Thanks for this one Mark. After my time at IBM I helped cofound a tech company focused on measuring environmental impacts of supply chains, and this one really resonated. I see the tragedy of Hann Bay as not merely ecological but sacramental. A beach that once mirrored the divine clarity of creation now reflects back our collective sin, a sludge of oil and blood and human indifference. The photographs of Fabrice Monteiro don’t document as much as they prophesy. His djinn rise from the filth not as specters of doom but as avatars of revelation. They are the unblinking eyes of the earth itself, forcing us to confront what we have made of paradise.
There is a great symmetry here with the Hebrew prophets. Jeremiah’s iron bars and Monteiro’s trash-born djinn speak the same language: the material world is never inert. It bears witness. It accuses. When blood runs in the water and sludge chokes the shore, these are not just environmental failures. They are spiritual indictments. The bay’s suffering is a mirror held up to our own desecration of the sacred.
And yet, there is something fiercely incarnational in this horror. The djinn, like the prophets, emerge from the very garbage we’ve discarded, as if to say “Holiness cannot be quarantined.” Even in the landfill, even in the oil-slicked bay, the divine refuses to abandon the material world. Monteiro’s art insists that the spiritual and the ecological are inseparable. The djinn are not abstract warnings. They are the earth’s cry, made flesh in recycled waste.
We prefer the Hananiahs of our age, the voices that soothe and deflect. But the true prophets, whether Jeremiah or Monteiro’s djinn, offer no such comfort. They stand knee-deep in the consequences of our choices and demand we face them. The question is not whether we will listen, but whether we will recognize these voices as what they are: sacred interruptions, calling us back to the covenant we’ve broken with the earth and, by extension, with the divine that pulses within it.
Thanks for this one Mark. After my time at IBM I helped cofound a tech company focused on measuring environmental impacts of supply chains, and this one really resonated. I see the tragedy of Hann Bay as not merely ecological but sacramental. A beach that once mirrored the divine clarity of creation now reflects back our collective sin, a sludge of oil and blood and human indifference. The photographs of Fabrice Monteiro don’t document as much as they prophesy. His djinn rise from the filth not as specters of doom but as avatars of revelation. They are the unblinking eyes of the earth itself, forcing us to confront what we have made of paradise.
There is a great symmetry here with the Hebrew prophets. Jeremiah’s iron bars and Monteiro’s trash-born djinn speak the same language: the material world is never inert. It bears witness. It accuses. When blood runs in the water and sludge chokes the shore, these are not just environmental failures. They are spiritual indictments. The bay’s suffering is a mirror held up to our own desecration of the sacred.
And yet, there is something fiercely incarnational in this horror. The djinn, like the prophets, emerge from the very garbage we’ve discarded, as if to say “Holiness cannot be quarantined.” Even in the landfill, even in the oil-slicked bay, the divine refuses to abandon the material world. Monteiro’s art insists that the spiritual and the ecological are inseparable. The djinn are not abstract warnings. They are the earth’s cry, made flesh in recycled waste.
We prefer the Hananiahs of our age, the voices that soothe and deflect. But the true prophets, whether Jeremiah or Monteiro’s djinn, offer no such comfort. They stand knee-deep in the consequences of our choices and demand we face them. The question is not whether we will listen, but whether we will recognize these voices as what they are: sacred interruptions, calling us back to the covenant we’ve broken with the earth and, by extension, with the divine that pulses within it.
Thanks again for reading so thoughtfully, Steve! Good to hear that this resonated with your experience and passion, too.