Category: Eulogy
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STILL KEEPING HOPE ALIVE
I had already made up my mind before I ventured to the steps of the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison. I was going to vote for Jesse. No doubt about it. But I still wanted to hear him in person — to feel the cadence of his stump speech roll across the crowd — and to lift my camera and capture who I had hoped would be the next President of the United States. It was early April 1988, a day before the Wisconsin Democratic primary. Jesse stood at the podium…
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FAREWELL PAPA
As the sun sets here in Halls Head on Easter Monday, we say farewell to Pope Francis. Much will be said about Pope Francis and I admired him greatly. But for me I admired him mostly for his stance on the environment, which came to light in 2015 when he published his ‘Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home’. He professed that the environment is a shared inheritance and its protection is a duty owed not only to the planet but to each other—especially the poor and future generations. I…
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UNDER THE MATAPALO TREE
I was homeless in Costa Rica for a spell in the summer of 1983. But a mate had heard of a gringo who had just moved to San Jose and might be looking for a roommate. So I called the guy and we decided to meet up at Key Largo, the local watering hole for ex-pats. I found Ladd sitting at the bar nursing a Pilsen. Easy to find … I just followed the gaze of the women in the bar. Ladd was a tall slender Texan, moustachioed with sandy blonde…
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A VOTE FOR COMPASSION
In November 1976 I got my first chance to vote in a US presidential election. I was a newly minted 18-year-old and eager to help shape the course of the nation. I voted for Jimmy Carter. And I’ve never regretted how I cast my first vote. Historians rate President Carter as being in the ‘middle-of-the-pack’ in terms of the effectiveness of his single term and perhaps a bit lower in leadership and his ability to control Congress. It was a challenging time with plenty of international and domestic crises to handle.…
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THE EPIPHANY. THE MENTOR. THE INSPIRER.
In February of 1986, I was lying in a hammock somewhere on the Caribbean coast of Honduras and I was deep in thought. A Honduran environmental organisation was paying me to photograph the national parks and document some environmental issues. I kept swaying in the hammock during the heat of the day awaiting better light toward late afternoon … swaying and thinking. I wasn’t happy. I realised then and there that I really didn’t know diddly squat about photography. I had been masquerading for the past five years as a nature/environmental…
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VALE MARIO
With great sadness I learned today of the passing of my friend, mentor, former boss and co-founder of the modern Costa Rican National Park Service. Mario Boza passed away yesterday at the age of 79. He had been suffering from mouth cancer since late April. His death comes as a shock as only a few weeks ago he wrote to me and suggested that he was on the path, albeit a very slow path, to recovery. Cancer rarely presents a straightforward path to recovery and in Mario’s case it took a…
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VALE TIM
Today, former deputy prime minister of Australia, Tim Fischer, passed away after a 10-year battle with leukemia. He was a rare breed of politician who just doesn’t seem to exist these days. After he left politics, Tim pursued personal interests and fortunately for the organisation I work for, the Crop Trust, one of those passions was fighting to ensure food security in times of a changing climate. He became a very inspirational chair of our executive board and devoted whatever energy he could spare to work with us, despite his struggle…
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MY FATHER ON FATHER’S DAY
I barely knew my father, but the fragments I held—eccentric brilliance, deep-sea dreams, fleeting moments in Alaska—still shape how I think about fatherhood. He lived wildly and inconsistently, burning bridges and chasing ideas. In the end, I was just a lightbulb in a long line of missed connections.
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VALE WOLFGANG
I thought I knew a thing or two about photography, love and life … until I met Wolfgang Hoffmann. He became my mentor and taught me pretty much everything I know about photography and a fair bit about life and love as well. Wolfgang passed away yesterday from congestive heart failure. I met Wolfgang almost 30 years ago to the day in the summer of 1986. I was a new grad student in the Department of Agricultural Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and ventured down to the dungeons of the…
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