I began this series in 2021, with the intention of documenting the enduring impacts of 2018’s Hurricane Michael. This storm remains the most powerful to make landfall in the U.S. since 1969 and the most destructive hurricane to strike the region on record. Michael razed entire communities and felled 72 million tons of standing timber. When roads were made passable, one could drive for miles through rural areas of North Florida bordered on either side by twisted and snapped trees. Loaded onto trucks, this quantity is said to have been enough to encircle the planet 1.5 times. 

 

Unlike coastal towns with tourism-based economies and the larger tax bases these afford, the North Florida communities documented have had a much more difficult time securing resources to rebuild. This led to a form of rural blight, with homes and businesses abandoned for much longer than elsewhere. Amplifying the hardships, unable to contend with the volume of felled trees, decaying ground litter became a breeding ground for both insects and wildfires. Pine and bark beetle infestations weaken vulnerable forests, and a warming atmosphere draws moisture out of dead fuel at an exponentially higher rate than seen in the past. These allow fires to start, spread, and burn much more intensely. In March 2022, the Guardian reported there were 150 separate fires burning simultaneously throughout the region. This is a part of the enduring legacy of Michael, three and a half years after the storm struck the region. 

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I began this work viewing Hurricane Michael as the catalyst for a cascade of interconnected tragedies. This has begun to change. A consequence of the slow pace of removal and rebuilding has been the opportunity to see the natural world's own efforts at reclamation. Broken walls being overtaken by vines, green saplings breaking ground in fire-blackened fields, a child's personal effects crumbling into dust in the afternoon sun - quiet reflection on these and other observed phenomena has provoked a profound shift in how I think about this project and more importantly how I think about our place in the world. 

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Hurricane Michael was born of a warming ocean, and a warming atmosphere renders all things more incendiary. Our complicity in these planetary changes is so well understood, that to see hurricanes and other climate tragedies as anything less than matched violence is at this point disingenuous. We coevolved with the life on our planet, yet instead of aligning our efforts with our host, under the weight of persistent assaults, countless ecosystems are degrading and species are disappearing, including, perhaps, eventually our own. Even the knowledge that our planet has weathered cataclysmic events in its past, events that have rendered all complex life on the planet to ash and mineral, has not checked our destructive behaviors. 

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I have little hope for us, but I have absolute faith in our planet's capacity for renewal. This work has become a way to keep an open heart amid escalating environmental breakdown. I retain authentic love for this place and for the living world and can find comfort in watching this natural world, in all its sensuous beauty, repossess our land, pull down our walls, and reclaim all that we've proven to be insufficient stewards of.