Okefenokee: A World Heritage Story
A five-part visual series exploring place, preservation and our relationship with the natural world.
Inspired by the Okefenokee's inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the series connects the swamp with places encountered across Korea and Japan. Each film asks a different question about why places matter and what it means to protect them.
Why Do We Protect Places?
What does a swamp have in common with a Buddhist temple?
From the Okefenokee's blackwater wetlands to Buddhist temples in Korea and Japan, this film explores the shared values that can make very different places worthy of protection.
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What Can We Learn From Places
We Don't Understand?
The Okefenokee and Jeju Island may seem worlds apart: one a vast freshwater wetland in Georgia, USA, the other a volcanic island shaped by the sea in Korea.
On Jeju, the haenyeo women who have free-dived for generations offer another way to understand a place through knowledge, tradition, and a deep relationship with
the natural world.
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Seeing a Place Differently
Sometimes understanding a place begins with simply learning how to look at it.
From fox statues and sacred forests in Japan to gates, temples, and the waters of the Okefenokee, unexpected visual connections reveal how different cultures express their relationships with nature, animals, and the unseen.
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What Does It Take to Preserve a Place?
Protecting a place is more than drawing a boundary around it.
Across Korea, Japan, and the Okefenokee, preservation is shaped by generations of knowledge, stewardship, and difficult choices about how people interact with the
places they value.
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What Will We Leave Behind?
The story of the Okefenokee is also a story about the people who shaped how future generations would experience it.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Black men working through the Civilian Conservation Corps helped create canoe trails and infrastructure that opened the swamp to exploration and shaped its history of public access and conservation.
Their work raises a larger question: What do we leave behind for the people
who come after us?
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