1 August 2020

Dearest Fazal,

Well, little Issa is back home from the vet, and she is going to be fine. After all the tests, her oxygen levels, her heart rate, the blood work, the X-ray on her left paw, and then shaving her arm to see if they could see any puncture sites—the verdict not certain, but likely, is that she was bitten by a spider—a black widow. The vet found toxins in her bloodstream. Her fever was high, 105 degrees, and she went limp like a tiny rag doll. We felt so helpless. All we could do was hold her close. She is recovering with Basho by her side.

It’s so hard when animals are hurting and they can’t tell you what’s wrong. They are stoic in their pain. Whether it is a cat or a mountain lion, a koala bear or a kangaroo, or the sloths and capybaras in the Amazonian rainforest, they suffer. When I think about the three billion animals that perished in the Australian fires this year, it shatters my senses. How do we even begin to fathom the scope and scale of the wildlife losses from fires and drought and the destruction of habitat.

This is a time of deep suffering, not just for our species, but all species.

I ponder this photograph, Mauro Ferreira das Neves, migrant ­laborer, burning and clearing the land on the farms around Grande Sertão Veredas National Park, Brazil, 2001. This is a tough one, Fazal.

You could not have known what was coming to the Brazilian rainforest two decades later in the fires of 2019—that 906,000 hectares (the size of New Jersey) would burn and that 2.3 million animals would die. This on top of 72 million hectares lost to deforestation since 1970 in the Brazilian Amazon, the highest rate of deforestation on Earth.

Mauro Ferreira das Neves is not to blame, nor are other migrant laborers. Politicians like President Jair Bolsonaro are to blame. Just recently he said he has “mold growing in his lungs” after contracting Covid-19 virus. Like our president he minimized the danger of the pandemic.

Last year, on November 20, 2019, it was reported by a São Paulo newspaper: “Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro shrugged off a government report that deforestation in the Amazon reached an 11-year high on his watch, saying Wednesday he expects the destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest to continue. ‘Deforestation and fires will never end,’ the pro-­development president told reporters in Brasilia. ‘It’s cultural.’  ”

In response, Marcio Astrini, public policy coordinator at Greenpeace Brazil, said, “About 90 per cent of the destruction of the forest occurs illegally, therefore, the only cultural aspect of deforestation in the Amazon is the culture of forest crime, which the government does not seem to want to confront.”

Here are the facts: 9,166 kilometers (3,539 square miles) were cleared in 2019, the highest number in at least five years, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. In 2018, the deforested area was 4,946 square kilometers. The sharp increase overlapped the first year in office of President Jair Bolsonaro, a climate change skeptic who has eased restrictions on exploiting the Amazon’s rich natural ­resources from wood to gold.

This is not so different from actions taken by Donald Trump who views protecting the environment as bad for business. Over 100 environmental regulations have been reversed from Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon emissions governing power plants and automobiles to a softening of regulations that ensured clean air and water including the monitoring of toxic chemicals to safeguarding the health of endangered species and migratory birds.

Fossil fuel development on public lands from our national forests to national parks and monuments like Bears Ears and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (as you well know) is viewed by this administration as a patriotic act of oil independence. While environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act must be curtailed, relaxed and rewritten to protect the “American Way of Life.”

And in the case of NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, this law requires federal agencies to understand the environmental impacts of their actions should a particular area be opened to logging or fracking or commercial development. It also invites the public to comment and be part of the decision-making process by providing alternatives to the prescribed actions. Two weeks ago, July 15 to be exact, the Trump administration gutted NEPA—a gift to corporations and polluters—while closing citizen participation to the American public.

As I mentioned to you the other day, we had Mary and O.B. over for drinks on the patio.

Mary O’Brien has spent thirty years working on NEPA and providing viable alternatives for grazing initiatives, rare and threatened plants, and the dangers of certain toxins. She was concise and precise in her reaction to NEPA being dismantled. “NEPA is democracy.” Full stop. She looked at me and then said, “We’re fucked.” Her alternative now: “We need to proceed as though NEPA is in place.”

So when I look at this image of Mauro sitting on barren soil cleared for the farming of soy beans, I see a systemic breakdown of health—the health of our democracies, the health of our communities and sustainable economies, and the health of the planet. His gestalt speaks for the state of the crisis we are in—hunkered down in his fatigue with resignation etched on his face, weathered and worn from working in the elements. His body is bent and compacted below the horizon, a horizon that normally would be hidden by the immense canopy of trees, now gone—a flat line like death when a body no longer registers a pulse.

I feel a penetrating silence in this photograph like smoke where no birdsong is heard.

Where does one situate hope, Fazal? For me, it is what Mauro has placed to his side. Is it his shovel, or a hoe, or a rake? Let it be both symbol and tool. In the twenty years since you printed this picture, we have many tools through the sciences and public health that are helping us to understand globally that economic issues are social issues are issues of environmental justice that all have an impact on biodiversity. The intersectionality between racial inequality and the destruction of land in the midst of the ecological and climate crisis and now, this pandemic, are all interrelated and interconnected. Our health and the health of the planet are inextricably bound.

