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The way we see the world shapes the way we treat it.

-          - David Suzuki

One of the reasons I conceived the Year of Refuge project as a personal photographic journey was because I was increasingly aware of how my own language about nature was creating a growing internal conflict. It is difficult to grow up in western culture without having a mercantile and consumer view of all things. This means that we look at all non-human things as primarily a resource whose values lie in their direct service to humans. Usually, we put a dollar figure on it as it makes it easier to quantify that value. Quantified values are easy to digest and compare and almost always imply that the right decision is the one that yields the highest dollar value. Forests are for logging; land is for development or for growing human food, and animal feed (for more human food), or for human recreation; animals are separated into those we can legally raise or kill for food or as trophies, or observe for our recreation, or have as pets; water is used for developing energy or for human consumption first; and air is measured by its quality for our use. Humans have always made decisions based on our perceived needs, and to some point in time that helped us survive. But, we have paid scant attention to how this transactional view has impacted non-human others, and ultimately to ourselves. Because this language is only between humans, we have forgotten how to listen to the animals, the plants or the planet as a whole. Now, the planet is speaking back to us in a language that we are struggling to understand.

In my younger, on the road days, I worked as a migrant laborer for a few years up and down the west coast of North America. Hitchhiking, riding the rails, and taking buses, I picked oranges, peaches and lemons in California, cucumbers and cherries in Oregon, and apples in Washington. On one of my last late-summer jobs, I was walking through an orchard along the edge of rows of Golden Delicious apple trees adjacent to the Okanogan River in Washington. Hungry, I picked one of the apples with a blush red finish to it from a low-lying branch on the sunny side of a tree. Taking a bite from the warm, moist fruit, I had a flash of insight and with a clarity unknown to me then. With every sense available to me, I understood that an apple, like everything else alive in on our planet, is made up of water, air, earth, and energy from the sun. It was like I had stuck my finger in a light socket - the apple in my hand was not something separate from me or from anything else. In fact, it would soon also become part of me. I too was made of the river, the dirt, the sun and the air surrounding me. The seed that started this apple’s life combined all of everything else around it to give it this unique life form.

Only a few months later, newly married and with changed responsibilities, I quickly forgot most of the lesson of the apple. So now, decades later, the lesson is reappearing. On a daily basis, as I look through the lens of my camera, I start to see the uniqueness of everything around me, and how everything is the same life though in a form different than my own.  I am attempting to listen and to learn a new language, one of plants, other animals, earth, water and light.

My language about the natural world is changing. Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, where I go daily and will do so until the Winter Solstice of 2022, is my both my teacher and my field of practice.