Our Waters Our Voices is a proposed traveling waterfront installation and digital archive. It invites people who frequent Florida fishing piers, waterfront parks, beaches, and community events to contribute cards with observations, lessons, memories, and practical conservation ideas that form a public record of local knowledge, shared experience, and community-generated ideas for keeping local waters healthy, clean, and fishable.

The project is informed by the collective-display tradition of Japanese ema, in which individual wishes, hopes, or expressions of gratitude are written on small wooden plaques and displayed together.

A chance encounter with a great blue heron entangled in fishing line during a volunteer cleanup led to a place-based investigation into the Pensacola area’s fishing-line recovery and recycling network. Drawing on personal observation and visits to local collection points, the essay asks how infrastructure, storytelling, and design might make the largely invisible problem of ghost gear harder to ignore.

Written as the introduction to Robert Reid’s An American Son, this essay places one man’s life within larger conversations about masculinity, identity, and the evolving American archetype. It also stands independently as a reflection on how landscape, risk, responsibility, and consequence shape character. the essay considers what this cultural inheritance gave, what it cost, and what its disappearance may mean.