What is a human being? Who are we, and why are we here? Those are just some of the basic questions I have wrestled with my whole life.
When I first flew over the Colorado River Delta in a two-seater plane, thousands of miles from where I grew up in Canada’s far north, I had no idea what to expect. I honestly believed that looking down from 10,000 feet, it would look like these little fingers coming out of the river. When I actually set eyes on it, I saw it was five miles of sheer beauty, a landscape on a scale so vast and wide that at first I didn’t know how to photograph it.
The task before me was to find a way to make beautiful and different images of a scene that almost literally took the breath away while conveying the message of life and renewal.
When I turned nine, my parents trusted me to operate a snowmobile alone, and I ventured out on what was the beginning of a lifetime of exploration. To be cut loose at that age allowed me the opportunity to connect intimately with wild animals and their vast habitats. I slowly began to understand the weave of this great fabric of life, and it was illuminating – I fell in love.
My pilot Rodrigo and I started honing in at different altitudes, anywhere from 200 feet to 1,000 feet, and everywhere. The lower we flew, the more it felt like we were flying through this three-dimensional canvas of poetry and art. To see these patterns was to be reminded of the tree of life, a quilted mosaic of silt and sediment — veins, capillaries, and branches woven intricately together, the lungs of the Earth.
I was momentarily lost trying to figure out a way to turn these patterns of life into photographic moments that could live on people’s walls.
It is beautiful, but this is a terrible beauty. For the story of the Colorado River since the 1950s has been a story of how an overburdened river no longer reaches the sea. It is a journey that starts high in the Rocky Mountains and winds through seven US states, over 1,500 miles of alpine forests, red rock canyons and desert floodplains to northwest Mexico, where it once emptied into the Sea of Cortez.
It is a journey that starts high in the Rocky Mountains and winds through seven US states, over 1,500 miles of alpine forests, red rock canyons, and desert floodplains to northwest Mexico, where it empties into the Sea of Cortez.
The region is experiencing the worst drought in 1,200 years, but that is only part of the story. The Colorado River is also a story of how human population and heavy industry have denuded, drained, and decayed one of the natural world’s great waterways.
And yet, now, today, depending on when the drought finally ends, there is hope.
Water began flowing here once again just a few years ago, the result of an unprecedented binational restoration effort involving conservation groups, the US and Mexican governments, and Mexicali Valley communities. Those efforts have provided new hope for the future.
With gratitude,
