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Acacia Johnson

A Zodiac boat heads to shore, part of Quark Expeditions’ voyage to south Greenland.

Annual camping trips in the Canadian Arctic teach Inuit children hunting skills and cultural values that have been passed down for thousands of years. In this photo from a September 2019 story on the tradition, an Inuit elder enters her tent at the spring camp.

When sea ice ages, the salt sinks into the ocean, leaving fresh, drinkable water on top. In this picture from the September 2019 issue, a young Inuit girl fills a teapot with water to take back to her family's hunting camp in northern Canada.

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Brown bears fish for salmon at Alaska’s McNeil Falls, home to one of the largest seasonal congregations of bears on Earth. As many as 80 have been seen at one time in this spot. The bears are used to small groups of tourists, who come to the area to watch them. A proposed mine in the region would threaten the bears’ migration corridor. (From “Alaska is the best place to see wild bears. A new mine could change that.” January 2020.)

Gothenburg, Sweden: On an evening walk, photographer Acacia Johnson and her partner discovered an old boat stranded on top of the highest hill in their neighborhood. The boat prompted some questions, she says: "How did we get here? How do we get back? But also: What can we see from up here that we couldn't see when things were normal?"

“On the first morning of self-quarantine, an unexpected blossom of light appeared on the wall in my partner’s apartment near Gothenburg, Sweden,” says photographer Acacia Johnson. ”Since starting our self-quarantine, I've found myself making photographs in the way that I did when I first picked up a camera as a teenager—searching for quiet magic in the everyday. In this time of uncertainty, it’s comforting to recognise the beauty in the small details all around us.”

The pristine coastline of Lake Iliamna, Alaska's largest lake, which Pebble’s proposed ferry would cross. At over a thousand square miles, this wild ecosystem is home to numerous tribal groups and one of the world's only freshwater seal species. It’s the largest contiguous nursery for red salmon in the world.

Just north of Amakdedori Beach, cliffs tower over Kamishak Bay, notorious for bad weather and shallow reefs. The beach is the proposed site for Pebble Mine's industrial port, where concentrated minerals would be loaded onto barges and dumped into a ship anchored in the bay.

The land between Kokhanok and Amakdedori Beach is a vast, undeveloped wilderness. The land is filled with streams and lakes, like this one. Here, Pebble hopes to build a road transporting concentrated metals, which would interfere with wildlife migration, scientists argue.