2008-2009, The Commons, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas

Installation view of Spooner Hall apse. This installation was made possible by a generous gift to the Hall Center for the Humanities from Elizabeth Schultz, KU Professor of English emerita.

In On Photography (1977), Susan Sontag noted, "Nature in America has always been suspect, on the defensive, cannibalized by progress. In America, every specimen becomes a relic." As our perceptions of nature are increasingly mediated by economics, mass media and consumer culture, our encounters with the natural world are more and more removed from direct experience.

Market-driven economic land management policies encourage sprawl, habitat fragmentation and unregulated commercial development of natural resources undermining the healthy and sustainable ecosystems that support all life, including our own. Paradoxically, we are nostalgic for nature—a nostalgia that can be marketed to—while the real thing is being consumed to exhaustion.

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