azteca. Nuestras dos grandes costas, el Pacífico y el Golfo de California por un lado, y el Caribe (cuyo nombre proviene de los indígenas caribes) por el otro, llevan proteína a la mesa de millones de personas y son los pilares de una economía basada en el turismo, la pesca y la energía.

Cuando México se comprometió, junto con la mayor parte del mundo, a preservar el 30 % de sus tierras y aguas para 2030, fue una decisión ecológica y económica, pero también un acto de pura soberanía. Nuestra reserva marina más grande, el Parque Nacional Revillagigedo, cubre aproximadamente 57,000 millas cuadradas, o 148,000 kilómetros cuadrados, y está completamente protegida. Según algunos cálculos, ya hemos logrado proteger casi una cuarta parte de nuestros mares, aunque hay que admitirlo, el nivel de protección varía. Todo esto nos devuelve al punto de partida, al momento en que me paré, como artista con más de tres décadas de fotografía y activismo, frente a las Rejas de Chapultepec.

La mayoría de los más de 20 millones de personas que viven en la Ciudad de México y sus alrededores pasarán toda su vida sin entrar mas alla de la superficie del mar. Por eso les llevé el mar, colgado con orgullo en el valle elevado donde nací, lejos de la costa. El mar es el patrimonio de nuestra nación y la fuerza viva detrás de las lluvias que alimentan nuestros cultivos, los peces que alimentan a nuestras familias y el mismísimo oxígeno que alimenta nuestros pulmones. Quise llevar esa fuerza a la altura de los ojos, a la calle donde la gente y quienes ostentan el poder en este país no pueden pasar sin toparse con la mirada de una ballena o de una foca. No se puede luchar por aquello que nunca se ha aprendido a amar.

Pero también quise transmitir, a quienes ven la exposición y a los lectores de aquí, lo significativo que es que mi obra se exhiba precisamente en Chapultepec. Ahora ya conocen parte de la historia que hay detrás: un espacio verde y cultural de aproximadamente el doble del tamaño de Central Park y, al menos en mi opinión, mucho más hermoso. Ha sobrevivido a la conquista, la invasión, la ocupación y el auge y la caída de imperios. Mis visitas de niña, en especial al museo y al zoológico, son la razón por la que, para empezar, me hice naturalista. Hoy el zoológico ha recibido duras críticas por el descuido de los animales. Videos compartidos por PETA y por visitantes preocupados muestran a animales en un evidente estado de angustia dentro de recintos reducidos. Yo buscaré formas de apoyar y reparar aquello que, de niña, fue tan querido para mí; espero poder contar con la ayuda de empresas mexicanas y del gobierno.

La identidad de una nación se refleja en la manera en que trata a sus comunidades más vulnerables y marginadas, y en cómo cuida su naturaleza, incluidos los animales confiados a sus programas de conservación. Tenemos que decidir qué tipo de nación queremos dejar a las generaciones futuras: una definida por la crueldad y el descuido, o una que honre su historia, a su gente, sus tierras y sus aguas, y a los animales a su cargo.

Incluso en tiempos de conflicto y desesperación, incluso cuando la batalla parece perdida y nuestros generales nos ordenan abandonar nuestros puestos, todavía podemos elegir luchar por un legado vivo que nos sobrevivirá. Nuestra existencia depende de estas tierras y océanos, y lo que hagamos para protegerlos determinará el mundo que heredarán las generaciones futuras. Protegerlos con orgullo y ferocidad de espíritu es lo que realmente significa ser mexicano.

The water was a cold, frothy white. From the boat it had looked Caribbean blue, that impossible turquoise, but the moment I slipped under I could barely see my own hands. The Great Australian Bight keeps its secrets in suspension, a turbidity that hangs like a smoke screen. And somewhere in that haze lurks one of the healthiest populations of great white sharks on Earth. We had a permit most people can only dream of, granting us permission to enter the water with mother southern right whales within their calving grounds. We had come a long way, to a remote coast with almost nothing on it, to help with a campaign to protect this precious calving habitat from seismic blasting. Paul was filming beneath the surface, and our friend, Emmanuel Lubezki, “Chivo,” filmed from a drone above. Over the next thirty days, we would read the language of these wild mothers and learn to mind our place.

Southern right whales are the true nomads of the southern ocean. They cross the roughest seas on the planet to feed off Antarctica and then return to warmer waters to calve. I often think about how we nearly lost them and how lucky we are to still have them on Earth. Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, whalers killed more than 150,000 southern right whales, hunting them to the precipice of extinction. By the 1920s, barely three hundred were left alive in all the world. They were the “right” whale to hunt, as the horrible saying goes, because they are slow, curious enough to draw too close, and because they float when they are dead due to a high fat content.

Mindful of the dark history between our two species, we took extra care on our approach. We would lower ourselves into the cold and wait in perfect stillness, letting the mothers decide on a safe distance. We never pushed toward a newborn and always kept an eye on the murk at our backs for any hint of sharks. But then the whales did something I had never experienced before. Instead of staying away or passing and moving on, they would come close to check us out, making slow, deliberate U-turns and coming back for an even closer look. Of all the whales I have ever dived with, these were by far the most bold, playful, and mischievous.

Southern right whales are the fourth largest whale in the world, and when one swims directly toward you, it feels a bit like being confronted by a sentient bus, topped with a barnacled battering ram. Their heads are crowned with callosities, rough islands of skin crusted with barnacles and pale whale lice that they use to slam into one another. More than once a whale came straight at me and veered at the last instant, leaving just ten inches of water between gray mottled skin and my mask.

On the day I almost died, Paul and I were floating still in the shallows while a mother and her calf moved peacefully past us. By then the whales had grown a little more used to our presence and the baby, fueled by curiosity, suddenly broke away from its mother to come take an even closer look. Distracted by the little body soaring toward me, I did not see the mother’s quick reaction. I only heard Paul’s voice calling behind me, tinged with uncharacteristic panic, “fluke!” I barely managed to drop an inch before the tail collided with the top of my head. Paul immediately grabbed my hand and yanked me to him, away from the whale.

I turned to look back at the mother as she shepherded her calf to a more respectable distance. Had I been completely upright instead of swimming flat, she could have easily broken my neck. The rebuke had left me dizzy, but I quickly realized she was not trying to kill me or even harm me. She was correcting her own child and setting a clear boundary between my body and her baby using the only language she had. I was simply, enormously lucky.

I think about that mother often these days. This autumn the calves of her species are dying and scientists are scrambling to understand why. Since June, hundreds of newborn southern right whales have washed up along the coast of Patagonia, on the other side of the same southern ocean. The scientists bent over their stranded bodies believe the likeliest cause is a bacterial infection, perhaps entering through the wounds inflicted from the relentless pecking of kelp gulls who target vulnerable calves. But so far none of this has been confirmed. What is certain is that somewhere down there a mother is doing exactly what these whales do, placing her enormous body between her baby and the world, and yet nothing she does could possibly stop the insidious spread of disease.

I too cannot dive down and stop it, just like I cannot stop the reef from bleaching or bring back the species already lost. This is the helplessness that drove me, after thirty years of fighting armed with science, policy, and photographs, to a table covered in paper and paint.

I have written here before about my series Marks of Memory, which always begins with a black-and-white photograph from my archive spanning over 30 years. On the canvas of the image, I overlay flowers cut and torn from official documents in the way that we layer marigolds over the graves of our loved ones in my hometown for Día de los Muertos. Like the ofrenda, what I make with my hands on the canvas becomes a place between worlds. In Mexico, no one is ever truly lost or gone as long as there is someone to keep their memory alive.

