I’m not a very good nature tour guide. For one thing, I don’t know much about nature. For another, I walk very quickly; I have to keep reminding myself to slow down. Despite my shortcomings; however, two days before Halloween 2019, I take my English Composition class on a walk to a nearby greenspace, a short walk from our community college campus in Queens. Greenspace. It’s such a recent compound that Word autocorrects it into two.
Memories are translations. We gather much and miss more. I originally compiled this archive in spring of 2022 for a final project in a course on environmental histories and values. I did it mostly for myself. I wanted to attend to what I had picked up throughout the pandemic — people, places, poems, photographs. These fragments are re-memories of ecosystems and relational nests.
Today’s itinerary: visit Earth Room, where a layer of soil, two feet thick, has occupied a gallery in SoHo since 1977.
This is the first ever photo-essay shot on sand mining in Koilwar, Bhojpur district Bihar. The sand mining nexus in Bihar is intricate and involves influential people at distinct authoritative positions in the government, administrative circles and mafia. As a result, photos of sand mining are highly inaccessible. Though several stories have been published on the issue, photojournalists have often […]
When we moved back to Michigan, we bought an old farmhouse on five acres. I was still married then, with three young daughters and soon two more. After we had settled in, I planted an apple orchard. The farmhouse was a white Greek Revival with four bedrooms and an old lilac out front. It stood on a barely perceptible rise […]