'Reframing' Outdoor Spaces

Summers in BC are stunning. Spending time hiking outdoors is part of the reason I moved there. I often document my experiences hiking to send to my family, and, as I mentioned in my previous blog post, I post photos on Instagram to connect. As cringy as it is to admit, the images I post curate a particular identity, often associated with my hobbies and friends, wanting others to see and celebrate this accomplishment I hold as a treasured memory of my experience. John Ury and Jonas Larsen note in their book The Tourist Gaze 3.0 that “photographs do not only make places visible, perform-able, and memorable; places are also sculptured materially as simulations of idealised photographs as ‘postcard places.” [1] My Instagram feed and reels are littered with these “postcard places” that often have me adding to a list of dream backpacking trips. But what I want to focus on today is how these “postcard places” - the location of each photograph, the backdrop, and the framing of our experiences - communicate a story, impacting the landscape’s own story.

A couple of years ago, I stumbled across a six-chapter article series Radio Canada journalist Justine de l’Église wrote called “Spoils of #nature on Instagram,” which discussed engagement with the outdoors and the use of social media in those spaces. The first chapter focused on a provincial park I am familiar with, as it is very close to where I call home - Joffre Lakes Park. The chapter takes readers to the Jofre Lakes, a system of three lakes that, as de l’Église notes, is quite photographable. The journalist describes this ‘Instagramable’ moment where hikers can stand on the edge of one of the lakes and, while maintaining balance, walk a couple of metres out on a floating log. Admittedly, it makes a beautiful picture. But what intrigues me is how engagement with these lakes has changed. Through a combination of tagging the photograph's location, Instagram algorithms and Covid-19 spurring newfound outdoor appreciation, the hike spiked in popularity. With the increased traffic, BC Parks found that hikers parked along Highway 99 if they couldn’t secure a spot in the parking lot, which is quite dangerous on windy mountain roads. Additionally, park rangers found increased garbage left behind on trails and more significant evidence of off-trail hiking, disrupting the sensitive flora. [2]

It is amazing that people are getting outdoors, engaging with nature, and creating memories, yet how can the educational piece be implemented to spark actionable awareness of the human impact on the environment? A similar question has been asked and analyzed in museum spaces. Museums not only want to get visitors in the door, but there is a goal of creating dialogue and memorable conversation about the visit as a fully embodied experience, ultimately creating educational growth and change. [3] When surveying museum-goers in a handful of countries, museums found that visitors to their spaces wanted to feel like they belonged there. They wanted to see themselves reflected in the room they were visiting. [4]

Similarly, provincial and national parks, with these picture-perfect moments, enable people to curate a sense of belonging in that physical location as a form of social stratification. Humans want to remember themselves as belonging, but what aspects of themselves? When looking at a picture, what feeling is attached that helps curate a story? Is it only the story of the human that is amplified, or is the story of the physical place also strengthened, or is it distorted?

Humans try to preserve a memory, but what about the memory held within the landscape? Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, reminds us that humanity’s interactions with the earth “bears the scars [...] and the echoes of our stories” as a participant in the story of life. [5] With this perspective, how can we embody a shift in our engagement with spaces, whether national, provincial, or heritage sites, as the construction of self and reconstruction of place alter the experience and the physical landscape?

The physical landscape continues to shift and change through natural processes but also shifts in response to climate change, bearing the scars of humanity. Scholar Stef Craps addresses the stories attached to the wounds of place through her work “Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in Anthropocene.” Crap focuses on grief related to environmental impacts and losses and challenges people to engage with the destruction going on around them. She believes “coming to terms with ecological grief can inspire efforts to work through it and reinvigorate practices of environmental advocacy.” [6]

