Hello from me and the Industrious Mysterious Iberian Orcas
Dear Friends of the Universe,
It’s been awhile but I write to you from the Iberian Peninsula, where I have been helping to produce a documentary on orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar for the last month. Me and five sweaty dudes in a sweaty small airbnb in the town of Barbate with insane mosquitos and bellies filled to the brim with Jamon y Queso sandwiches and a bedtime of 2AM…what could go wrong? But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. I’d like to start with the beginning of summer and what I’ve been up to and some funny stories here and there.
I drove out to California during the Mormon cricket migration in early June, to continue working on my long term project in partnership with the Kashia Band of Pomo Indians. This was my fourth summer documenting what ‘Landback’ truly means for the ecosystem and cultural resilience over time. Nina Hapner and her team of amazing Indigenous divers and scientists are single handedly going to restore the kelp and abalone near Stewarts Point.
It was incredible to see all their hard work paying off over the last eight years since the tribe bought back the land. In July I started directing my first film about the Big Wall Bats Program in Yosemite with partnership with Well Good Studios and an amazing bat scientist, accomplished big wall climber, and bouldering guide book creator Shannon Joslin. I will return in October to do some surveys of Half Dome with my co-director Gaz Leah.
At the end of July I worked on a very special project about organic farmers for Mad Agriculture and the USDA. The images will be seen at a gallery at Climate week in New York at the end of this month. (If you’re in town swing by!) I flew to Minneapolis and drove out to the border of South Dakota, crying to Taylor Swift’s new album and ogling over the fog on all the lakes at 5 AM. I met up with Farmer Andrew Burness, who was a studio art major in college and was a very accomplished potter, but after his grandfather passed away no one wanted to take over his farm. He took to his grandfather's notebooks he found in the attic and learned to farm.
Now he farms 900 acres of organic soybeans, wheat, and corn, sometimes spending over 12-18 hours on his tractor. In the middle of the day he set me up a blow up mattress in his yard with an extension cord to a fan so that I could nap for a few hours while the sun was high. We had lunch together and he asked me about all my photos on my website, ALL of the assignments and ALL of the stories. I’ve never had anyone do that before. We made a little pottery as the sun went down with his fiance who is a vet technician. She told me that every week a nice little old man brings stray dead cats to the door that he thinks they can save :(.
Every year at the end of July, Lobster season begins. My family and my dads high school friends come out of the woodwork to dive in canals with our gardening gloves, tickle sticks, and nets. If we’re lucky we limit out with our six lobsters per person per day by noon. Swimming down to 20 ft over and over again for 8-10 hours for three days is like no TIRED you’ve ever felt before.
After lobster season was said and done, I flew to Barbate, Spain to work on a story about the orcas ‘Interacting’ with boats in the Strait of Gibraltar, which I’m sure you’ll have heard about. The orca memes that said “eat the rich” were everywhere last year. I originally came with the intention of just building out a more fully fleshed out photo story about the issue and we were supposed to be able to dive with the orcas under the permit of a Spanish scientist who has been dubbed by Rolling Stone Magazine as a ‘mad scientist,’….. I didn’t say it they did. But we had dinner with him that first night and I was tapped to join him on the boat. The next day the carpet was ripped from under me…
It was a beautiful day in the Strait of Gibraltar, the boat was filled with water, the Spanish marine biologist lay at the bow of the boat looking up at the sky yelling on the phone in Spanish and then handed out chocolate bars to everyone, chugged three energy drinks that he smashed and left to float around the boat on the ground. The boat was surrounded by pilot whales and bottlenose dolphins. That night we were to meet in Tarifa for an interview so I could find out a bit more about his research. He told me to meet him at this smoky dark Moorish casino. I walked in with our boat captain by my side, sweet sweet Bernardo, feeling like I was in a James Bond movie of sorts. The wallpaper was a fabulous kaleidoscope of colors and patterns. We locked eyes 20 feet from each other at the back of the casino. He was sitting next to his right hand man, and a bald woman I didn’t know, and just held up one finger at me. I made a bad joke about who was winning blackjack that didn’t hit and immediately spun around on my heels and waited outside for him. I went to grab something to eat as we hadn’t eaten in 10 hours and I texted him to let me know when he would be out of the meeting. He texted me a photo back of the sunset and said “vacation time” which meant adios bi&*$, you didn’t wait for me outside the casino so I’m not waiting for you.
