[.article__paragraph--cap][.small-caps]In 2018, I learned that bald eagles[.small-caps] were in trouble. They had been rescued from the brink of extinction years before, after bans on the pesticide DDT went into effect. But the growth of their population was threatened again, this time due to lead poisoning. Observers had witnessed bald eagles acting erratically, succumbing to a strange, drunken lethargy, sometimes falling from the air and slamming into vehicles. It turns out that hunters were unknowingly harming the eagle population by leaving lead fragments from their ammunition in the gut piles left behind when field dressing a deer, which the eagles later ingested while scavenging the remains.[.article__paragraph--cap]

That winter, I discovered a group of intrepid bird surgeons doing triage work a few minutes from my apartment in Iowa City. If a motorist were to see an injured bald eagle on the side of the road, or if someone managed to capture a confused bird ambling aimlessly through a field, they could pack the eagle into a cardboard box, call a number, and within minutes deliver it to a small warehouse building lined with cages and stocked with surgical supplies. I asked an organizer for the outfit, called the RARE Group, to contact me when they received a call, so I could drop what I was doing and photograph them at work.

The first call I received, after an eagle had been hit by a truck, led to a short series of photos that illustrates how multidimensional nature photography can be. Here was no bare, unspoiled nature, but a group of skillful humans in a steel building applying medicine to an animal that both belongs to wild nature and happens to be a meaning-rich symbol of a complex human society – the nation’s bird.

[photo here: Eagles_189]

The eagle is but one such symbol. From the beginning, American’s identity has been wrapped up in our relationship with nature. And despite our supposed modern disconnect from the natural world, as a photojournalist I still see people united by their deep connection to nature wherever I turn. In August of 2017, I photographed a group of pagans, druids, Wiccans, and other free spirits as they gathered at a nature preserve in rural Missouri to witness a total solar eclipse that was going to be visible over a swath of the United States.

After a clear morning and afternoon, I overheard a girl ask her mother why a bank of low, wispy clouds was just now beginning to obscure the sun, only minutes before totality. The response was memorable: “Sometimes the darkness wins,” she said.

The clouds were just thin enough to tempt the crowd into hope. I snapped away as the faithful clapped and stomped and danced and chanted and drummed in unison. They began to grow hoarse, sweating through their clothes, as if willing the clouds to part. And with only moments to spare until totality ended, they did. We all removed our eclipse-proof sunglasses. For a few minutes, we looked directly at the eclipsed sun together.

[Photo here: OakSpirit_528]

Many of the faithful would have described their euphoric experience that day as spiritual, completely inaccessible to science. Others might have argued that for the experience to be real, it has to be natural, of this world. It can’t just be magic. Still, our interactions with nature, be they with raptors or heavenly bodies, are always mediated through the stories, symbols, and languages that make us human. And there is something kind of magical about that.

[Photo here: BearsEars_1893]

In 2017, I visited Bears Ears National Monument for a photo assignment. Bears Ears, an expansive territory with ancestral significance for multiple tribes, was then at risk of losing its federal protected status, potentially opening it up to mining prospects and pollution. I accompanied Cynthia Wilson, an activist and member of the Navajo Nation, along with her mother and her younger sister as they picked juniper branches and cedar bark, which they use to craft traditional food and medicines.

[Photo here: BearsEars_2586]

[Photo here: BearsEars_2649]

It is possible to read this story as one that illustrates an understandable desire to return to a pristine natural world, one untainted by interference from the artifices of human culture. Romanticism, an intellectual movement originating in Western Europe in the eighteenth century, expresses an earlier generation’s desire for a more natural existence. Here’s William Wordsworth, an English Romantic poet, writing in 1798:

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

Wilson’s vision for Bears Ears certainly contains some elements of romanticism: a desire to connect with nature, a reverence for tradition. But her vision resists the temptation to see nature as a fixed, external template to which humans must conform or perish. Instead, says Wilson, Bears Ears is “a relative to be protected and taken care of.” By treating the land as a relative, Wilson presents a more nuanced, more social, more hopeful romanticism, one built on coexistence between equal subjects instead of dominance by either.

[Photo here:25-wea-tornado]

I see this hopeful romanticism when I cover natural disasters here in Iowa. People become more isolated when they are devoid of hope; some stock up on survival kits and weapons and fantasize about how they will fare in an apocalypse, because they expect to be forced to go through it on their own. But I’ve learned that rugged individualism is no consolation when a tornado or a derecho has lifted your home from its foundation and deposited it onto your front lawn. A tornado survivor I met in 2024 might have felt alone when I met him at his demolished home; he was still grieving the recent loss of his wife when the storm hit. But he certainly wasn’t alone. In the short time I spent photographing recovery efforts at his home, dozens of people from around the community, many of whom were dealing with damage to their own homes, dedicated their time and tools. I drive through his town often. Now, the first thing I see when I approach is the man’s house, once demolished, now transformed.

[Photo here: CONGRESS-IOWA_1134]

I saw hopeful romanticism at the Tai Dam Village Festival in Des Moines, which I photographed in 2024. At sunset, an elder in the community, assisted in his wheelchair, left the heart of the party to make an offering at a nearby body of water where, a few years before, a teenager had drowned while playing with friends. What I love about this moment is how nonjudgmental the adults seemed toward the boy who sat transfixed by a mobile game instead of the spiritual phenomenon taking place a few feet to his right. Surely it would have been better if this kid had been fishing. But I’m drawn to this moment because it presents a realistic depiction of the coexistence between the natural, social, and spiritual worlds. The community depicted here is one where neither perfect conformity to nature nor perfect piety is a prerequisite for belonging. This coexistence is a kind of grace.

[Photo here: Eagles_213]

It is a fortuitous human symbolism, and not some brute survival instinct, that will probably be the bald eagle’s salvation. A campaign for hunters to voluntarily switch from lead to copper ammunition has been successful so far, in part because hunters wish to live according to conservationist principles, but also because the extinction of this particular species is harder to accept than the extinction of, say, a lesser-known mollusk. We need bald eagles for ecological reasons, of course: they are apex predators that regulate prey populations and contribute to biodiversity. But we also need eagles for social, cultural, even spiritual reasons. They are a symbol of our freedom, our independence. The eagles didn’t have a say in this meaning making; we assigned it to them. But that meaning, socially constructed or not, is no less real.

[.smalltext]This essay was adapted by the author from the Sussman Spring 2026 Lecture at The Harkin Institute, which he delivered on March 12, 2026.[.smalltext]