Our objective was to document the good and the bad: recent victories for the biotic health of the Park, like the preservation of large parcels of land, and scars, like ATV damage and logging devastation. As an artist, my goal is always to make compelling images of issues that will motivate the viewer to question said issues, as well as her involvement. And why do we care about some ATV damage and logging scars?
Glad you asked.
The ball we live on is a big complex machine with many necessary moving parts that contribute to its doing what we need it to do for us to live on it. Large wild spaces: clean the air and water, produce oxygen, provide a home for the animals, which in turn perform a vital role in propagating that life system.
Unsustainable logging/ATV damage fragments the system, introduces invasive species - which usually crowd out the more fragile native species (already weakened by the loss of their habitat), and promotes erosion (loss of topsoil, water pollution, stream silting, lost fish habitat, no fish link in the food chain, etc).
So this stuff is important.
The wind, which had sped us along on the way up, now made our jobs difficult. With the hazy winter light, only certain angles work to produce good images, and as soon as Bob positioned the plane, the wind blew us away, and made getting back to that spot slow, and things happen very quickly in the air anyway.
Ultimately it was a very successful day. Cloudy light can ultimately produce some wonderful results if it lights the areas you want, leaving others darker, but it can do the opposite as well. Sometimes we wait for clouds to move and illuminate, other times we compromise, knowing we have deadlines imposed by fuel, weather and darkness.
Dropping John off in Saranac Lake, we comment on the large hangar that Citibank built so its CEO could park the company jet out of the elements when he came up to his retreat in the Adirondacks, and I reflect on the fact that it must belong to us since we bailed out Citi for just this sort of foolishness. And you can be sure that retired mogul is living large on our largesse. No need to mention his name.
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