Waterfalls and Respect

I suppose there's some humour to the fact that I just finished drafting an entire piece on our responsibility to each other and to the earth as we travel only to have it wiped away by some intransigent bit of code buried in this interface. C'est la vie, as they say. Here's the story I'd like to tell instead, given that the universe is very much hating on my time, efforts, and energy.

I love waterfalls. I love watching and capturing the flow of water from high above to the rocks below and the eventual escape to the streams, rivers, and oceans that wait with open arms. I love the slick, wet rocks, their shimmer in the shadows of the waning sun and their faces worn smooth by the relentless pounding of water. There is much to find beauty in, much to learn from this constrained chaos.

One of the principles that the group I'm a member of espouses as we travel is to "limit our impact." We do this by sticking to trails, developing relationships with the custodians of places, packing out what we bring in, and generally being good human beings. We love to be off the beaten path (our nom de guerre being "Offbeat") but we'll venture there when it's appropriate and within that ethical guideline I've discussed before.

There's always contention between the needs and wants of a community. For example, the waterfall you see here is on private property in Saksun, a fact that we were unaware of prior to being told so by the farmer who owned the surrounding fields. In the presence of such, we acknowledged our unwitting trespass and promptly removed ourselves from the environment. This is both a token of respect to the farmer whose land we were on as well as a nod to the understanding that his livelihood was affected by our presence.

I cannot stress enough that this respect seems to be losing its way these days. Every day, I read reports of families who have to petition their towns to close roads because strangers are encroaching on their land to take pictures. We believe we are entitled to be anywhere we want with little ramifications for our actions. What we fail to understand is how our presence affects those around us, even when it's as simple as taking a picture of a waterfall or fall foliage.

We owe it to ourselves and each other to engender respect, both to the places we find ourselves in as well as the people who depend on it for their livelihoods. We need to understand that our casual attitudes towards these places do more harm than just a surface scratch on some grassy soil. There are very real consequences to stepping into places where we don't belong and, as time progresses, we're going to begin to see more of this.

This isn't said to be a killjoy but is said to remind us that our art, our tourism, our travels have impacts in ways we can't even begin to fathom. We imbibe deeply in the wanderlust that floods our souls; this is who we are at our core. But we, typified in the waterfall you see here, need to understand our chaos, our splashes, our joining into the gyre that our experiences are collected to.

My dear souls, life is a continual unveiling of place and purpose. It's peering into the shadows and being blinded by the light. It's a heady mix of failures, fuck-ups, and glorious successes. By all of these means, we're continually remade and formed. As we go through these gyrations and shapings, we need to be cognizant of the ripples we cause and seek to minimize our already-outsized impacts.

As we head into another weekend of play and purpose, strive to understand your role, your impact. What are some of the ways in which you can change how you approach our environment and the places you visit? What can you do to give back or leave less of a mess? Maybe, within our lifetimes, we can finally realize the joys of place AND purpose, responsibility AND play, art AND privacy.

May it ever be so.

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