At first I made these offerings only in response to the people I have met living through loss on the edges of a warming world. Displaced by drought and scarcity and the violence of a destabilized planet, many have been forced to leave their homes behind or fight against the systematic erosion of their traditional ways of life. But not including animals in my work felt like another kind of erasure. I have spent my life insisting that we are not separate from nature, that the mother whale and the woman fetching water from the well and the bleaching reef are bound together in a living fate. And yet here I was, trying to draw a line between them on the table.

And so Refugia was born, under the umbrella of Marks of Memory, this time for the wild beings with whom we share this planet. The flowers within each piece are cut from documents that have ruled the futures of entire species. Pages from the IUCN Red List, CITES listings, Audubon plates, and the field notebooks I have filled over thirty years. Into all of this I also fold my own hidden papers, the ones that have come to define my life as a Mexican woman and immigrant twice over. I know what it is like to be ruled by pieces of paper. Humans, animals, all of us are subject to the cold mechanics of bureaucracy. Some of us are granted the privilege of being marked as belonging, or protected. Others are not so lucky.

In the living world, refugia (refugium singular) are pockets of healthy habitat where life can begin again even as the world changes around it. Each collage is its own paper refugium, but there is still one I have yet to make, and that is the mother whale who first sparked this journey.

Thinking back on that day in the waters of the Bight, I would not have blamed her if she treated me with hostility, as our species has long treated her own. But the reality is she did not. She regained control of her calf, created distance between us, and chose to leave me alive. She showed restraint, or at least as much restraint as her 60,000-pound body would allow her. By contrast, my own species once nearly eradicated hers and, to this day, still kills and harms whales, despite knowing exactly how much trauma and pain these animals endure. The whole reason I was in those waters to begin with was to collect photographs for a campaign against seismic blasting right near the calving grounds, in which high-powered airguns blast the ocean floor every ten seconds with deafening, traumatic, and even lethal consequences to marine life.

Making room for these animals on my canvas is symbolic in many ways, but my work never stays within the frame. As I carve out safe spaces on paper, I also work to create protected areas in an increasingly hostile world, all for the chance that nature’s most vulnerable species may outlast our cruelty and thrive under the stewardship of their most devoted defenders.

This is the promise of Refugia, the promise I make to the whale who spared my life, and to all the wild mothers of this Earth who would do anything for their babies.

Want to read more from me? Subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date with my current work, upcoming exhibitions, book signings, and public speaking tours.

Subscribe

This month I am celebrating a bittersweet anniversary. One year ago, I decided to leave the U.S. for good and renounce the citizenship that I had worked so hard to obtain. Since that difficult decision was made, I keep arguing with myself about which word best describes the feeling of leaving. On good days I refer to it simply as “moving,” as I have done so many times in my life. On the harder days when I feel the guilt and sense of loss creeping in, I call it what it truly felt like from the inside: “self-deporting.” Although I was legally a U.S. citizen and, theoretically at least, not in danger of forced removal from the country, somehow it still felt like I was being exiled from the place where I first got married, raised my children, and built a career. I chose to go before the country that I had given so much of my life to could finish telling me I no longer belong.

I am writing here to share what the decision meant, and perhaps more importantly what it did not mean. It was not a verdict on the Americans I love, the friends and colleagues who stood by me for decades. My own sons are American, although my daughter, born in the US, chose to “self-deport” with me and is now solely a Canadian citizen. I made this choice in defiance of the cruelty this administration has inflicted on its people, especially the Latin American communities. I could no longer stand by a nation whose leaders either blatantly condone or choose to ignore such deliberate unkindness and violence. They have branded every immigrant a criminal to be rounded up and caged like animals regardless of their status or their story, inflicting deep trauma at best and resulting in their deaths at worst. And so I chose to leave while I still had the option of doing so on my own terms.

The saddest part for me is that I firmly believe I was a good American. After I moved to Virginia from Mexico, I did all the right paperwork, got the right credentials, the driver’s license, the American passport, and I also perfected my use of English. Perhaps most important, I became a dutiful voter, proud to exercise my right to a democracy even in the smallest of local elections in my home state of Virginia. Years later, even after I moved to Canada to follow a new partner and a new life, I remained a Virginia voter and taxpayer, and I was dutiful about it. I mailed my absentee ballot across a border, from my new home to my old one. I believed that showing up to vote and to pay taxes was our right and our duty to democracy.

To be clear, this is not the confession of someone who threw her right to vote away. Nor am I someone who left because I feared for my life, as so many others have. I made a deliberate, painful choice, and I am now a proud voter here in Canada and someone who is fully aware of the power even one vote can make, more so than most.

Most people around the country were not paying attention to the race in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017, but I was glued to the TV screen. The race had come down to a single vote: Shelly Simonds, a Democrat, against David Yancey, the Republican, 11,608 to 11,607. But then a contested ballot erased the narrow margin and left the race an exact tie, and because the law had no wiser instrument, the winner was chosen by drawing a name from a bowl.

So there I was in the flickering light of the television, waiting for a hand to reach in and draw one of the two slips of paper on which hung the balance of an entire chamber. Just one more vote for either side from anywhere in the district, just one more citizen who made it to the polls or chose to stay home, and the election would have already been decided. I held my breath, along with my neighbors in our little bubble of a town on the edge of the Potomac, and Yancey’s name was drawn.

Do not ever, ever, let anyone tell you your one vote does not matter. Virginia is the proof, sitting right there in the record, that power in America can be decided by one vote, and then by pure chance to bridge the perfect divide between two parties, once considered two halves of the same whole. When I mailed my vote in from my new home on Canadian soil, I did so trusting its full weight would be counted, as is every citizen’s right.

Today, both my home here in Canada and my birth country of Mexico are under attack from the very country I was once so loyal to. The current administration has no regard for the decades of peace carefully fostered across North America. We are being made to take sides, to see a border where we once saw a neighbor. And while we are pitted against one another, the people behind it have dismantled all the environmental protections, laws, and safeguards to protect land, seas, people, and wildlife that I, alongside thousands of other American colleagues in the NGO community, in governments, foundations, and grassroots movements, fought for decades to put in place.

In the meantime, it seems the world has conveniently forgotten that climate change does not wait politely on the sidelines while we squabble amongst ourselves. It has only grown more dire, sweeping away thousands of lives and homes in great floods and pushing nations to create stronger safeguards against climate-induced economic loss. People around the world, often the most vulnerable, are losing their homes and, more and more, have been forced over borders in order to survive. When they arrive, we have a word waiting for them: immigrant, spat out like a slur, and one by one the doors all shut in their faces from one country to the next, including the U.S. These are fellow human beings made to wear a label that overrides their story, displaced by a catastrophe created by the very countries that refuse them.

That is partly why I turned to painting my Marks of Memory series. The faces of the people who are already displaced, or who will be displaced but don’t yet know it, as the planet becomes more uninhabitable. In every new piece are layers upon layers of papers that decide who is let in and who is turned away, who will have a chance of making a new life, as I have, and who will be doomed to detention camps, hunger, and fear. I am trying to give visibility to the people I have photographed in remote parts of the world, many of whom were the beneficiaries of American aid and philanthropy that is now all but gone. These are neighbors, friends, somebody’s children, standing at a border they have to cross because the alternative is worse.

