Moose's Conservation Journal

For those of you who have been reading my blog you know that I was very worried about some possible resource extraction activities harming the Glacier/Waterton International Peace Park and I was closely watching the ILCP and their RAVE on the Flathead Valley to fight this.

Well folks, it worked!!! The Peace Park is a designated UN World Heritage site and the UN sent an investigation team and expressed their displeasure with the proposed plans. Earlier this month, the British Columbian government prohibited industrial development in the valley. I will not talk about this success in much detail here, but refer you to ILCP’s story, a story in the Missoulian, and NPCA’s coverage. However, I want to thank all of you who took action to protect the Flathead and the Waterton/Glacier International Peace Park based on my pleadings here in this blog.

Now on to the meat of this post. My response to this issue illustrates very well an issue that is critical to the field of conservation photography. That is the old cliche “you love what you know, you protect what you love.” Just how my response illustrates this, is that ILCP has done quite a few RAVEs at this point, but the two I got the most enthusiastic with my support were the two locations that I have enjoyed in person; the Flathead and the Borderlands. This issue defines the very reason for the existence of conservation photography. Photos will never be a substitute for intimate knowledge of a landscape, but they are much better than nothing. So one of the primary jobs of the conservation photographer is that first step in the cliche; help your audience get to know the landscape, the critters in it, and the beauty of the symbiosis between the two. Many argue that too much ecotourism, resulting from people knowing just how wonderful a place is can be very destructive. I acknowledge this possibility, and some of our most popular and most fragile places are dealing with a little of the “being loved to death” syndrome. However, ecotourism is almost always better than development. Which do you think would be harder for say a gopher tortoise to deal with, having a bunch of tourists stick cameras in its face or its home and food put under a parking lot and mini-mall?

Tags: Conservation, ecotourism, Flathead, Glacier, National Park, photography, RAVE, Waterton

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Conservation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.