The news has been full of climate disasters this week: heat waves in the south, fires in Canada, floods in Vermont, predictions of climate change to the power of El Niño doom. And I’m painting bears in Alaska when I should be painting plankton. Am I fantasizing about worlds past? Do I need to escape from cell phones and paved roads and go hiking? Or is there more to it?
To be clear, I’m painting large landscapes that just happen to have bears in them because scale is important. Bears are a cool piece of the ecosystem, but they exist in very large landscapes. These paintings are inspired by photographs I took while working as an expedition guide on a small cruise ship in southeast Alaska. Alaskan landscapes are mammoth. Monumental. Fantastically huge. The scale of the mountains, glaciers, and fjords dwarves the biggest bears. That’s really saying something because Alaskan coastal brown bears are bigger than your average inland grizzly thanks to the all-you-can-eat salmon buffet that swims in from the Pacific Ocean every year.
Almost everything in Alaskan coastal ecosystems depends on salmon. Even trees near salmon streams grow bigger faster because they are fertilized by salmon carcasses. Salmon connect land and water, and they depend on healthy rivers and oceans. There is an ocean connection here, even if it’s less obvious than plankton.
Maybe we need images of charismatic megafauna with big-eyed cubs in beautiful places to inspire awe in us, as a reminder of the magnificence still out there, and the dimensions of wildness. It’s like taking a break from the news with an armchair awe-walk.