As I watch the fierce battle in the upcoming midterm elections rise to a crescendo, I am also watching the regime’s next cruel turn. I cannot tell you how surreal it feels to stand on the other side and watch as everything from voting rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press is attacked again and again. The mailed ballot, the one I sent so faithfully across the border every year, is high on the list of rights that this president is desperate to end. The courts have blocked him for now, but the fight is not finished and the intent could not be more clear.

This administration understands the power of a single vote. No one works this hard to take away something that does not matter. The bowl in Virginia proved how one vote can change the tune of an entire election and decide who holds power.

This was the one thing that made me hesitate to renounce my citizenship and leave a nation behind. But in the end, I do not regret ‘self-deporting’ and not being able to vote in the country I once thought of as home. It was the right decision for me, one that was fully supported by my family and friends. What I do regret is ever believing that the vote, by itself, was enough. Of course the ballot is necessary, but voting alone, especially now, is no longer sufficient, and soon it may not even be guaranteed. The other half of the duty to a nation is refusing to spend your outrage on the enemy your leaders hand you while they blatantly pull apart the machinery that allows you to choose your leaders in the first place.

If you are reading this and you are someone who can vote in the US, do it. Keep your eyes exactly where they do not want you looking: at the rolled back regulations on emissions while summers hit record highs and at the loosening protections on endangered species. And above all, at the attacks on the very foundations of what constitutes a democracy.

Want to hear more from me? Subscribe to my newsletter for all upcoming events, exhibitions, book signings, and go deeper into the stories behind my work.

Subscribe

In the dusty streets of the small city of Jinka, in the heart of South Omo (southern Ethiopia), it was late in the afternoon. The clean light of the high altitude sharpened every detail of the scenes playing out around me, little vignettes of city life. Beside me, my fellow traveler and photographer suddenly caught her breath, drawing my eye to where she was looking. A pair of mesmerizing, deep blue eyes set in a lovely dark face met mine.

I could instantly see the thought flash across my companion’s mind that a portrait of this young man would sell very well, and she was not wrong. But there was something else about him that caught my attention: a thin scar threading the ridge of his eyebrow and at the edge of his eye. When we approached, hoping to make his portrait, I was relieved when we were greeted with a warm smile. Cameras are not always welcome and the beauty we see in other people is not always a reflection of how they feel about themselves.

It turned out his name was Abush, born to the Ari people with eyes as deep as the sea. In his village however, this was seen as a curse. Most people kept their distance from him even as a young child and villagers would harass his parents, evidently threatened by superstitions beyond my understanding. Abush shared all of this with me over a beer and plate of injera without a trace of bitterness. He told me how he was shunned and mistreated for most of his life. When his little brother was born with the same pair of eyes, Abush confided that he felt relieved he was no longer alone in the world. At the same time, he dreaded that someone he loved would now share his fate, someone he would need to protect.

It is incredible to me how two artists can photograph the same person in the exact same light on the exact same afternoon and somehow end up with two completely different images. Where my friend saw a photographic opportunity, I saw someone with a story and a wound. But neither of us was seeing him for who he was, at least not until we began chatting with one another. The calm, detached way he spoke about the past unraveled me more than anger or sorrow. This was clearly someone who had grown up never expecting kindness from the world, but that did not stop him from giving it.

Since our conversation, my thoughts keep returning to the ocean-eyed boy making his way in an unkind world. In his own village, Abush’s eyes make him a monster to be feared, but where I come from, those same eyes make him beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that they literally stopped my companion and I in our tracks. It hurts to think how many of us have been judged worthless or even threatening simply because of old prejudices, preconceptions, and beauty standards dutifully cycled through every generation. It hurts even more to think of how much of us live defined by this, by the people who behold us.

At first, I did not have the words for this slowly-forming thought. But recently, I have been developing my art practice through some self-directed art school and I came across a term that felt like a puzzle piece falling into place. I was watching the artist Jeff Koons describe the reasoning behind his “Gazing Ball” series from the dim light of my phone screen. One of his main inspirations was the concept of the “beholder’s share,” which is essentially the idea that a picture is not finished by the artist but rather by the person who looks at it. The theory, originally sparked by the art historian Alois Riegl more than a hundred years ago, was named and further defined by Ernst Gombrich in his book Art and Illusion. Gombrich firmly believed that the viewer brings their whole self, including their memories and expectations, to everything that they see.

Slightly more recently, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel followed the idea into the brain and found that when we perceive a face, we are building it out of our own feelings and experiences. In other words, the beholder is what finishes the “work.” This can be a generous act that invites the viewer to become a participant in the making of art, or it can be a source of long-held prejudices. So when my companion and I both failed in our own way to see Abush, we saw instead our own projections and assumptions collecting into a face. The cause behind Abush’s exile from his own community was not his beautiful blue eyes but how other people perceived them.

The thought makes me feel like we’re all just walking around as unfinished sentences with far too many people eager to rush in and put words in our own mouths. The main issue of course is some people are praised in beautiful prose while others are told their very existence is to be feared, hated, and cursed.

Thank you for making it this far and reading Abush’s story. Since you’re here, please consider subscribing to my newsletter for all upcoming exhibitions, book signings, and heartfelt stories from the edge of climate change and conservation.

Subscribe

The Making of Entre Libélulas

I cannot change the hardships in Abush’s past, nor do I want to. I do, however, want to transform the world that surrounds him. And so when I returned to my studio weeks later, I printed the black and white portrait of Abush and set to work creating what I call a “paper painting.” I tore up reports documenting the cruelty inflicted on people that are different, albinism, dwarfism, other-gendered and other so-called evil traits in some African communities. I mixed them with my own immigration papers and other documents that have come to define where I am accepted and where I belong, or don’t belong.

As I worked, dragonflies began to appear from beneath my fingers until they filled the space around Abush. They seemed to conjure themselves on their own accord, flying into the piece. A dragonfly spends most of its life underwater, hidden in darkness as a nymph for years at a time before it rises and becomes the jeweled, bright creature we know. It is also almost entirely made of eyes, each holding up to thirty thousand tiny lenses and seeing nearly everything at once.

The next step was to bring blue back into the painting, to the eyes staring from the middle of the canvas and to each delicate dragonfly wing. The color that once branded Abush as an outcast now fills the world around him, so he is no longer isolated. I wanted to give him some kind of armor, much like the swarm of yellow butterflies that Gabriel García Márquez, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, sends trailing after his character Mauricio Babilonia wherever he goes. Years ago I heard the Lakota spiritual leader Arvol Looking Horse, Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, who sat for one of my portraits, talk about how his people once painted dragonflies onto shields, war shirts, and lodge covers as protection against harm. I thought maybe they could protect Abush too and his brother.

If you look past the dragonflies, you will see the whole surface is covered in unintelligible writing. It is an asemic script that conveys feeling rather than meaning. When I was a girl, my younger sister and I invented a secret language to keep our conversations from the rest of the world, and I wrote to Abush in something close to it.

With the piece finished, there is just one more step to take. Years ago I photographed a girl named Nagide, whose portrait, wearing a flamboyant flower headdress, became the cover of my book, HOPE. After her portrait was so well received by viewers in galleries around the world, I returned to where I had met her and tracked her down to give her what the image had earned. It is the least I owe to the people whose stories inspire my work and the person I want to be every day. I plan on giving the earnings from this piece to Abush as well. It won’t change what he has been through, but it might help make his days a little lighter and it’s past time to return the world to a state of reciprocity and kindness. This I learned from working closely with Indigenous peoples over the years, in which generosity is often simply a way of life.

