I’ve been missing my Midway family these days, and at the same time, wishing them luck and love as they continue to explore the poignant landscape of life and death on Midway Atoll.  

I have reluctantly passed on this Midway trip because I have been hearing the cries of winged creatures from another part of the world. At the end of this month, I’m heading to The Gulf of Mexico with author Terry Tempest Williams and Avery Resor, a young environmental studies graduate from Duke University.  While Avery examines the wounded ecology there and Terry pursues a story for Orion Magazine, I will be filming it all as part the Midway documentary project.  For me, it will be a bitter homecoming to my homeland, to the soiled shores of beaches where I built sand castles as a child. Above all, the trip will be about witnessing, about being present with a powerful source of sorrow and, hopefully, change.

Right now I’m in my Cortes Island office, a hundred miles north of Vancouver, equidistant from Midway and the Gulf.  I’m staring at a Google map on a couple of monitors, noticing how fractal the land looks as it stretches its fingers into the sea and dissolves into the blue.  The crow’s foot, as it is called, the last tendrils of the mighty Mississippi, looks so delicate. It is delicate. It seems even more so from a god’s-eye-view, a hundred miles up.  I’m staring at a living entity, previously ravaged in so many ways, fighting to stay alive. As I click my trackpad to add different layers of visual data, the strings of beaches and sandbars, usually so silver and turquoise, become electronically necklaced with yellow and red — indicators of how much oil is washing ashore.  There it is in living color: a final blow to an economy, a way of life, a crucial food supply, a essential ecosystem.  I’m virtually viewing the impending death of an entire region of the United States, a toxic shock to thousands of lifeforms that have lived and thrived here long before humans — white humans — claimed these waters as theirs to thoughtlessly pollute and plunder.  Soon, I will be in the reality of it all, in the midst of a sweltering Southern summer.

Here’s a portion of an interview I did with Terry when Chris and I visited her earlier this year. She touches on the importance of artist and the act of witnessing:

Here is the current trailer for the film:

Birds have been important spirits and messengers in Terry’s life, and are becoming more so in mine. The terns of Midway still flutter in my memory, as the cries of pelicans, deluged in the oily mother substance of plastic, draw me homeward.  So many other species are also suffering there, including an angry, confused, and despairing populace.  As I prepare for this trip and send supportive thoughts to Midway, it sharpens the meaning of this quote from Emily Dickenson:

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul”

May these journeys find new ways to nurture that feathered one.

Bill Weaver

As soon as we landed on the island, we all agreed to adhere to a strict work ethic that is summarized in these three rules:

• No plastic added.  We never add any additional plastic to any images or compositions. What you’ll see it what was there.
• No rearranging. The plastic contents of the rib cages are not rearranged in any way.
• OK to remove. We allow ourselves to occasionally remove from the frame a few objects that might obstruct the view, such as twigs, feathers, grass leaves, or pieces of plastic from the top layer.

Chris Jordan explains these rules in more detail in the following video.