How to find the balance? How to find the will?

I was heartened to see that within Grande Sertão Veredas National Park there are strong international initiatives and local programs in place to support sustainable agriculture in adjacent communities, alongside eco-tourism and environmental protection. A new consciousness is emerging that recognizes how a strong economy and a strong environment are complimentary not competitive. Collaborative ventures and unlikely partnerships are seeding new alliances that support one another, instead of the old ways that engaged combative warfare in the form of violence on the ground like the large-scale clear-cuts that paved the way for the timber wars of the 1990s in the Pacific Northwest. Earth First! tactics, acts of civil disobedience, and eco-warriors like Julia Butterfly who lived in a 180-foot tall, 1500-year-old California redwood for 738 days from December 10, 1997 to December 18, 1999 are emblematic of that moment. The same moment when the clearcutting of the Amazonian forests in Brazil was intensifying.

I wonder what acts of resistance we will see in the future.

We are in trouble, Fazal, and I keep thinking of John Lewis’s phrase, “good trouble.”

How do we make “good trouble” in the collaborations you and I have made vows to complete?

Although I have always seen your work as fine art, I have also known that, at its root, it is inherently political. You care. But I didn’t realize how political and complex your portraits really are until spending this kind of time and reflection with each one of your “30 Moons” that you sent me as an homage to your thirty years as an artist devoting your focus and time to places of conflict.

With each photograph, Fazal, I see the trust you have created through the power of your relationships. I have witnessed first-hand how you engage with the people in each community where you choose to commit yourself—communities largely comprised of people on the margins, people of color who have suffered the losses of land, livelihood, and the deaths of family members as a result of war, racism, and the physical consequences of environmental injustices like uranium mining and contaminated water. I have seen how you listen. I know how you have listened to me as I spoke of my own family’s history of cancer from the nuclear tests in Nevada. You are my comfort and confidant. I have seen the toll it takes to do your work at the level of perfection you demand of yourself. The physical and emotional costs are real, though you rarely speak of them. When you were asked to travel to Ohio cold without knowing anyone to take portraits of those affected by the heinous actions of America’s immigration policies it was not easy. But you found a way in through a shared empathy.

I have seen you take what is unacceptable, vile, and beyond inhuman and transform it into a formal representation of art that becomes a physical experience that soothes the heart, even as it breaks. You continue to show me beauty is a form of survival.

I see you, dear Fazal, as an empath. I see you as one who misses little from the smallest detail to the largest concept. I know you as a terrifying observer with a bright wicked humor. You often sign your letters “with love and laughter,” and I find both whenever we are together.

You are among the most fierce and relentless defenders of justice I have known. And your stubbornness is a self-­constructed wall. I never stand a chance of sway or influence when your mind is made up, even when it puts you at risk. Your direction is the arrow toward action. And yet and yet, I am also in awe of your vulnerability. Not only do you care, you hurt, and even as you advocate and fight for those who are invisible to most, you are one step away from collapse.

Our bodies do not lie. Your back. My brain. They keep our physical and psychic balance in check.

Tonight, the moon-close-to-full is again shining above Round Mountain as I write to you. Saturn appears like a jewel overhead. Soon, Jupiter will be visible creating a triage between them.

I have taken to night-walking. Here in the outback of Castle Valley it is becoming increasingly surreal. Here in the timelessness of the desert, these sweltering days of heat rob all things alive of energy. It is a sustained entropy that cracks and shatters the surfaces of leaves and the carapaces of beetles, the scales of snakes. It steals color and song from birds. Only the spines of prickly pear have a heightened caliber of affect. The valley is blurred with smoke without origin and the air is heavy and stale.

Last night, I kept walking toward the moon, hoping to absorb her light, my mother’s face illumined, but instead I was absorbed into the dreamlike trance of darkness that only inertia can inspire. The darkness within me was being met by the darkness outside of me—and yet as I kept walking I found I was surrounded by the eye shine of jackrabbits and deer and in the hidden secrecy of night walking I found a new form of communion.

In daylight, a black-tailed jackrabbit (the Diné call them “Grandfather”) runs zig-zag between the chamisa and sage passing through the barbed-wire fence like a magician. Ravens gather in the morning light, flying west toward the rock formation Priest and Nuns, as mourning doves emerge cooing from cracks and creases in the cliffs. Coyote stares, then moves on his way. And bluebirds appear as a matter of ceremony. This is what I miss in returning to Mauro Ferreira das Neves’s landscape. It has been stripped of its stories, not only of the understory and overstory of the great Amazon rainforest and Cerrado, known as savannas, that blanket Grande Sertão Veredas National Park, but it has been stripped of its wildlife. They are gone, displaced, refugees left to die or find another home great distances away.

I fear, my dear Fazal, if I am honest and let down my protective shield riddled with bullet holes, that where Mauro sits at the site rendered dead by his own hands, that this may be our fate as well.

There are no more horizons to walk toward.

We are home.

Brooke and I send abrazos to you and Alex,
Terry