Included as an article focal point of ecological grief was a funeral held in 2019 - a funeral for the Icelandic Glacier, Okjӧkull. The funeral was not only meant to create space to grieve the loss of the glacier but was meant to acknowledge the environmental impact that humans have on the earth itself. Where people would once peer up at the glistening glacier, now what is left is what Crapp has described as “a memorial plaque warning of the impact of climate change.” [7] The plaque itself challenges those in the present to consider their future impacts, even blatantly calling out the reader as responsible for the death of the glacier itself. [8]

What purpose did the funeral hold? Craps describes the funeral as follows:

Glacier funerals expose and counter this striking omission, calling on us to go beyond approaches to mourning that privilege human bodies. They dramatically scale up the magnitude of the kinds of losses to be mourned, both spatially and temporally. They extend grievability to geological features that not only occupy vast territories but whose demise results from long-drawn-out processes that transcend the duration of a single human life. This grief is dealt with, however, in the same way the loss of human life is—that is, through funerals. Vanished glaciers are treated as lost lives, environmental bodies deserving a mourning process mirroring those usually reserved for human lives. [9]

The act of mourning environmental destruction “reduces complacency and inaction;” it forces people to take responsibility. [10] Do people want to belong and participate in grief, or instead continue to observe the suffering? Interestingly, photographs of the plaque calling people to grieve went viral. [11] I haven’t tried to find images of the plaque on Instagram to read what people captioned their photographs. Still, I genuinely wonder if the plaque changed how people engaged with the landscape and opened people’s eyes to what they learned while spending time in nature.

This picture is from my 2022 summer hiking trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. According to the US National Parks Service, in 1850, there were roughly 80 glaciers in the park. An aerial survey done in 2015 found only 26 glaciers that met glacier size qualifications. What about now, almost a decade later?

Provincial and national parks are places of enjoyment. I don’t want enjoyment to disappear, but it doesn’t have to be ignorant or complacent joy because these spaces deserve meaningful reciprocal engagement. How people engage with heritage sites and parks as a form of entertainment, as a means to the building blocks of curated identity, does not remove the environmental destruction and barriers set up for the rest of wildlife to hurdle over as they shift their lives, grieving their habitat loss.

There is a space for grief, but grief doesn’t have to be an infinite, overpowering experience that cements us into inaction and hopelessness. Planting roots in hopelessness robs us of our human agency but also “blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth.” [12] For restoration to occur in these spaces, Kimmerer challenges us to determine what land means. We need to ask ourselves if land is a commodity, essentially a prop in our own stories, even our own Instagram page.

I believe we can see ourselves reflected in nature around us, and yes, we still enjoy the outdoors as a space for leisure. A photograph can tell a story, and it can "make places visible," but this "performable" digital space can leave us feeling empty and unfulfilled. Personally, that's not the feeling I want to associate with my experiences in nature. [13] So maybe the next time we snap a picture and want to create a story of an outdoor adventure, we can reflect and consider that “restoring land without restoring a relationship is an empty exercise.” [14] So, let's consider not only how we restore our relationship with the land but also how we are engaging in re-storying the land through the constructed photographs of ourselves.

End Notes

[1] John Urry and Jonas Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2011), 142.

[2] Justine de l’Église, “Spoils of #nature on Instagram,” Beside Media, Accessed October 22, 2023. https://beside.media/dossier/spoils-of-nature-on-instagram/

[3] Marilyn G. Hood, “Staying Away: Why People Choose not to Visit Museums,” Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift, ed by G. Anderson, (New York: Altamira, 2004), 156-157.

[4] Laurajane Smith, Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites, (New York: Routledge, 2021), 119.

[5] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 7.

[6] Stef Craps, "Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene," in Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches, edited by Brett Ashley Kaplan (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 69.

[7] Craps, "Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene," 72.

[8] Craps, "Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene," 74.

[9] Craps, "Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene," 73.

[10] Craps, "Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene," 71.

[11] Craps, "Ecological Mourning: Living with Loss in the Anthropocene," 71.

[12] Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, 328.

[13] Urry and Larsen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0, 142.

[14] Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, 338.