CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/6/2018

In Cottonwoods, Robert Adams asks, 'If it is not too late, will we do better before it is too late?'

"I took the pictures because, as Merrill Gilfillan wrote in Magpie Rising, 'Where there is any hope at all, there are cottonwoods on the horizon." Much has continued to change in Colorado since 1992 when Constance Sullivan and the Smithsonian Institution Press invited me to publish the early version of this photo essay and interview: the state's population has increased substantially, development has spread, water resources have diminished, and oil and gas wells have invaded even residential areas. Is it too late? If it is not too late, will we do better before it is too late? People of my age were children of privilege. William Stafford wrote, for example, of what fall days were like:
The sun was over our town; it was like a blade.
Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms.
Wherever we looked the land would hold us up.
- Robert Adams