Encroachment

The most effective anti-Vietnam War demonstration I witnessed was a person holding up a butterfly and torching it with a lighter. We were later informed that the butterfly was already dead, but the impact had been made. That act generated more anger and emotion than the daily death count on the nightly news. The lesson I’ve carried with me is that humans often have much more capacity to care about individual lives within sight than we have for larger numbers out of sight.

I grew up in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, back in the 1950s and 60s when it was still forest and farmland. Our home overlooked Anderson Lake, which was pretty much my private playground in a quiet, idyllic setting. Then an avalanche of suburban sprawl began altering the landscape. Shopping malls, industrial sites, hundreds of homes, and roads to connect them all fragmented the ecosystems. For me, it was not just a loss of the landscape, but the creatures each acre of land was home to — I knew the trees that held birds’ nests, the hillsides with fox dens, the patches of milkweed supporting monarch butterflies, each just as precious to me as the one in that demonstration. This fragmentation and usurpation of natural lands is not unique to Eden Prairie, it is just the first place I felt it viscerally.

In 1976, we moved to the small town of Moose Lake — my dad’s hometown, 110 miles north of the Twin Cities. The stretch between the Cities and Moose Lake was a mix of woodlands and farms and was a welcome, restful drive for vacationers heading north. But, just like Eden Prairie, this too began to get developed. Unsightly industrial buildings sprang up, followed by characterless housing developments. I drive this around four times a year. Each trip I discover more of what used to be natural beauty has been replaced by an unrelenting march of more gas stations, fast food restaurants, industrial behemoths, and homes. Rather than looking forward to the drive, I now loathe it — saddened by the degradation in scenery, and the accompanying loss of habitat supporting birds and other wildlife.

This encroachment of human development into previously wild lands is directly linked to the population growth that has taken place on the planet, going from around one billion when my grandparents were born to more than 8 billion today. The consequences of unsustainable population numbers are manifested in well-documented ways, such as climate change, ocean acidification, habitat loss, and species extinctions. What is less talked about is the stress all of this puts on us.

We need nature in our daily lives in order to be whole and well. We yearn for periods of quiet and stillness. When those things we need and cherish are bulldozed down, or are beyond our daily access, we grieve and suffer — a process no less wrenching than the grief we feel for the loss of a loved relative. Perhaps because my life as a wilderness photographer has made me more attuned to wild places, I am nearly constantly mourning the loss of areas I knew as wild. This has taken a tremendous cumulative toll on me. Trying to bring about awareness and change, many of my fellow artists document the devastating environmental and social consequences of human encroachment on nature in direct ways. I fear we have become numb to those images and stories, just as we became numb to the death counts coming from Vietnam.

The image on these pages is titled 8,097,649,655, from my series, Encroachment. The title of each piece is the world population when I create the artwork (for reference, many scientists feel the earth can only sustain around 2 billion, and we are currently adding over 74 million each year). The green and blue areas of the image symbolize our forests, waterways, and oceans, everything else represents human encroachment into those areas.

This series is the third of four movements in a larger body of work that will be on display beginning August 9th. My hope is that seeing the plight of our planet depicted differently may wake us from our apathetic slumber — that we may begin to take personal responsibility regarding population numbers and make collective efforts to zone future development in ways that take our need for natural beauty into account.