This site  is one of my love songs to Mother Nature, who finds herself in deep trouble at the moment. To give but one of countless examples, consider that 75% of Earth’s wildlife has vanished in the last fifty years. And to sharpen the point about our destruction of and domination over nature, currently 34% of the biomass of mammals on Earth is us humans. Another 62% is our livestock. Wild animals are a mere 4% of all the mammal biomass in the world. 2% of those mammals are on land and 2% are in the ocean as whales, dolphins, and seals.

While it’s perhaps a fools errand to psychoanalyze oneself, I’m fairly sure that the source of my passion for photography stems from the fact that I had simply terrible eyes as a child. I couldn’t see much of anything until I was six. Not even the big E on the eyechart. So, it seems that I have never taken the visual world for granted and my images are sort of an ode to the ability to see anything at all. And, to confess, it’s really the act of making photographs that is most compelling for me. The being out there and really trying to see what’s going on with form and light. I love sharing them with people like you dear reader, but the search for a decent image is the dopamine buzz. It’s the feeling that our ancestors felt on the hunt and allowed them to survive precarious circumstances so that we could be here now, a now we seem intent on screwing up for coming generations.

The other way I help is through my work with Nature & Culture International where I serve as Board Chair. With headquarters in Del Mar, CA NCI is one of the most effective conservation organizations in the world. It works to protect tropical forests and biodiversity in South America. Over the past 30 years, NCI has helped conserve over 29 million acres across the Andes and Amazon by putting local communities at the center of the work rather than treating them as bystanders. By way of perspective, all the US national parks in the lower 48 states total up to 19.5 million acres.

Many of the images you’ll see here were made in South America in the ecosystems that NCI protects: Amazon rainforest, Andean cloud forests, high-altitude páramo grassland, the deciduous dry forests west of the Andes, and the mangrove wetlands on the equatorial Pacific coast.