For more than twenty‑five years, I worked on a long‑term photographic project titled Managing Eden, an exploration of how we define wildness and how we value nature. Traveling across the country, I photographed the remarkable people, places, and programs that reveal our complex relationship with wildness and the ways we manage, conserve, interact with, and protect natural landscapes. Although I never intended the project to span decades, each new subject opened another line of inquiry, and the work gradually evolved into distinct chapters.
Through the making of this work, I came to understand that our relationship to wildness is both precarious and full of paradox. Wildlife now exists in a strange, symbiotic dependence on human intervention: when we step in, we alter what is wild; when we refrain, species may vanish entirely. Our self‑appointed stewardship has made our presence both problematic and essential—our touch threatens the very wildness we seek to preserve, yet we often have no choice but to intervene.
Throughout Managing Eden, I collaborated with individuals and organizations across the country, including the Center for Species Survival at the National Zoo, the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the National Wildlife Research Center in Fort Collins, Arizona Fish and Wildlife Services, HawkWatch International, the Birds of Prey Foundation, and the Colorado Division of Wildlife. Together, their work and stories deepen the project’s examination of how human hands shape the future of the wild.
Portfolio:
Zoology: Denver Museum of Nature and Science
Zoology: Smithsonian Collections