Anna Love

I was inspired to go to West Virginia as a curious human being who cares about our human right to live on a healthy planet. I’d gone to the opening of a documentary called Burning the Future at the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco. The entire film-making team was there as well as Maria Gunnoe, 2009 winner of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. The movie was about mountain top removal in West Virginia. I wasn’t an activist or a humanitarian photojournalist. I’ve been photographing posh weddings in the wine country for the last 8 years, enjoying eating organic food and drinking wheat grass in San Francisco. So it’s a bit unusual that I would choose a trip to West Virginia to see mountains being blown up as a vacation. What inspired me was a sense of urgency inside, a feeling that time is running out for all of us if we each don’t do what we can to make positive choices for the planet. And what I could do was take pictures and share them.