Now, when you look at Entre Libélulas, the name I gave my painting, you will have the job of finishing the piece of art, the way you finish everyone you look at. We all have memories of what it feels like to be shut out from the places and people we want so badly to be part of. I want you to reach for those memories and then look into the eyes of Abush and finish the piece with all the compassion, love, and acceptance that the world could not provide for him. Then turn that same perspective onto the rest of humanity and onto yourself.

Alor is a glimpse of what our planet can look like when humanity lives in balance with nature. However, even while surrounded by so much natural beauty, there is an elephant here on the boat with me that I cannot ignore. It is a question I find myself returning to again and again, and I want to think through it honestly, as I truly believe our future depends on getting the answer right.

I work with artificial intelligence now (and no, I do not mean in my photography or mixed media work as an artist, I want to be clear about that). I refuse to use it as a replacement or even as an aid to my creative process. There is no room in my camera bag or in my studio for it, and I do not use it for tasks I am perfectly capable of executing on my own. Instead, it has become something like a thought partner, a non-judgmental mind I can reason alongside late at night that helps me mull over my thoughts, and explore new ideas in between expeditions. I have also watched people I respect recoil from it, certain it will be the end of us all. I understand the fear, truly I do.

Canada, the country I call home now, already has more than 200 new data center projects in the works, while the U.S. now has more than 4,000 data centers, the most in the world. Globally data centers devour more than 400 terawatt-hours of electricity each year. For those of us who, like me, are unfamiliar with what a “terawatt” is, data centers in the U.S. alone consume about as much electricity as the entire nation of Thailand uses in a year.

In order to meet this sudden surge in growth, tech companies are relying on gas power and diesel generators for backup. Data centers need stable sources of power and they also need tons of water to keep cool, with the largest of the data centers consuming up to 5 million gallons of water a day. Some civil rights organizations have sued major tech companies over air pollution, emissions and the burden these centers place on local water supplies. Low-income rural communities are particularly at-risk, as new data centers place pressure on water facilities, power grids, and air quality. A United Nations University report that was recently released predicts that data centers could consume up to 9.3 trillion liters of water annually by 2030, worsening water shortages.

We have told ourselves that technology is our escape hatch from nature, the clever trick that will finally free us from the mud and tides. In reality everything we build deepens our dependence on the living world. The smarter our machines become, the thirstier they are, hungry for the metals and power only this planet can provide. Every answer they give has a cost measured in carbon and forests leveled. So why, given the current impacts of data centers, would a conservationist and artist, of all people, use AI at all? Why am I not boycotting this new tool entirely?

Truthfully I do not believe ignoring AI will make it go away. Investors are expected to pour $1 trillion into its development this year alone, which to me is proof that, whether we like it or not, the technology is here for the long term. It is also already deeply embedded in everyday life, used in every absent-minded google search or scanned item in an automated check out line. It is likely even your healthcare provider uses it to track patient information across their systems. AI is everywhere, but how we choose to use it and, perhaps even more importantly, how we regulate it is up to us.

Despite its destructive effects on the environment and communities, AI does have some indisputable potential for good. Scientists have been using it for years now to track and stop plastic pollution. It is also helping researchers and marine biologists understand the secret language of whales, opening new possibilities for understanding between humans and other species. And now, scientists are looking to use AI to connect enormous amounts of planet-wide data, hoping to reveal how climate change is affecting the Earth, including our oceans, and perhaps giving us the insight we need to finally solve the climate crisis.

I personally have seen these tools increasingly used in the field over the past few years and there is no denying the positive outcomes so far. But the question is, can the benefits that AI provides to humanity and our planet outpace the costs?

Artificial intelligence is a tool of astonishing power, and just like every tool humans have forged, from the first sharpened stone to the camera in my hands, it takes the shape of the hand that holds it. For someone who wants to understand the world, it can help solve some of our most pressing and urgent problems. In the hands of the extractionists, the same people who are emptying the seas and now heating the skies, it becomes another engine for turning living things into money, further exacerbating the problems we’re meant to solve. If we are to find a way to navigate this new technological era without allowing it to burn the Earth from beneath our feet, we need to start getting serious about accountability.

Right now Big Tech has made it clear they are prioritizing growth at any cost, with little regard for their environmental footprint. We need to make it clear that we will not stand for this. It is the industry’s responsibility and the responsibility of our elected representatives to urgently address and reduce AI’s energy and resource needs. We can demand renewable energy alternatives, restrict data center sprawl, and, above all, advocate for protections for local communities. We can demand that companies prioritize human rights over robots and put their money into alternatives that do not require endlessly depleting the Earth. We can refuse to support companies that use these tools for weapons programs, and demand transparency and integrity from their competitors who had the courage to say no.

And yes, we must also hold each other accountable. Students and employees who overly-rely on AI have shown declines in critical thinking skills, while AI-generated content has become so convincing that it can be impossible to distinguish it from reality. Half of us on the internet these days are left questioning what is real, while the other half disappears down rabbit holes of conspiracy theories. It also makes mistakes, a lesson even supposedly reputable organizations are learning the hard way.

In the end, there is no replacing the human heart, our ingenuity, creativity, or our connection to one another and to the planet that birthed us. But we also cannot ignore a transformation this immense. What we can do is rise to meet it. We need to build systems of accountability before the price of AI becomes the cost of our own future. We must keep the powerful few in check through the power of the many.

But now I want to know what you think. Do you use AI at all, or are you firmly in the anti-AI category with no exceptions? Do you believe there is a way we can implement it ethically, or are we as doomed as some of my colleagues say we are? I would love to know your thoughts.

Growing up in Mexico, I was surrounded by siblings, childhood friends, and extended family. Everyone I knew looked like me, spoke my language, and knew me, sometimes better than I knew myself. After immigrating to America, however, I found myself isolated and lonely. I had two small children, and a then-husband who often had to travel for work. I struggled to fit in with the suburban mothers. They thought my foreign accent was cute, but they did not understand my culture or where I came from. I was young, alone, and consumed by the demands of raising children. Somewhere along the way, I had lost sight of what I wanted for myself.

For a long time, I felt lost. Of course, I loved my children, and over time, I made a few lifelong friends in this new and unfamiliar place. But I had always dreamed of becoming a scientist and explorer, of living a life filled with adventure. I did not want to resign myself to a life I might come to regret. Then, one day, my husband came home with an old film camera. Suddenly, I had something of my own to pursue, a hobby I could explore while raising my children.

I dove headfirst into film photography, fumbling with the heavy camera and learning the basics. In our home’s boiler room, I made a makeshift dark room and recruited my kids to help with cutting and organizing family photos. I then found myself taking pictures at school events and being asked to take family portraits of the other soccer moms’ families. From there, it was weddings, engagements, and covering the local charity run.

I was lucky enough to be able to travel with my husband to other countries, often to remote places I had never even dreamed of seeing, let alone photographing. On those trips we would bring the kids whenever we could, which left me in the exceedingly complicated position of balancing motherhood, photography, and travel for weeks at a time.

Still, I persisted in my newfound pastime-turned-profession. My camera became my passport to the whole world, allowing me to experience a whirlwind of new cultures, places, and the most wonderful people. It gave me purpose and the courage to leave the safety of my comfort zone. By the time my youngest left elementary school, I had made my decision: I was going to be a full-time photographer. I signed up for night classes in the city and that was it: I took off running down my new path.

