Letter To The Lakes

Tom White

Tom is a freelance journalist and photographer based in the North East, his work has taken him across the UK as well as around the world.

tomwhitephotos.co.uk

It’s hard to think of a point in my lifetime when the focus on humanity’s impact on the environment was more at the fore than now, and long overdue it is. Recently I watched “Don’t Look Up”, the new Netflix feature length film satirising the climate crisis by depicting the reaction to a giant comet hurtling towards earth, and it brought home once again how devastating and ludicrous our response has been to the damage we are doing.

As photographers who spend so much time in the landscape, it seems to me we have a deep responsibility to set an example in what we can all do to mitigate our impact on the earth, as well as sharing and engaging with photography that focuses on climate change. In this desperate context that we live in, I also find it staggering that so many photographers seem keen to pour thousands of kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere just to make a quick buck through selling NFTs. Although that discussion is probably for another time…(see Tim's editorial for issue 247.)

Nature’s ability to adapt and regenerate does give us some hope, and on a much smaller level, this can be seen from disasters such as Chernobyl or the scarring of landscapes from industry. For many years I have enjoyed photographing abandoned slate mines across the Lake District as they have been reclaimed by nature, the slow creep of regeneration producing a strangely beautiful concoction.