Gambier Islands

We have to accept the fact that we are trashing the planet and start asking "When are we going to stop?"
David Brower

My purpose as a photographer is to point out our connection with the natural world to an increasingly alienated audience. The generation now poised to inherit the earth is the first to be so detached from her. For millions of years humans lived as other species, eking out a daily survival from nature, and mindful on some level of how utterly dependent they were on a healthy and abundant world. Virtually all early cultures worshipped nature, to appease the gods and assure continuing abundance.

Alas, nothing has changed about this but our perception, distorted as it is by our encapsulation within the cocoons of a modern world-city, home, and workplace. Add to this the illusory world of television and computers and you have a generation for which nature is an abstraction, suffering from what author Richard Louv calls "nature deficit syndrome." The real world has been replaced by a small screen that we are tethered to for hours every day, frantically trying to fill our pocketbooks and our emptyness. Of course we can't, thus the billion dollar market for prozac et al to soothe our "money-grubbing" souls. We are far healthier, wealthier, and safer than humans have ever been. And more miserable. As Thoreau stated, "If misery loves company misery has company enough."

All species are destined for extinction, and so the days are numbered for us. If we persist with the arrogant notion that we are separate from nature then the lifespan of our species will be shortened. We must recognize that we are a part of nature, and also a force against it, and begin to moderate our ways, to live in harmony with the world around us.

The fairy tern in the photograph was likely encountering a human for the first time. The scene was Dulce Island, a tiny atoll in the Gambiers, lost somewhere in the vastness of the South Pacific. Dulce is uninhabited and hundreds of miles from any place that is. It is just as far from any international shipping lane. In our 30 days of sailing from Easter Island to Bora Bora, during which we made this stop, we did not see another vessel.

And yet as we made landfall on Dulce, ostensibly to visit the nesting bird colonies, what impressed us most was the trash, the flotsam and jetsam that had been beached by tide and storm. This entire island, a world away from human endeavor, was strewn with the universal "spoor" of civilization. It was a shocking revelation to a shipload of people who had traveled so far to get away from such.

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We have to accept the fact that we are trashing the planet and start asking "When are we going to stop?" David Brower My purpose as a photographer is to point out our connection with the natural world to an increasingly alienated audience. The generation now poised to inherit the earth is the first to be so detached from her. For millions of years humans lived as other species, eking out a daily survival from nature, and mindful on some level of how utterly dependent they were on a healthy and abundant world. Virtually all early cultures worshipped nature, to appease the gods and assure continuing abundance. Alas, nothing has changed about this but our perception, distorted as it is by our encapsulation within the cocoons of a modern world-city, home, and workplace. Add to this the illusory world of television and computers and you have a generation for which nature is an abstraction, suffering from what author Richard Louv calls "nature deficit syndrome." The real world has been replaced by a small screen that we are tethered to for hours every day, frantically trying to fill our pocketbooks and our emptyness. Of course we can't, thus the billion dollar market for prozac et al to soothe our "money-grubbing" souls. We are far healthier, wealthier, and safer than humans have ever been. And more miserable. As Thoreau stated, "If misery loves company misery has company enough." All species are destined for extinction, and so the days are numbered for us. If we persist with the arrogant notion that we are separate from nature then the lifespan of our species will be shortened. We must recognize that we are a part of nature, and also a force against it, and begin to moderate our ways, to live in harmony with the world around us. The fairy tern in the photograph was likely encountering a human for the first time. The scene was Dulce Island, a tiny atoll in the Gambiers, lost somewhere in the vastness of the South Pacific. Dulce is uninhabited and hundreds of miles from any place that is. It is just as far from any international shipping lane. In our 30 days of sailing from Easter Island to Bora Bora, during which we made this stop, we did not see another vessel. And yet as we made landfall on Dulce, ostensibly to visit the nesting bird colonies, what impressed us most was the trash, the flotsam and jetsam that had been beached by tide and storm. This entire island, a world away from human endeavor, was strewn with the universal "spoor" of civilization. It was a shocking revelation to a shipload of people who had traveled so far to get away from such.

© Danny Kimberlin 2015