Colleen Mullins
lived in the Minnesota cold for 22 years — her tires got stuck in the
snow, as the locals like to say. To escape the harsh weather in 2006,
she visited New Orleans for a warm birthday treat. It was a year after
Hurricane Katrina, and she wasn’t even planning to take her camera, as
she had seen enough disaster porn… Once there, the scale and scope of the city’s damage overwhelmed her. At one point, Ms.
Mullins couldn’t take it any longer and broke down weeping. One weekend,
she stumbled across a Times-Picayune interview with an urban forester,
who described the massive destruction of the city’s tree canopy and the
trail of broken tree limbs the storm left in its wake, sometimes made
worse by poststorm reconstruction. She was fascinated by one tree he
mentioned, featuring a huge canopy with a V cut out of the center. “I want to see this tree,” she thought. “Tell me where there’s a tree like that.”
She tracked it down.
The sight of it was enough to persuade Ms. Mullins to return three weeks
later with the idea for a project she felt compelled to do: to
understand how Katrina changed the ecosystem, and how some organizations
are trying to ameliorate the situation by planting a new generation of
trees to replace what the storm destroyed.
Landscapes, After Katrina (via Lens)