Our family gathered at the Chassahowitzka River over Thanksgiving weekend in 2021, with gratitude for having survived the Covid pandemic. We celebrated the arrival of a new baby among us and relished the uptempo beat of our shared dance of life: moving from lamentation to hope once again. I felt in the words of poet Maggie Smith from her poem Lacrimae ... tears, blue always for water running through and under everything. 

Carrying these complex emotions with my Hasselblad 907X 50C  onto the river, I knew that the camera lens would point both ways.  I made poetic images to bear witness to loss by showing the ecological pain beneath the still beautiful Chassahowitzka River Wildlife Refuge. Nourished by a spring fed, fresh water river, this refuge just north of us, was lush and bursting with  richly varied plant, bird and fish life  sustained by healthy hardwood forest and tidal marsh when  we first came to know it. For decades, our family has watched in wonder as manatee winter in the warm sheltered fresh water of the spring fed basin.

Now, the vegetation on which they feed is dying, both from saltwater intrusion and large algae blooms. Rising sea levels, increasingly powerful storms. and diversion of fresh water to feed rapid development inland, is laying waste to the Chassahowitzka.  Ghost trees and topless palms dot the landscape increasingly flattening into a monoculture marsh. We must bear witness to the transformation, and know that we cannot heal ourselves if the environment that sustains us dies.