快猫短视频

ONE morning in the summer of 1933, David Brower, future leader of the US environmental group the Sierra Club, bumped into the landscape photographer Ansel Adams on a path in a forest in the Sierra Nevada mountains. As famous encounters go, this was not quite on a par with that of Stanley and Livingstone in Africa. But in the context of the dramatic environmental reform that was to take place in the US during the 20th century and the way images helped effect it, it was auspicious.

It was the time of the Depression, soil erosion had reduced the great plains of the Midwest to dust bowls. For many conservationists the tragedy was of biblical proportions, heralding the collapse of American civilisation. This was no 鈥渘atural鈥� disaster, but one triggered by aggressive agricultural practices that had destroyed the ecological equilibrium of the grasslands. Until then the prairie pioneers had been celebrated as heroes -now it was obvious that they had created a wasteland.

鈥淔or many conservationists the tragedy was of biblical proportions鈥�

To reverse this decline, President Roosevelt launched his New Deal reforms, and for perhaps the first and last time in the history of environmentalism, government and conservation found themselves fully on the same side. The scale of the decline and the urgency of the need for reform were captured not by stills photographers but by film-makers. Pare Lorentz鈥檚 The Plow that Broke the Plains, released in 1936, went beyond the aesthetic appreciation of nature that had typified landscape photography and instead portrayed the dust storms as a kind of retribution, a triumph of nature over the foolishness of humankind, with no easy path to redemption.

The following year Lorentz released a second film, The River, a lament about the ecological ruin of the Mississippi river valley. This time he offered suggestions of how Americans could pull out of the crisis together, by controlling erosion and building dams to stop flooding 鈥� not a tactic favoured by today鈥檚 environmentalists.

In Natural Visions, Finis Dunaway, assistant professor of history at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, recounts all this in compelling detail. It is the artists behind the images who interest him most, in particular the way they were carried along by, or leaned against, the political and cultural winds, and how the their actions led to the modern environmental movement.

He has a fine eye for the subtleties, and a light touch, almost too light sometimes. His own environmental colours, for example, weren鈥檛 clear until the final paragraph. Not that matters, for there are characters aplenty to carry the narrative. Not least Brower and Adams.

Dunaway does not play up their encounter, but it did mark a turning point. At the time, Lorentz鈥檚 films of ecological catastrophe portrayed a collective experience of nature, a vision of what happens when societies fail to understand and connect with the land. Later, under Brower鈥檚 guidance, the Sierra Club, through its coffee-table books full of iconic images by such photographers as Adams and Eliot Porter, emphasised the individual experience of nature, portraying wilderness as a source of personal therapy and escape, even worship, rather than as an ecological tapestry of which people were just a part.

Brower was convinced that iconic images were the best way to kindle people鈥檚 concern for the natural world. He must have been right for during his time as executive director from 1952 to 1969, membership of the Sierra Club grew from 7000 to 70,000.

The Sierra Club photographers did share something with the cinematographers of the Depression era: a desire to capture the sublime, the spiritual, in nature. 鈥淚 feel that 鈥� unless some great spiritual experience is evoked, some deep excitement and sense of purpose is stimulated within our people, our cause is lost,鈥� Dunaway quotes Adams. And again: 鈥淒evelopment will reign supreme until nothing else remains to develop.鈥�

Yet ironically the image that did most to boost the cause of environmentalism was taken not by any expert photographer, but by an astronaut circling the Earth in the Apollo spacecraft in 1968. Like a film director building up to a finale, Dunaway leaves this until the last few pages when he quotes the now famous lines from poet Archibald MacLeish, published on the front page of The New York Times on Christmas Day in 1978: 鈥淭o see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together.鈥�

鈥淓arth from space鈥� spawned gushing hyperbole in newspapers across the globe, but it took environmental awareness to a level Lorentz, Adams and the other great image-makers could only dream of.