For me, photography was not something to pass the hours I had while my kids were in school. It was a passion. As an immigrant, it was important for me to feel understood. And when words failed, I found that the images I took spoke for themselves. Photography was the key that opened a world of possibilities. It gave me the courage to connect with others, share my story, and pursue my dreams.

For parents and for mothers especially, it is easy to become engrossed in the daily duties of caregiving and forget about your own dreams and aspirations. I often felt guilty for not being a stay-at-home mom devoted solely to her children. But I soon realized that it was crucial for me to have something that I loved and that brought me joy outside of the house. You must remember that you are more than a parent, more than someone always needed by others. You are your own person with unique interests and talents, and it is vital to nurture those aspects of yourself.

There will never be a perfect time to pursue something you love. But if you never take the chance, you will never know what you are capable of becoming. If you had told me thirty years ago that I would be where I am today, I would never have believed you. When I first came to the United States, everything was a challenge, from adapting to a new culture to learning English. Then I had children, and life became ten times harder.

It truly is never too late to pursue your passion, no matter where you are in life. In the end this is the lesson I passed on to my children and now I have the privilege of watching their young adult selves making and re-making their own lives in the world. And I know that if they stumble or become lost down the road, they will find new purpose and start again.

When you get to a crossroads you will find that beneath all the challenges, you are still you, and there is still so much of your life left to discover. My advice is to make that first step, no matter how small, and see where it takes you.

For a moment, I wondered if I was far more deliriously jet-lagged than I realized. I was busy corralling my two children and one teenager through a bustling market on the border between China and Tibet when a vision crossed my path that seemed to pause the Earth on its axis. Even my youngest stopped to point at the woman dressed in bright red, with a startled-looking goose balanced precariously on her head. We watched in a daze as she strode up the winding path between the storefronts, crossing nonchalantly in front of dark doorways and ignoring the people who, like us, had stopped to stare.

At the time, I was there with my then-husband for a primatology and conservation expedition. We decided to turn our work trip into a hybrid family adventure, which meant I was left alone juggling snacks, water bottles, sunscreen, and the rapid-fire complaints of my 6- and 10-year-olds, while my teenage stepson did his best to keep us all together. Despite the chaos, it was a wonderful trip, filled with new experiences that forever changed the way my children saw the world.

Still fresh into photography, I carried my film canisters and an old Yashica twin-lens camera I had purchased in a street market for the trip. Until then, I had mostly used it to capture family moments that would eventually line the walls of the stairs leading from our basement to the main entrance, an endless collage of our lives. But in that moment, peering through the waist-level viewfinder of a camera that was still new to me, watching as the woman and her avian sidekick appeared upside down and ghostlike on the ground glass, I knew I had to act quickly.

I stood and moved toward her, kids in tow, hoping with everything I had that she would be open to a stranger taking her portrait. We shared no common language, and she was clearly in a hurry, so I could not ask her to stop or pose. Instead, I launched into a familiar game of charades, smiling and gesturing with my camera as I tried to make my case. The great bird on her head flapped its wings impatiently, shifting to keep its balance as she paused to listen. When she gave me a big grin of understanding, I was able to snap exactly three frames there in the open shade of a building, its dark doorway creating a natural black backdrop behind her. After three clicks, she gave me a friendly but dismissive wave, and off she went.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

Keep up with my latest work, exhibitions, and upcoming events including book signings, speaking tours, and panels.

Months later, after returning home and developing the film, I finally saw the three images. In the first, the goose is flapping its wings and the frame is blurry. In the second, she is mid-sentence, looking straight into the lens. But the third was, miraculously, beautifully exposed and perfectly in focus. It captured everything: the joy, the absurdity, and the magic of that split-second encounter. I titled it simply Lady with the Goose, like a storybook character, which was exactly how she had appeared to me and my kids.

For days afterward, I wondered about the goose. Was it customary to travel with poultry in that way? Judging by the stares of passersby, that seemed unlikely. Was it a pet then? The animal was well-fed and was clearly at ease in its reclined position on her head, accustomed to this unusual form of transportation. Finally, near the end of our trip, I spotted her again in the same market, and I was delighted to see the goose at her side. In one practiced motion, she swept her companion onto her head and disappeared around a corner.

I still have the original slides from that day and have recently released a special edition print of her that includes the original film’s edge markings, just visible along the border in a faint red.

Recently, I received some news that left me a little worried. A hammerhead known and loved by divers across The Bahamas had gone missing from her usual dive sites. I know her well, having encountered her many times over the years. Her bold personality, charging playfully through schools of fish and approaching divers like an ocean welcoming committee, earned her the name Queen from locals. I can attest that she is indeed queenly, all 15 feet of her, and other sharks tend to give her a wide, respectful berth. Her disappearance is not entirely unusual, as great hammerheads migrate between Bimini and the coastal waters of Florida. A few years ago, she vanished in a similar fashion, only to return just as local conservationists were beginning to fear the worst.

The “worst” in this case is Queen traveling beyond the waters where she is protected. Within the Bahamian archipelago, she is largely safe. The Bahamas established national protections for all sharks in 2011, building on decades of local conservation efforts. Sharks play a vital role in maintaining healthy ecosystems while supporting tourism at famous dive sites like Tiger Beach, where they can be monitored. But the ocean is vast, and an animal like Queen is not meant to stay in one place. It only takes one encounter far from home with the wrong boat, the wrong person, and her reign could come to an abrupt end.

When the body of a large great hammerhead washed ashore in Juno Beach, Florida just this past spring, there was a wave of unease among conservationists. Great hammerheads are protected in both The Bahamas and the United States, yet the shark had clearly been killed and finned. It was devastating, especially because great hammerheads are critically endangered. Then, just weeks later, another hammerhead washed up on the beach with its fins intact, but this time with a rope around its neck. A troubling pattern was beginning to emerge, one that reflects a larger story playing out across the world’s oceans.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

Keep up with my latest work, exhibitions, and upcoming events, including book signings, speaking tours, and panels.

For millennia, humans have regarded sharks with a mix of awe and reverence. In Hawaiian culture, sharks are often seen as spiritual messengers or guides. Sailors lost at sea sought safe passage with the help of Kamohoaliʻi, the shark god. Thousands of miles away in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Māori traditions similarly recognize sharks as guardians overseeing the balance of life. In modern pop culture, however, our fascination with large predators has shifted towards spectacle. Films like Jaws have spawned an entire genre built on fear of animals both mythical and real, though even the “real” animals tend to be wildly exaggerated.

Even outside the entertainment world, shark attacks make for irresistible headlines. Warming waters and growing coastal populations are bringing more people into contact with sharks, and the consequences can be tragic. But unprovoked attacks are rare, with only about 60 to 100 reported worldwide each year, resulting in roughly 5 to 10 fatalities. By comparison, humans kill an estimated 100 million sharks annually, largely for the fin trade and as bycatch. Yet somehow, when fish are scarce, some fishermen still point to sharks as the problem, ignoring the deeper issues of habitat loss and destruction, overfishing, and the consequences of runoff, pollution, and warming seas.

