Gentlemen,
thank you very much for sharing your thoughts. I think we face (at least) two different level of challenge here.
- The "larger" challenge of the sustainability of human presence on Earth at large;
- The "smaller" challenge of saving the environment and the photographic locations we love from being overwhelmed by inconsiderately behaving tourist / photographers, while preventing newly found photographic locations from meeting with the same end;
I am an optimist by nature, and believe that with enough thinking and putting in enough effort, (almost) any problem can be solved. However, I am also a realist, and I'd rather put my direct, personal effort into problems that I, personally, might truly have an impact on. For those issues that I care about, but haven't any chance to be effective in fighting personally, I'd rather support organisations that I trust (financially or otherwise) and have them "fight by proxy" on my behalf.
There is one extremely interesting thing in what Dave said - why don't we show the "behind the scene" of what we do? I paused, and my first thought was that this would be a reporter's job, not a landscape photographer's. Thinking about it a bit more, for me this is definitely the same kind of issue, while much less dramatic in terms of immediate "life or death" scope, that war photographers face: take photos of the dying child, or help him? When I go working somewhere, my mind is set towards the task at hand: create beautiful images of the landscape in front of me. Not only photographing a crowd doesn't come to mind, but the very presence of a crowd puts me so much out of my "zone" that I normally find myself not even start working, if a place is too crowded. Therefore, I normally don't go to crowded places. Even when I go to Iceland, which is as today the most crowded place I go, until now I managed to find spots with little enough people to allow me to work in (relative) peace.
I will organise a trip with a reporter friend, not to do the usual "idyllic" backstage videos we all see on the web and used to sell Workshops and the like, but to do a serious reportage on the "state of the union" of landscape photography in ultra-popular locations. This would ensure that the photos are made by someone that professionally does reportage, and not by me, and will also make the storytelling easier, since we'd already have a story and a leading character (as non-photogenic as I am, I am afraid!).
That aside, I think that on the "larger" issue we could:
- try and minimise our carbon footprint as much as we could;
- put pressure on politicians and such to pass environmentally-friendly legislation;
- support organisation that do so;
While on the "smaller" issue, we could:
- do what I propose in the article, which seems to be ok for everyone so far;
- use our skills as photographers (at large, even if perhaps not our personal skills!), the "power of photography", to document the damages done to the environment by, paradoxically, other (and too many) photographers;
Is this a good summary of what has been said so far, and does that make sense?