Welcome to my website! The photos on display in the purchase photos sub-menus (Dick’s Faves, Naturally Nature, The Aviary, Wild Lives, and Wilderness Landscapes) are from my various travels, including those years that I canoed solo in the wilds of the north, from the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Canada, to the far arctic of Alaska.

Those trips, from 1998-2011, are precious to me, because even then I could see that a warming climate was changing the very environs that surrounded me. On my first visits to the Boundary Waters, fierce storms were frequent, and my paddling took me by thousands of acres of trees lying like toothpicks on the forest floor, a result of the a now legendary “hundred-year storm” of the previous season.

During my Alaskan expeditions, I encountered arctic temperatures upwards of 80° in mid-September. When asked about the effect of this changing climate, an Inupiat villager showed me how the Kobuk riverbank had eroded, significantly altering its course in his lifetime. He also spoke of longer growing seasons disrupting the traditional economy. Visiting the Wrangell St. Elias area to the southeast, I saw the rapidly melting Kennicott Glacier, a shadow of its former self. I dared not venture out unto the tundra, lest my footprints further damage the thawing permafrost. Traveling Alaska’s Taylor Highway, I drove by miles and miles of charred forests, a result of the 2004 Taylor Complex Fire.

But threats to the environment are not only due to a warming climate. Mining pollution menaces entire wilderness areas—such as the Boundary Waters and the fisheries of Alaska’s Bristol Bay. Proposed oil and gas drilling—with their accompanying roads, pipelines, and other infrastructure development—in the Gates of the Arctic National Park and other vulnerable preserves—puts these wild areas at risk of pollution and despoliation. Large-scale lumbering, carving roads deep into the pristine forest, endangers Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the northernmost rain forest in the world. Overfishing contributes to the yearly salmon decline in the Kenai Peninsula. Runoff pollution in the Chesapeake Bay undermines the livelihoods of Eastern Shore watermen. Roads are being proposed that would cut through entire wilderness landscapes, changing forever the character and ecology of remote reserves such as Brazil’s Pantanal, a World Conservation Heritage site.

These threats to our wilderness are only magnified today. In the United States alone, new permissions are being granted for mining, logging in old growth forests, and oil and gas production. Proposals for the sale of our public lands are in the works.