There seems to be a prevailing belief that sharks are villainous at worst or expendable scapegoats at best, despite their essential role in marine ecosystems and despite the fact that populations of oceanic sharks and rays have declined by more than 70% over the last 50 years. In the end, the ocean’s most dangerous predator is not a predator at all, but human irreverence for life and for the balance of nature. Fisheries that dredge the seafloor or leave miles of long line in their wake, fishermen who act without conscience or regard for the laws meant to protect marine life, these are far more devastating than anything swimming beneath the surface.

For the last 30 years I have dived in nearly every ocean with sharks, and my hard drives are filled with oceanic whitetips, hammerheads, reef, blue, and bull sharks. I have bobbed at the surface surrounded by curious silky sharks off the Galápagos and swum alongside tiger sharks in Australia. The latter was made even more surreal by the fact that it was filmed for an episode of Welcome to Earth with actor Will Smith. In all these years, not a single encounter has ever left me fearing for my life.

Contrary to the narrative perpetuated by the media, sharks are typically shy, elusive, and highly sensitive. Marine biologists struggle to tag hammerheads because the stress alone can kill them. Even when released after being caught by fishermen, intentionally or otherwise, many do not survive. The hammerheads that washed ashore in Florida this spring were suspected to have been caught illegally and removed from the water, which ultimately killed them. These may seem like small, isolated incidents, but they are symptoms of a growing disconnect and loss of respect for the natural world.

As of today, it seems Queen’s reign prevails and will hopefully continue to do so for many years to come. Local divers expect to see her again this winter, which means I can sleep through the night again, at least until December. Still, I will be thinking about her; Tiger Beach would not be the same without her dutifully greeting divers and charging fish for the thrill of it. My purpose in photographing Queen and other sharks across the world has always been to offer an alternative narrative to the fear that so often defines them.

People have lived alongside sharks for millennia because they understood how these animals behave and respected the waters they have patrolled for far longer than we have walked the Earth. If we want our oceans thriving and filled with healthy populations of fish, we must learn to do the same.

I found a new kind of happiness the first time I went looking for bears. I did not go alone, since I was practically a city girl and knew nothing about them. Instead, I went with a man who has spent his life photographing bears and other wild animals. Paul Nicklen built a successful career as a photographer not only because he loves and understands animals, but also because he knows how to survive in the wilderness and appreciate the drama and beauty of the wildest places on Earth.

For years, Paul traveled to the far north for National Geographic assignments to find bears. When we started dating and building a life together, he let me join him in places like Alaska, the Yukon, and the wet, green coast of northern British Columbia. We went to places where the roads end, into land that still belongs to the animals, and we waited. That is what looking for bears really is: waiting. We sat still in the cold and drizzle with our cameras ready, hours passing by, learning to read the land as the bears do, following the salmon streams, berry slopes, and old trails pressed into the earth by paws.

Paul, now my husband and the best wildlife photographer I know, taught me almost everything I understand about this life. He showed me how to sit silently in a landscape until it forgets you are there, how to wait for the moment when the light and the animal come together, how to approach something huge and wild with respect instead of fear, and how to leave it just as you found it. He brought me into his world and into the discipline of his craft.

Standing beside him in that country year after year, surrounded by wildlife living their own lives, has been one of my greatest joys. Although much of what I write here is a way of processing my grief over the wild places and species we are losing, thinking back on those days does not bring the familiar pain of loss that has accompanied decades of working to protect our planet. Instead, all I feel is pure happiness, the kind that leaves you smiling at old pictures when no one else is around.

And then there is the bear. When it turns its great head toward you, you feel as if you are being measured by a being much older and calmer than yourself. It studies you for a moment, determining whether you might be a threat, and then it goes back to the more important work of salmon and berries. Under that brief spell, you realize for the first time your true size, and any sense of human importance evaporates right there on the riverbank. Nature is a most honest mirror.

The first time I experienced this was at the end of a long day’s walk deep in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest, a dark, dripping dream of a place on the northern coast. Paul was there for National Geographic, photographing spirit bears, the rare white Kermode. I came as president of the International League of Conservation Photographers (ILCP) to take my own photos of the Gitga’at First Nations, who were protecting their homeland from an oil pipeline and had asked for our help. I have always loved nature, but at the time I was still just a city girl and felt completely out of place. I followed Paul in waders three sizes too big, carrying my own cameras and tripod, while he trekked through the forest as if he belonged there. He was patient and kind, but I knew even then I was secretly being tested, and he was trying to gauge if I could keep up in this world.

Our hike ended when we walked around the trunk of a huge tree and saw a large male black bear on the other side. Paul turned to check if I was scared and found me standing there in those oversized waders, crying. But my tears did not spring from fear. They streamed down my face in pure, ecstatic joy. I had never seen a bear before, and in that moment, I was sure I was looking at the most magnificent creature in the world.

Years later and I have since encountered many, many bears in the wild. Each one of those encounters was just a precious and new to me as the last. Over time I learned the power of these animals, their remarkable intelligence, and how wonderfully expressive they can be. They also have come to symbolize the start of a relationship that grew into a whole new life. So when my husband asked if I would paint one of his bears, my answer was an immediate yes.

The photograph we chose together was of a beautiful female grizzly, her gentle eyes and soft muzzle captured perfectly through Paul’s unending patience. He gave the image to me, and then I did what I have been learning to do at the easel; I took his photo of that great gray face and crowned her with flowers. It is the first work we have made together, Paul’s eye and my hands, and that is why it means so much to me. Everything I love is in it, the north, the cold, the years, the man, the waiting, and the animal. I placed the blossoms on her head as you would for a queen, a bride, or someone dearly departed, because to me she is all three: sovereign, joined to that wild land, and mortal in a world where people in distant offices decide how many of her kind will survive.

The portrait of the bear we chose is of a powerful predator, a mother, and a single, vulnerable life at the edge of where her species is protected. In Alaska’s preserves, such as Katmai National Park, bears gather along coastal rivers to feast on salmon and prepare for the harsh winters ahead. But once they leave the safety of the park, many go on to be killed by hunters or shot from helicopters in an indiscriminate, state-sanctioned cull.

The argument in defense of these killings is that reducing bear populations is the only way to help caribou recover, but it is hardly a sustainable solution. A changing climate, along with roads, mining, and oil development, poses a far greater threat to caribou. Yet those realities rarely make it into city halls or the closed-door meetings between politicians and powerful industries. Instead, it is easier to keep drilling, keep expanding, and keep shifting the blame onto the bear, an animal that has lived in balance with North America’s ecosystems for millennia.

I named her Osa Mayor, the Great Bear. It is the name of the constellation that has guided travelers home for as long as people have looked to the night sky, afraid of the dark. I want this bear to be more than the animal who can be hunted, starved of salmon, or pushed from her last mountain. Like the stars above, I want her to become the bear made permanent, lifted out of reach and placed within the cosmos. I know I cannot follow her into her mountain forest and protect her, but on the canvas I can at least show that she was here, that she was truly magnificent, and that she was born to be crowned.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

Keep up with my latest work, exhibitions, and upcoming events including book signings, speaking tours, and panels.

Polvo y Pétalos grew from contemplating the many ways the world and its systems of power have sought to define, control, and erase the value of women. Growing up in Mexico, the expectation was that I would find a husband, have children, and that this would be the most meaningful thing I could do with my life. Thankfully, my mother, a highly educated psychologist, believed in the value of education and the freedom to pursue our passions regardless of gender. When I decided that I wanted to study the marine sciences, my father declared it a waste of time, but my mother became my champion. She convinced him to let me go and it is thanks to her that I was given the freedom to imagine a different future for myself.

