In the late 1800s photography was incredibly novel and factual. As the new category of art and journalism took form, every picture printed and published was believed. It became the record of verity, and a ledger fo detail the levels of which were undisputed. To the masses, if it was photographed, then it was so.
Fast forward 220 years, and comparatively if somebody in 2020 saw a photograph, the likelihood of a hint of skepticism regarding the factual reliability of the image and the integrity of the photograph is increasingly possible. To this degree, the believability of our world is becoming increasingly less reliable. Most people nowadays, those who are text savvy enough to witness and partake in online meme culture and new media information outlets, are certainly aware that what is being presented on the World Wide Web could in fact be fake, and that a personal discernment need be exercised to vet content properly. Perhaps traditional news print and anecdotal information of the 1800’s was viewed with the same skepticism. Then along came photographs; then along came the climate crisis.
Now, let us compare the photographs of the 1800’s to the existence of animals and species in the 2000’s. Each preoccupation exists in that century as fact: valid is the image of Yosemite National Park to newspaper readers as the reports about endangered blue whales are to modern travelers. (Thank you Ken Burn and David Attenborough, respectively.) To the people of the time, an encounter with a story of a whale or a picture of a pristine valley was a memory of the present moment. In other words, those readers and the sea tourists both lived their lives according to the best practices they knew, and they lived in the moment. I wonder, who in the 1870’s and who in 2019 thought about their natural experiences as being the last of their kind? Is self reflexivity a condition of increasing modernity? Is questioning the present moment a human trait?
When something old is presented to us, we believe it to be real. Will someone in 2240 believe that whales existed because of a photograph, and not because of a story in which someone encountered the dying, giant swimmers? Could I be the last generation that believes that nature exists the way that it does?
I may be a part of the last generation to experience whales and nature as things that exist in real life, and not in photographs. I am in the year 2020 and I am 29 years old. As it stands, there is a literal mass extinction happening on a scale that is almost inconceivable, all around me, and for better or worse mostly out of sight. For what I can see and actually appreciate, the species in front of my eyes in the world that I am experiencing through my own life, that is like the photograph of the 1800’s. The same truth - as a felt sense of reality which came from a now faded picture of California - might be the same fading truth of the existence of species like blue whales, squirrels, yellow bellied warblers, beetles or any living thing in contemporary time.
It feels inconceivable for someone in the year 1870 to question the validity of a photograph. It also feels, to say the least, odd to consider someone in 2021 questioning the validity that birds still fly in the sky. Both these concepts are accepted truths, until adjusted to the contrary. The progression might come from the passage of time, the social media sphere focusing attention on a future crisis, or the ambivalence for the natural world in general. Is that the trend, then, for novelty in nature to diminish once it is exposed? Once something is reproduced ad nauseam, a healthy skepticism perhaps deters us from believing the present moment, and then in turn just the facsimile. We then shift our faith to the old, or the new, telling us how it was/what it will be.
Pondering the privilege that I could chose to travel great distances to witness species that still exist on earth, tomorrow, just so I can say that I saw them may sound like unacknowledged entitlement. Yet I know traveling is harmful to the environment on some level, and I for now chose a photograph of yesteryear or a story of yesterday instead. This in the hopes of enriching an attitude of gratitude for the comfort that I have and live. I place my trust in the pictures, in the stories and in the present moment. As far as I know, the natural world exists. Solipsism aside, I can see retroactively how engaging nature - like the increased tourism of Yosemite and the mismanaged arboreal surroundings because of non-native caretakers running the show (see the tree burning practices of the indigenous Californian tribes) - can deteriorate it beyond recognition. Perhaps it is time to live in the pictures, the tall tales of tall trees, and let those thing exist without misguided human interference.