Wild West

The high plains of Wyoming and Namibia share several physical traits, including their large size with sparse human populations, the predominance of semiarid high, flat plains, the richness of minerals within their soils, and the (sometimes waning) wealth of plains wildlife. But it is their cultural, historical, and social characteristics that link them together in my mind and in this series. 

Each has been a frontier to be explored and maintained by intrepid original human settlers of varying colors, and then colonized by non-native white settlers, ranchers, farmers, hunters, and even scientists and conservationists. Both lands exist on the western ranges and the physical extremes of their continents and in the minds and travels of their colonizers. These places form both a harsh and romantic colonial image of cowboys, outpost forts, herds of hoofstock to be managed, manifest destiny, and laissez faire in the face of hardscrabble existence for both animal and man. 

A certain breed of non-native human will always seek out such refuges from the urban, the architected, the postmodern culture of technological societies; these steps are repeated across time and space, linking these places in ways they may never fully realize. This series depicts a set of such discovered links, between rancher and scientist, American and Namibian, wild animal and domestic stock. You decide which is which, or if it does not matter.