However, not all women are fortunate enough to have someone advocating for their future. Many of the women I have met over the years had absolutely no choice in becoming wives and mothers from far too young an age, with little or no access to education or any opportunities beyond the home. Their lives have unfolded within systems not built for them, with centuries of displacement, restrictions, and colonial structures of power continuing to constrain the realities they navigate.

Yet when I photograph women in these remote corners of the world, I find them proudly wearing traditional clothing, laughing, holding one another and their children, singing, and smiling. When my own children were young, I sometimes brought them with me, and we were always welcomed with open arms into what felt like a secret club: a universal sisterhood built on women caring for one another, even in the face of extraordinary hardship.

Polvo, dust, and pétalos, petals, may seem delicate and easily swept away, yet both are part of the cycles that sustain life on this planet. The flowers in this piece were made from my own legal records, immigration documents, my marriage certificate, and divorce papers: remnants of bureaucratic systems with the power to grant or deny women authority over their own lives. They are, in a Mexican-inspired tradition, floral offerings to the women whose stories and voices persist despite generations of erasure and marginalization.

Stories we may never fully know, but from which the future grows.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

Keep up with my latest work, exhibitions, and upcoming events including book signings, speaking tours, and panels.

Today science is finally catching up with what such people have always known. Studies have shown that the most intact places left on this Earth are, overwhelmingly, the places Indigenous peoples have called home since before our maps existed. Their lands shelter the great majority of what remains of our planet’s wild nature.

And yet, these same communities are among the most impacted by climate change and conflict. From rising seas to worsening droughts, the consequences arrive first and hardest in places that have contributed least to the crisis. Despite this, Indigenous peoples rarely see a meaningful share of climate funding or support. The imbalance is as stark as it is unjust.

This article was originally published in my newsletter.
Subscribe below for my latest work, upcoming exhibitions, and book signings.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

As an artist and conservationist who regularly works within Indigenous lands, respect is as essential to my practice as my camera or easel. Indigenous peoples’ rights to their lands, cultures, and self-governance deserve to be honored because they are human rights, the same as anyone’s, anywhere. This should not be a radical position. It’s basic human decency, with or without any benefit to the rest of us.

It is also true, with undeniable evidence, that recognizing Indigenous rights and governance is the most effective conservation strategy we have. The lands least penetrated by roads, industrial agriculture, and urban sprawl are, not coincidentally, the lands under Indigenous stewardship. That is not an accident of geography. It is a consequence of centuries worth of knowledge passed down from one generation to the next.

Yet even in formally protected areas, Indigenous presence is often only tolerated. Some communities are consulted. Others manage their ancestral lands in defiance of eviction threats and even violence. The spectrum from genuine collaborative governance to de facto dispossession is a clear indicator that while progress has been made in some places, it is far from enough.

Then there is also a word that makes many governments uncomfortable: reparations. This refers to returning land titles, funding efforts to revive Indigenous languages, and ending systems that still treat Indigenous lands as resources to be taken. It also means correcting the profound imbalance in climate finance, ensuring that Indigenous communities have direct access to the resources needed to adapt, lead, and continue their stewardship.

For thirty years, I have watched, listened, and learned from people who understand these lands better than anyone. It does not matter whether I am working through a lens, speaking at a climate conference, or creating art at my easel. These faces, these stories, and the people who have lived them, who are still living them, deserve respect, along with the authority and support to govern their own lands, waters, and ecosystems as they have for millennia.

I carry them with me into every sphere I enter. I think of them when I write letters to politicians advocating for stronger protections for our planet. I think of them when I work alongside scientists planting coral, and when I stand on a stage in front of strangers. I think of them when I shred the documents of my own life and layer them over familiar hands and faces: a mingling of stories, a coalescence of the human spirit, freed from the paperwork and systems of power built to erase, control, and claim.

Protecting the Earth begins with protecting the sovereignty, health, and wisdom of those who have cared for it across generations.

I grew up in a place where flowers marked every season. They were the weather, the calendar, and even the language of both streets and gardens. Cuernavaca is the city they call the “eternal spring,” where I did not own a sweater until I was a grown woman because I had never once needed one. The bougainvillea came over the garden walls in sheets of magenta and paper red. The jacarandas dropped their purple across the avenues every spring until the pavement looked bruised with sweetness. When I walked to and from school, immersed in the chatter of my friends and siblings, the air, always, smelled of something in bloom.

My mother had a saying about the valley. In Cuernavaca, a city surrounded by volcanoes, she would tell me, if you throw out an old broomstick into the yard, it would take root and bloom again. I believed her, because I had seen it come close to true. It is a place so willing to live that a dead grey stick of a thing, dropped and forgotten in the dirt, will put out a green shoot just to show you it can. I learned then that life is insistent and that beauty is not rare or precious but ordinary and everywhere: spilling, careless, free. Something that, if you are not careful, might be taken for granted and that nature, if left alone, will always fight to be alive.

But Cuernavaca taught me the deeper meanings of flowers too, and this is the part that took me a lifetime to understand. As is the case in much of Mexico, in that valley, flowers are not only the symbol of life, but they are also the language we use to speak to our dead.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

Keep up with my latest work, exhibitions, and upcoming events including book signings, speaking tours, and panels.

The city is old ground, older even than its name. Cuauhnāhuac, as the people who inhabited the valley called it, means “surrounded by trees” in the Nahuatl language. Cortés and his Spanish conquistadors struggled to pronounce the name, so they settled into the Spanish-sounding “Cuernavaca.” Dotted with ancient pyramids, colonial cathedrals and abandoned haciendas, this is the land where the Tlahuica people lived and where their descendants still walk. They worked those flowers into their lore and named that place long before Hernán Cortés came and built his heavy palace of stone in the middle of all that bloom; a conqueror’s house set down like a fist among the gardens.

Today the valley bears both the wounds of conquest and the older knowledge that survived it. And one of the ancient beliefs that survived is the way Mexican people meet death. Each year for the Day of the Dead, in cemeteries, streets, churches and private homes, we would carry marigolds by the armful, the cempasúchil with its smell of earth and rust, and we would pull the blossoms apart petal by petal and lay a road of them so the dead can find their way back to us. We covered the graves and piled the altars with floral offerings. We invited the dead to be among us and, in the language of flowers, told them they were loved and never forgotten, that they are still expected home.

It took leaving Mexico to show me what I had. I have spent a lifetime in the places where nothing blooms: months on the ice in the polar regions, where the only colors are white and the blue buried inside the ice, or the deserts in Africa, where you can travel for days and never pass a single living shoot; weeks at sea on the long crossings, the horizon empty in every direction, the world shrunk to salt and grey water and the metallic smell of the boat.

Out there I learned that you can be homesick for a scent. That after enough days at sea the first thing the land gives back to you is its fragrance, the green breath of soil and growing things that reaches across the water long before the coast comes into view. I would stand in all that emptiness and ache for the flower market in Cuernavaca, the wet riot of it, the buckets of gladiolus and carnations and lilies, and for my mother’s garden, for the ordinary sweetness of her roses’ scent in the air as I had walked through every day as a child and never once thought to notice. You do not know what flowers are until you have visited the lands where few ever bloom.

