One Wildland at a Time
Storytelling, Social Media, and How We Experience the Wild
Is it possible to preserve wildlands in the face of pressure from social media promoting a vision of tourism that values conformity, comfort, and safety above a person seeing and reacting to nature independently?
My lifetime working with a small land trust may give some clues to the answer. I live on Monhegan Island, a small island off the coast of Maine. Monhegan’s beauty, its incomparable light, and its cliffs battered by Atlantic storms all feel like a part of my being. In the 1950s a few residents—who saw the island’s wildlands as remarkable—joined a wealthy summer visitor in creating Monhegan Associates, a land trust charged with preserving the island’s forests, meadows, and cliffs.
In the early months of the recent pandemic I walked less on the island’s trails and instead studied the photographs and paintings of the island available on Pinterest. I was shocked to find that within my lifetime, the way artists and photographers perceive this island has been transformed.
Most of the online paintings and photographs depict a far tamer place than the one Kent, Bellows, and Hopper painted a century ago. The island’s cliffs and forests have changed little. Atlantic storms still batter its shoreline, but today’s pictures more often take for their subjects the houses and gardens in the village rather than the island’s rugged shore and headlands or its wild forests.
Because the island’s town has become dependent on tourism, there is pressure to make visitors comfortable. Trustees of the land trust sometimes propose “supporting the local economy” by widening and smoothing wildland paths, constructing bridges over seasonal wet areas along a trail, adding more informational signs, and even choosing which plants should be allowed and which ones removed.
Monhegan Spruce Forest. © William Partridge Burpee (1846–1940). Monhegan Spruce Forest. ca. 1904. Pastel on paper, 14 x 11 1/4 inches. Monhegan Museum of Art and History. Gift of Remak Ramsay #4475.02.
It feels to me as though we are in danger of creating a theme park—an area that appears to be a wildland but isn’t one—a place where people can no longer experience the wild.
You might ask, “Well, isn’t it enough that the land trust now owns three-fifths of the island—including nearly all the forested areas outside the village, and the sea-cliffs that are some of the highest and most dramatic on the Atlantic coast—so that land is no longer in danger of being subdivided into private plots for hotels and cottages? Is the idea of preserving areas adjacent to a resort village as wildlands rather than as a park or a public garden perhaps a bit precious, maybe entirely wrong-headed?”
“I was shocked to find that within my lifetime, the way artists and photographers perceive this island has been transformed.”
Here is one example, from my experience, of why preserving wildlands is essential. Picture a day in late fall. The light was fading. I stood on a cliff edge witnessing the duel between a peregrine falcon and a cormorant. The falcon hurtled toward the low-flying cormorant. Just in time, the cormorant splashed to a stop on the ocean and dove beneath the waves. The falcon hovered, attacking as soon as the cormorant popped up. Each time, just ahead of the falcon’s talons skimming the water, the cormorant took a breath of air and dove. They repeated this until the peregrine soared away on an updraft, wheeled around the cliff top, and floated close by at the level of my head. A yellow-rimmed eye examined me. I felt … fear … before the falcon banked away, disappearing into the dusk.
Ocean Headland, Black Head, Monhegan. Photo © Richard Farrell
The peregrine is a large bird—and this one was close, hungry, and frustrated. My body connected with hominid ancestors who for several million years were as often prey as they were hunters—an experience I have remembered for decades. Could I have felt that connection in the same way if I had been standing on a paved path? Or behind a fence? Or next to a plaque explaining which islands I could see on the horizon?
“It feels to me as though we are in danger of creating a theme park...”
The paths through this island’s wildlands, maintained by our land trust, are often rocky and crossed by roots. To walk without tripping requires constant alertness. For a number of years, trustees have debated making the trails smoother, wider, and safer—considering whether to add bridges, stone stairs, and cautionary signs. These are all features that people expect in a park, but to enter a wildland trail you must recognize that there is some risk of tripping over a stone or a root or getting your feet wet. There is a risk of feeling lost because trail signs are few and inconspicuous. And—undeniably real—there is also a danger of injury or death when you rely on your own common sense, rather than warning signs and fences, to avoid standing too close to the edge of a cliff.
Is it possible for us to preserve wild areas when it seems we are overmatched by a vast consumer culture, celebrated in social media, that tries to define how we experience the world? Humbly and with a fragile hope I answer, “yes … if we are willing to see for ourselves and if we are willing to accept some risk in entering a wildland.” To see for yourself means being aware of social media’s power to value the beauty of a wildland only as an embellishment to the “ideal vacation.” My experience tells me that seeing natural beauty with your own vision can offer a much greater reward.
“Is it possible for us to preserve wild areas when it seems we are overmatched by a vast consumer culture, celebrated in social media, that tries to define how we experience the world?”
Richard Farrell grew up on Monhegan Island and in Clearwater, Florida. For the past five decades, he has lived on the island year-round as a carpenter/innkeeper/photographer/writer. He has served the town in a number of jobs. He has served on the Monhegan Island Sustainable Community Association (the affordable housing land trust) as a trustee, vice-president, and president. He has been a trustee and vice-president of Monhegan Associates (the land trust for preserving the island’s wildlands) and currently serves on the Associates’ Ecology Committee and Wildlands Committee.