Nice……
After that the production company that had originally invited me, decided to hire me on as a producer after I showed my free wheeling friendship capabilities. I made a bunch of Spanish fishermen pals who we interviewed about Orca interactions, homemade bombs, shooting at them, and the importance of them as keystone species to keep all the other fish in check. (Sardines and Tuna are king)
The ebbs and flows of these understandings over the last forty years have changed drastically as there are now only 19-40 Iberian orcas left in the Strait (up for debate depending on who you ask). Javier and Diego, two of the fisherman pals, invited us to a fish cookout at the fishermans’ port of Barbate where we spent a week hanging out in cat poop in 100 degree weather watching nets be maintained and cleaning all the seaweed off them and shooting the shit in Spanish while getting eaten by fleas.
We finally received the permit to dive with the orcas on August 17. We are hoping that by documenting them underwater marine biologists can extrapolate WHY the orcas started this ‘fads’ of ‘interacting’ with the sailboats in 2020. There have been over 700 boats damaged and a few have completely sunk, in one of the highest trafficked straits in the world. Orca fads are not new! Pods have been documented helping fishermen hunt other whales in the 1800’s where the whalers would take the blubber and the whale tongue would be gifted to the orca named Old Tom in Australia.
I hope to keep producing other environmentally focused docs in the future. We’ll have to come back in April when the tuna start to migrate again.
At the end of August, I came back to the US to meet up with my three year mentorship group at Anderson Ranch under the guidance of Ed Kashi and Jim Estrin. We spend five days hyping each other up about the horrors of freelancing and congratulating each other on our long term projects and attending the rodeo.
Then with two days to spare, Ecoflight took me out to the four corners. I had been following the story of the San Juan Generating Station's upcoming implosion in the four corners for the last year and knew I had to make some time to get down there for the explosion of the smoke stacks. I’m starting to work on a larger story about the economic impacts of the transition away from coal to solar but more importantly about the money that was promised-but not received- to the community through the New Mexico Energy Transition Act which passed in 2019 and in 2022 the plant started to be decommissioned. If you want to know more about the energy transition on the Navajo Nation, Len Necefer’s dissertation is a great place to start. You can even follow his substack here. And this is one of my favorite books on the topic: Landscapes of Power by Dana Powell.
Obviously it was a bit stressful to know what to focus on during the implosion, but for my story I want to focus on the families in the region that are having to be relocated and disbanded for work. There’s been a 700% increase in homelessness in the school district since the decommission. My colleagues focused on the drama of the implosion which was hard to not get drawn to but I’m happy with my visual decision here. Down to the last 5 minutes I was driving around in Corey Robinson’s Rivian trying to understand how to turn it off/on/park/and what the heck is with that crazy credit card key too. I still think they’re the coolest.
Drone Video by Ben Hunter//Ecoflight
I then rushed over to Eros, Louisiana for Mad Agriculture to document another incredible organic farmer named Donna Issacs. Originally from Jamaica, she came to the US with her mom when she was young, after the civil unrest started, and yes she did attend Bob Marley’s funeral. Donna was all about regenerative soil practices. Her compost game was out of hand. She uses her pigs to turn up the soil then moves the chickens onto it for fertilizer, then places her own compost mixture which she learned from a book about Korean Natural farming where she uses fish bones, guts, and few different types of powdered acids, fermented rice water and milk and mixes it all up into a magic potion for her veggies
This summer was filled with lots of travel, learning opportunities, heartbreak, and pouring myself into projects that I really believe in. Thank you all for following along in my journey. Feeling grateful and tired. I’ll be moving again for the upcoming winter and taking suggestions for happy neighbors.
Now I want to hang out with Donna and see her pigs! 🩷 as always, I don’t know how you do it all, but always welcome bug photos on your adventures.
What a wonderful way to get a glimpse of your fascinating career and life long experiences Kudos to your success and hard HARD work! You are an AMAZING WOMEN!