Photograph by Talia Cole
The David Brower Center on Allston Way, just a few blocks from Berkeley High School, is opening with a new exhibit showcasing the extraordinary photographs of the Douglas Tompkins park.
Douglas Tompkins was a businessman turned environmental activist, a high school dropout turned millionaire. Tompkins is largely known for starting the company The North Face with his first wife, Susie Tompkins, hoping to be suppliers of high quality rock climbing and camping equipment.
With his second wife, he had a change of heart; he turned against capitalism and became an environmental activist. He bought over two million acres of land in both Chile and Argentina, earning him the title of one of the largest landowners in the world. Tompkins later donated the land to the government to make it into national parks.
At the exhibition, huge photographs of the sky, the earth, and water hung on every wall, showing the beautiful world that we often overlook. The exhibition made viewers hold their breath in complete amazement as they gazed at scenes from nature they have never witnessed before.
A set of exquisitely captured photographs of clouds spilling over the horizon hung right in front of me. A golden mountain lion about ten times bigger than the real thing watched me from behind twisted, gray branches. In the next room, aerial photos of Tompkins’ property hung, looking more like abstract paintings than the wilderness. Fog crept over orange hills, blue rivers ran through prairies, and beams of light shone through forests; beauty was everywhere.
It was all nature — there was not a human or man-made object in a single photograph.
I asked myself: why do humans continue to judge natural beauty to be unimportant? We search for it everywhere and we kill ourselves to achieve it.
Why should trying to maintain the environment be any less important? Tompkins tried to teach us that beauty is not useless, it does not go away, and that things are worth more than just their economic value.
The environment is currently in danger, with climate change as an ongoing problem. And one of the main goals visitors feel when attending the exhibition is that Tompkins wanted everyone to take a stand and change the planet. The photographs are stunning and viewers might be inclined to keep nature pristine. But no change will happen without action, which Tompkins and the photographer, Antonio Vizcaino, want the art to express.
When Antonio Vizcaino was speaking at the exhibition, he said, “I believe that when you look at a beautiful photo of a landscape, you feel connected. You feel that it’s become part of you.”
Vizcaino said that people connect to nature because, “We all want life, and we are life. When we see the beautiful landscapes full of life, we connect.”
He hopes that “Something will change, that society will appreciate the beauty of life and try to save the planet.”
Even though Tompkins owns the parks and land, the show was focused on Vizcaino trying to capture the beauty of nature in order to encourage people to protect the environment. Tompkins was a motivated environmental activist, and he knew how beautiful the world is.
He just wanted everyone to protect the world, care for the world, and treasure the world the way he did throughout his life.