The Trees are Drowning

A visual elegy for Nova Scotia’s coastal forests, The Trees are Drowning reflects on climate grief and rising seas offering a contemplative look at beauty on the edge of collapse, where the trees are swallowed, one by one.

The Trees are Drowning is a photographic elegy to the slow, relentless destruction of Nova Scotia’s coastal forests due to climate change. Shot with a digital Nikon camera, the series documents a stretch of shoreline where rising sea levels have begun to swallow the treeline—trees once vibrant now stand stripped of life, their trunks exposed, bark weathered and salt-stained, rooted only in shifting sand and tide.

Presented as a photobook mock-up, this submission includes original poetry and prose to help contextualize the emotional and ecological narrative running through the work. These written elements are not necessarily intended for inclusion in the final photobook, but they have been integrated into the prototype to support the reading of the imagery and convey the atmosphere of quiet grief, memory, and loss that underpins the project.

What emerges is a meditation on environmental collapse—one that avoids the sensational in favour of the intimate and elegiac. The images capture not just the altered landscape, but also the emotional weight of bearing witness to it. Trees become monuments, their postures strained and aching, set against skies that feel too wide, too still.

This work is both personal and ecological: rooted in place, shaped by mourning, and driven by a desire to honour what is being lost. The Trees are Drowning is not only a document of environmental degradation—it is also an invitation to sit with sorrow, to listen to the land as it changes, and to reflect on what vanishes when we fail to act.