autumn leaves
Toronto. The landscape photographers recorded the great outdoors over the years allowing us to see the changes – by season and by time.
Mountains change, leaves fall, forests are lost. All carefully recorded by landscape photographers over the years. Without the patience of these photographers, we might never know how much the landscape has changed.
My first realization of the impact of climate change was seeing the Columbia Ice Field out west. As we stopped for lunch, we noticed the glacier across the road. When we went over and walked the glacier, we were warned to avoid any crevice in the glacier since we would die of thermal exposure long before any rescue attempt. And this was 20 years ago in mid summer! Markers showed the lower edge of the glacier by year and just how dramatic the change was since the middle of the last century. The highway actually traversed an area that was once ice!
Some landscape photos appear in books and magazines, others in collections and archives and libraries. Visit your collection or the nearby archives/libraries and take a careful look at progress through the eyes of a landscape photographer.
NB. The title is a riff on the name of a 1957 TV show, “Leave it to Beaver“.
