I think a lot about the environment, climate change, and the possibility that our earth may become uninhabitable due to human activity. It’s a thought that used to bring me great sadness, but as I’ve tried to enlarge the scope of my thoughts, and think of humans and earth on the scale of the universe, it now elicits an odd feeling of not melancholy, but emptiness.

I wanted to take photos that represented those feelings of emptiness, so I went to the Salton Sea. It is California’s largest lake, created when irrigation canals burst in the desert. For a short time, it was a tourist destination, but the flow of agricultural runoff turned the lake toxic, and it’s now become a major source of air pollution. Dead fish litter it’s beaches, and once full communities are now vacant ruins of homes, parks and motels. It’s a peak into the apocalyptic world environmental disasters can create.