behind the lens

For a public exhibit of photographs some years ago, I wrote a little essay to introduce myself. I talked about knowing the world through science and knowing myself, in part, through photography.

Seeing the world as a scientist doesn’t mean having to wear the spectacles of a physicist or biologist or geologist. It simply means seeing the world as it is, through reason and empirical proof – free of the biases imposed by cultural and individual beliefs. In the modern world of nearly seven billion people, each wielding a technology that is too big to hold with two hands, reason and empiricism are the only means by which we’ll not forever harm the earth or destroy ourselves first. Encouraged by my parents and teachers, I became a scientist a long time ago.

I first held a camera an equally long time ago – to photograph my parents from a six-year-old’s perspective. The camera was my father’s Brownie, and it took rather sharp pictures for such a simple thing. The next camera to come my way fell through the opening of a gumball machine (my reward for persistence). The tiny marvel actually worked, but it was next to impossible to find more film.

A decade after that photograph of my parents, I purchased my first 35-millimeter camera and a hand-held light meter. I recall many visits to the camera store. It smelled not unpleasantly of chemicals. The shop owner was a helpful, short, balding man with an eastern-European accent. A few moments after his doorbell jingled, he usually appeared in a long, bibbed apron, straight from his developing lab. I still have many of the slides I took with my first camera.

a sense of home

Africa is an especially magical place for me to experience and photograph. On each of many visits, I felt drawn to Africa in search of the familiar.

Human genetic history happened predominantly in Africa. Then, in only a few millennia, we stepped from survival in small groups that were intimate with their environment and its inhabitants to insular life in megasociety. I think we struggle to cope with civilization, because it’s still too alien. Much of what we are – our perceptions, desires, and needs – remains adapted to conditions in the Pleistocene.

Adaptations create the familiar, and the familiar is home.

transformation

More than ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived is extinct. Many forms perished in devastating near misses – global cataclysms, when almost all life on earth disappeared at once. Metamorphosis-and-extinction has been the rule for life on a changing planet. In about a billion years, the sun will swell and boil the oceans into space, and in a few billion years more it will incinerate the earth. But today, the life on earth to which our minds and emotions relate has barely reached middle age.

Our mammalian ancestors were among the survivors of a cataclysm sixty-five million years ago. It’s looking quite certain that our legacy is going to be another cataclysm that is just as severe. In less than two centuries, we’ve consumed half of the planet’s fossilized energy at an accelerating rate that can last perhaps only a few more decades – long enough to make certain we’ve set earth’s climate on a new course that will be more hostile to us and to countless other species. We’re burning the planet’s forests and turning the oceans into deserts just to provide ourselves enough food. We’re forcing the living world into extinction at the rate of three species every hour.

It is impossible to be a part of nature while leaving it untouched. Every one of us consumes resources just to survive, irreversibly converting a tiny bit of earth and air and sunshine into us, leaving a tiny bit less for everything else to get through the next billion years. Our tiny bits add up quickly. It would make a wonderful difference if all of us could live green on a diet of minimal consumption. Doing so really might buy us and the planet some time and save some species from imminent extinction. But mustering the will of billions to live green fails to address the real problem – the ultimate cause of our existential legacy.

There are just too many of us, vastly too many right now, and our numbers continue to increase exponentially. Our population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion people. At the beginning of 2008, there were more than 6.6 billion of us, doubling ourselves in much less than one generation. The planet can’t support our number of voracious feeders at the top of the food chain, and it won’t do so for much longer.

The lily-pond riddle illustrates how everyday human intuition fails to grasp the speed of exponential progression. Imagine this idyllic scene: a pond into which Claude Monet plants his first lily – one lovely green leaf floating atop the water. Overnight, once each day, every lily pad grows to become two, such that after thirty days the pond is completely full of beautiful, green lily pads. On what day is the pond half full? The answer is day twenty-nine. And so, when our population reaches the half-way point to its maximum capacity (the number of people the earth will sustain), it is only one period, one doubling time – currently less than one generation – away from disastrous collapse.

Just a few hundred years ago, life on earth passed a critical threshold when one species reached the capacity to alter the global environment. This new era is the anthropocene – the time of man. Life may not be so lucky in the anthropocene cataclysm. Far more likely, however, nature’s genetic experiment with the big-brained, upright, talking toolmaker will end. And the survivors once again will take new paths.

legacy

I’m a fair distance past middle age, retired now after nearly three decades of doing science for a living. Happily, I find more time to learn about the world and about myself and to reflect on legacies – ours and mine.

I haven’t planned that photographs would be part of my legacy. Photography is my personal chronicling of the world – a way to celebrate nature and create remembrances of things I treasure. Photographs are my form of rock art, I suppose as conventional as wooly-mammoth pictographs. But any of my images to survive me could become a legacy of sorts.

Another aspect of my legacy is rather at odds with convention. For most of us, the only legacy of any importance is successfully passing along our genes. Genes that leave no legacy are destined for extinction. I’ve not passed along my genes and never will at this point in my life.

It hasn’t taken much reasoning to see that my legacy, conventional and otherwise, is a drop in the ocean. The world is full of stunning, awe inspiring nature photographs that have yet to prevent us from wrecking the planet. I don’t think my images will matter a lot in that regard either. As for my personal extinction – well, that’s been a matter both of good choice and of good luck. All things considered, it probably will be my most noteworthy legacy – and about the greenest signature I’ll write in the records of nature.