I grew up in the middle of Washington State’s Skagit Valley, running through cornfields and mustard rows, picking berries in the summers, and driving farm equipment at night. That early intimacy with the land taught me where food comes from and how deeply human life depends on nature’s rhythms.
Decades later—after photographing revolutions, climate disruption, and human resilience across Africa, the Middle East, and the world’s megacities—I began to understand my birthplace differently. The Skagit is not only the landscape that formed my childhood; it is a living ecological system shaped by the Coast Salish peoples, a globally important migration corridor for birds and salmon, and one of the most fertile agricultural basins in North America.
Today it stands at a crossroads: threatened by sea-level rise, saltwater intrusion, winter flooding, shifting labor forces, development pressures, and the accelerating uncertainties of climate change.
This project is a return home through a new lens—artificial intelligence. Using AI as a speculative tool, I imagine how farming in the Skagit Valley might evolve in the coming decades. These images explore futures in which technology reshapes not only how we cultivate food, but how we define community, heritage, and belonging. They exist between memory and imagination, documentary instinct and dream logic, reflecting a world where the pastoral is increasingly interwoven with the synthetic.
After years of working in places marked by upheaval, this series is also a meditation on continuity: how a rural valley in the American Pacific Northwest might transform, and what remains when landscapes evolve faster than the stories we tell about them. As a father, I think often about the world my daughter will inherit—the fields, coastlines, and food systems that may look radically different from those of my childhood.
These images were generated using AI and have not been edited in any way post-generation. They are not predictions, but provocations—visions of a possible future that ask us to consider how our choices today will shape the land tomorrow.
