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Tide and Time is a photojournalism and reporting project by Justin Cook in collaboration with The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting’s Connected Coastlines Initiative that documents the accelerating effects of climate change and erosion on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

The work focuses on a tiny historic cemetery that is slowly washing into the Pamlico Sound. Through portraits, landscapes, aerial images, and interviews the work documents the locals trying to preserve the cemetery, the eroding marsh ecosystem around it, and Jean Hooper, 85, for whom the cemetery is sacred ground, and still wants to be buried there beside her husband and grandparents even if the sea eventually takes her bones. Justin also has a possible family connection to this story: His late grandfather was from the Outer Banks and the preservationists discovered that they share a distant relative who was once buried there, but years ago a storm sucked her casket into the Pamlico Sound.

A decades-long erosion study and other research by prominent North Carolina sea level rise scientists informs the science in this project, and my work visually illustrates this science through the slow creep of climate change in the lives of ordinary people, and translates the science into a visual and emotional language to which the average person can relate. Tide and Time investigates the psychological impacts of climate change, particularly ‘solastalgia,’ or a sense of homesickness and loss that some Outer Banks locals feel while still at home as climate change renders their home unfamiliar.

Copyright © 2021 by Justin Cook, All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-7376753-0-3

Printed by Conveyor Studio in Jersey City, New Jersey,

Published by Tiburon Editions in Durham, N.C.

Photo editing by Alyssa Coppelman

Word editing by Lisa Sorg

Illustrations by Eric Nyquist