The Human Touch

When humans are left out of the picture, what stories remain untold?

It is a question I hear often: why are there so few people in your photographs? First there is the matter of logistics: I am alone most often in the islands. I leave early, often in the pre-dawn darkness, and stay out late, in the rain, in the cold. That combination and the uncertainty of what I will find, does not always make an enticing itinerary for potential guests.

But that is only part of the answer, and the easiest part at that. The other part is more difficult to articulate. It is also much more important.

Sierra Club calendars, Instagram posts, coffee table books, even the recent Wisconsin Public Television program “Wisconsin’s Scenic Treasures: Northwoods” give us a view of nature as if humans have never set foot on the landscapes they are portraying. They are beautiful; they are deceptive.

While there may be places on earth — the bottom of the sea floor, for instance - where humans themselves have never set foot, our agents are there in the form of microplastics, air & water pollution, chemical footprints. A recent map produced by the Global Development Risk Assessment project of the Nature Conservancy claims that nearly 95% of the earth’s surface now shows some form of human modification.

(Map created by Hannah Ker for the Nature Conservancy)

There are mountains of spent oxygen cylinders near the summit of Mount Everest. Plastic bottles bloom like artificial flowers in the remote Gobi Desert. Miles of fishnet filament troll the stomachs of blue whales. A recent survey even found microplastics in snow and ice samples from Antarctica.

Our Vibram-soled, flip-flop, croc-wearing footprints, and the detritus of our full scale summit push toward Mount Consumerism, are everywhere, including here in the Apostle Islands. Where humans go, wherever they exist, they leave their mark, for better or worse. More often than not, it has been for the worse.

Aldo Leopold once wrote, “There are two things that interest me, the relation of people to each other, and the relation of people to land.” I too am deeply interested in the human relationship to the landscape in general and to these islands specifically.

The problem with that relationship artistically is one of balance, or lack of it more precisely. Except for the Ojibwe, whose stories go deeper into this land than the roots of the White Pine, the human relationship in the Apostle Islands has far too often been one sided, dominated by humans who mark the score in ledger lines and rows of numbers: 285,000 cubic feet of brownstone carved from the bones of Stockton Island in a single season, fifteen million board feet of timber cut from Oak Island in 1919 alone.

The “supply is unlimited” claimed the Bayfield Press in 1877. It was not. And the toll was immense.

By the time the area was surveyed as a potential national park unit in the 1930’s, Harlan Kelsey, the report’s author, called the condition of the islands “so violently disturbed that probably never can they be more than remotely reproduced.”

We all know now, that was not exactly true – left alone because of the economic crash of the 1930’s and changing markets, the islands did come back, nature did return enough for the islands to be designated a National Lakeshore on September 26, 1970 and a part of the National Wilderness Preservation System on December 8, 2004.

If that recovery teaches us anything it is that nature never stands still. Time is at work in these islands. That a place can be a national lakeshore and a national wilderness only decades after having been so heavily influenced by human hands is a testament to the resiliency of nature, a reason for humbleness in our own species, and perhaps a lesson to be learned.

The lack of people in my photography then has been a small act of symbolism. This is nature’s place. It is not a denial that humans have been here, are here. It is a simple poetic gesture that this should be a place where nature dominates and humans walk softly, listen, learn, and be humble. We are, I hoped to say with the lack of people in my photos, a part of the picture of the islands, but only a part. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that “part” for humans too.

We live in a time when love is necessary and required, more so than ever - both of nature and of ourselves. Maybe it is time to include more people in my photography of the Apostle Islands, to show that love of that kind is possible and that the human presence on the land does not always and inevitably lead to destruction.

In an essay entitled “Love in a Time of Terror” found in his posthumously-published Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, Barry Lopez lists a litany of the world’s woes and then asks, “In this trembling moment … is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”

The answer is, and must be, unequivocally and completely, yes. We as humans must envision ourselves as part of the picture, include ourselves in that equation of love. We must be in the picture, but only a small, humble part of it. Perhaps only then will love, and healing, become possible.

— Jeff Rennicke

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