I’ve printed images I took in Antarctica and Greenland on diaphanous vails that gently sway as visitors walk around them. Echoing sad memories of glaciers calving and melting into the ocean, seventeen of the vails fall one by one, leaving one suspended above an undulating sea of blue. This installation is 17ft x15ft x 15ft. Following this installation, I made prints expressing the abuse and neglect impacting the polar regions.

My first connections to the natural world were crickets singing me to sleep on warm summer nights and lilacs sweetening the air. As an adult, I saw manatees in the mangroves of Florida, and in Nome, Alaska, I sat on a black beach and felt the cold spray from the dark Bering Sea. Yet it was an epiphany in Yosemite that firmly cemented my love of our planet. Alone by my campfire at the base of Half Dome, thinking about a majestic glacier sculpting it from an immovable mountain, I found comfort in my insignificance and peace in my connection to our slowly changing planet. My small footprint and minor foibles didn’t even measure a millisecond.

I knew everything was fine.

Later, In Antarctica and Greenland, I was overwhelmed by the scale of unending whiteness and ancient layers of vibrant greens and blues. It was intimidating and dangerous, but it was also the most sublime piece of Earth I had ever seen.

By then, I knew everything wasn’t fine.

First, there is a swell, then only a whisper as the ice floats away, disappearing into the warming sea. The krill will die, the penguins and the leopard seals. The humpback whales will become extinct.

I know. I’m awake now.

The glaciers are weeping. Their tears fill the oceans.

My footprint is small and brief, but not without consequence. Greenland and Antarctica, with your glaciers of greens and blues, your vast whiteness—I love you, don’t leave me.