I did not realize, for the longest time, that this was the thing my hands were reaching for at the easel. Now, however, decades and oceans away from that garden, I make my work by laying flowers over the things the world is letting die. An offering of flowers over the face of an animal whose species is slowly vanishing. Over a guardian’s weathered hands or a once thriving reef gone pale as bone. Over those images I lay the documents, the certificates, the ledgers and expired papers, the cold instruments that decide who belongs and who may stay and what a life is judged to be worth. Then I add the love letters, my children’s school grades, the sweet notes I receive from the people who follow and love my work and shred them into petals.

Two logics meet on that paper. The logic of the document is the official one: it measures, sorts, and ultimately discards. But the logic of the flower is the love language I was born into. It tells us that nothing is discarded, that the dead and the ancestors are escorted and covered and kept close, that everything is owed an offering and never forgotten. When I bury an endangered animal or ecosystem under blossoms, I am not hiding the pain or the loss. I am giving it the only funeral I know how to give. The Mexican funeral. The one that insists you were precious, and you are mourned, and if there is any justice left in the dirt of this world, you will never be forgotten and you might yet bloom again.

People sometimes ask why the work is so beautiful when its subject is so full of grief, as if the two should not be allowed in the same frame. They have never buried someone they loved under marigolds. Where I come from, beauty is part of the mourning. It is what makes the grief possible to bear and live beside, or to hand to a stranger and ask them to feel it too.

So that is where the flowers come from: a country that raised me to believe that life is stubborn and beautiful and the dead are never thrown away, never truly gone. I make my work the way Cuernavaca made me. I take the broken thing, the lost thing, the thing the world has discarded, and I lay it in the dirt of the page. I cover it in flowers. And then, the way my mother promised, I wait to see what blooms.

One runs on the clock of the emergency. She knows, because the science she trained in will not let her forget, exactly how fast the reefs are bleaching, how hot the earth is scorching, how the dry seasons are lengthening, how the fires and floods are coming, and how the guardians are losing ground. She lives by campaigns, deadlines, and the relentless march of time, and she is right to. The crisis she answers is real, it is now, and it will not wait for anyone. She is what I consider the most useful part of me, and on her loudest days she stands at the maker’s shoulder and tells her there is something obscene about painting over old love letters and expired immigration papers for a month while the actual elephant, the actual river, the actual people run out of time.

I have stopped letting her win that argument, though I will never fully silence her, nor would I want to. She has her reasons, and truthfully I need them. Because the other woman, the one at the easel with paint on her hands an

d her own past dissolving into shreds of paper before her, is doing what gives me the strength to keep fighting at all. The grief over the state of the world does not fade away when a campaign ends. It accumulates the way the papers lie over one another, loss laid over loss. If I had no easel to bring it to, it would bury me, and a buried person is no use to a whale or a forest, or to anyone for that matter.

Making is how I cultivate the one thing this century is going to demand of all of us: the resilience to keep witnessing horror without turning away and without being destroyed by it. Each object I finish is a small proof that I can take something unbearable—a loss, a document of failure—and not be defeated by it. That I can hold it in my hands and make it into something with dignity and weight and beauty. I am, in the most literal way, building an emotional levee to withstand the deluge that is coming.

These days my mornings look a little different. The inbox fills with emails that sit and wait. The phone lights up and then dims again. Somewhere, a flight is boarding or a conference is starting that I should perhaps be at. But after thirty years of fighting, I choose instead to stay in my studio, because the papers that have followed me across continents are finally becoming something I can bear to look at. The light through the window pools across the canvas, and the image is about to become what it was always meant to be. I am late to things. I disappoint people I love. I have made my peace with both, trusting that what this morning made is more vital than me being on that plane.

When a painting is finished, the feeling that wells within me is closer to relief than pride, and closer still to defiance. Over the image of a life caught before it passed by, I lay the documents that tried to govern that life, the deciding and the discarding and the judging of worth. And then I cover all of it with flowers.

And yes, the whales are still dying. The women are still walking under a burning sun, burdened by heavy water jugs or loads of firewood, with a host of children and goats in tow. The forest is still burning. The worst is still ahead of me, and I have no illusion that my hands shredding and pressing can somehow stop it. But here, on this easel, on the painted ruins of my own belonging, one disappearing life has been weighed and found precious and made to stay.

That is what I do. I hold what is vanishing from this world in my hands, and I make myself strong enough to fight for it. Strong enough to bear witness, to take action, to feel compassion and empathy even through the days when numbness threatens to take over. The two women who always felt at war within me are not enemies at all. They are two sides of the same self: the maker and the fighter. The studio is where we all converge and sharpen ourselves for what is to come.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

Keep up with my latest work, exhibitions, and upcoming events including book signings, speaking tours, and panels.

People imagine this is the work, but in truth it is only the beginning. It is the gift the world hands me on its way past. Because the truth is, although a photograph is a keepsake, it is also a record of loss.

The instant I press the shutter, the scene in front of me is already leaving. The light has changed, the whale has vanished back into the depths, the old elephant is walking into a future that holds fewer and fewer of his kind. I have spent my life pointing a machine at things that are disappearing and asking them to stay, but they never do. Not the animals, not the reefs, not even the people, nor their right to the places that made them. Over thirty years working on the edges of climate change, conflict, and conservation, and I have lost more of these battles than I have won.

That is not the kind of thing one is supposed to say out loud, but it is true, and the work I make now is built on it. It is built on the grief of the fights I lost, and the harder grief of what is still coming and that I will be there to witness it and unable to stop it. The extinctions, the floods, the engineered cruelties one people visit on another. I am not making art in spite of that knowledge, I am making it so that I can survive that knowledge.

So I carry the picture home and begin again. And this time I have what the shutter never gave me: time.

This is where the photograph stops being enough for me, and where my hands take over from the lens. A clean digital image is too fast, too smooth, too easily made and endlessly copied. It can be flicked past in the time it took to capture. I do not want the thing I love to be flicked past, so I print it, then cover it with paper I have painted by hand, from the documents of my own life. Records of a divorce and a birth. Letters from a bank, a government office, a school. All the the ordinary papers that speak of love, music and friendship found and lost, and also the brutal paperwork a life accumulates, the kind that decides things about a person like who belongs to whom, who is permitted to stay, whose name goes on what, what a body or a household or a future is judged to be worth. I take that paper, the machinery of belonging and value, and I paint over it and build the disappearing world on top of it.

I did not understand, at first, why I was doing this, but over time the meaning became clear. The same paper that once measured my own belonging measures everyone else’s too. A decree decides a marriage, a ledger decides if a family is solvent or not, a diploma declares that a student has learned enough. And somewhere, in offices I will never see, that same cold species of document decides that a river may be diverted, that a person’s very existence is “illegal,” that a people may be moved, that the last corridor for migrating wildlife is worth less than what can be built across it.

When I lay the painted remains of my own divorce, my own bank statements, my own paperwork of staying and leaving across something like an elephant, or the hands of an elder on their ancestral lands, I place a vanishing world exactly where decisions are made: in offices, courtrooms, and boardrooms far removed from the people and places most impacted by them. The layering is slow, with thoughts and memories emerging only to be covered again. Once the paint dries, it cannot be undone, and that permanence is the point. The documents beneath were meant to be filed away and forgotten, but I refuse to let them disappear. I make them hold the ones they ruled against: the women and children, the ancient forests, the disappearing species, and all the lives, human and otherwise, that were deemed less valuable than the paper that decided their fate.

Subscribe to my Newsletter

Keep up with my latest work, current exhibitions, and upcoming events including book signings, speaking tours, and panels.