“We seek a renewed stirring of love for the earth. We plead that what we are capable of doing to it is often what we ought not to do. We urge that all people now determine that an untrammeled wildness shall remain here to testify that this generation had love for the next.” —David Brower
“Seeing the world through this particular lens has made my own life so much more meaningful and rich.” —Morgan Heim, conservation photographer
Is it all worthwhile? What are the rewards? To answer those questions, you have to examine your own photographic philosophy and how you feel about the natural world. You can, of course, continue photographing wildlife and beautiful landscapes without joining the battle to save these things. After all, there is a lot of work involved in conservation photography. But there are some rewards. Having a direction and purpose to your photography can help you develop skills that will benefit your work—perhaps even leading to publication and new horizons. And should you hope to become a professional, earning a living at it, these skills will be vital. Beyond any future monetary rewards, there is the pleasure of knowing that your work has aided in preserving and protecting places and species that are becoming scarce in our world.
A few years ago, I returned to make another whitewater raft trip on the Snake River in Hells Canyon. With me were a few Idaho friends. The rest of our party was made up of other folks from various parts of the country. None of the others in the group had been to Hells Canyon before—and I hadn’t been back since the 1972 trip with Pete Seeger. It was refreshing to see that the canyon was as beautiful as I remembered it from my early photographs. For the next six days, we floated downriver through magnificent scenery that, if the dam had been built, would all have been under hundreds of feet of water.
On our first day on the river we ran two of the major rapids: Wildsheep and Granite Creek. There was that surge of adrenaline as we plunged into massive waves, getting refreshingly drenched by the cold waters. After the Granite Creek rapids, we slipped along on quiet waters, drifting with the current and taking in the lush green hillsides splashed with wildflowers. At the base of one dark and towering wall, a mountain goat and her two youngsters grazed peacefully. No one spoke for a long while. And then two of the rafts maneuvered closer to mine. In a chorus, the people in them shouted, “Thank you, Boyd!”
Hells Canyon.
I was dumbfounded. What on earth were they thanking me for? A few made sweeping gestures with their hands, pointing up toward the canyon walls. Then it dawned on me: my Idaho friends had told the others of my involvement in saving this place, stopping the proposed dam, and getting protective legislation passed. Wow. I have to admit, I got choked up. Their gratitude, expressed in the midst of this wild beauty, was ample reward for the years of hard work it took to save the place.
We drifted on, absorbing and enjoying it all.
Mountain goat and young.
We drifted on.