The “Advocates for the Land: Photography in the American West” exhibit at the University’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art inspired museum Director David Turner to host a panel on Sept. 7 about how to read photography and use it to understand the landscapes of the West.
“The goal was to try to take the issues presented in the photos upstairs and see how we live in the landscape and how we can manage it better in the future,” said Turner, who was also the panelist moderator and curator of “Advocates for the Land.”
“I hope it makes people well aware of how to read photos … so we get a better understanding of where we live. It is a kind of visual education,” Turner said.
The first panel speaker, Chairwoman Sue Bowers of the Society of American Foresters, gave a brief introduction to her work as a forester.
“There’s a lot that goes on that we can better understand,” Bowers said about the forest industry. Bowers’ task was to identify how she visualized her ideal landscape and share it at the symposium.
“My ideal landscape as a forester is one that can deliver today and maintain its ability to deliver in the future all that the forest provides for us,” she said. “The challenge is: How do we have our cake and eat it, too?”
The difficulty in balancing economic, social and political values of landscapes, whether forested land or wetlands, remained an underlying theme throughout each panelists’ speech.
Dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon State University Hal Salwasser asked, “How do we find the right balance between what our physical lives depend on and what our spiritual lives depend on?”
Noting that a third of the original forests have been lost since 1600, Salwasser’s ideal landscape was one that “contributes as appropriately to its well-being capacity of life” while still providing the resources humans need.
Panelist David Bayles was assigned to speak on how to manage a landscape for multiple uses.
“My conclusion was we don’t know how to manage a landscape for multiple uses” because the concept of balance “is a failed objective,” he said.
“Landscapes are ecologically, socially and politically in the worst shape that they have been in 30 years,” Bayles said.
He suggested that there is an easier solution to landscape management.
“We should manage ourselves,” Bayles said. “It’s easier to manage people than it is landscapes.”
The last panelist, associate professor in the ecology and evolutionary department at the University, Scott Bridgham, does basic research “to see how nature ticks.”
“At some point we’ll have to take a utilitarian viewpoint and balance that with the eco-centrist viewpoint,” Bridgham said.
He suggested two solutions to the problem of deteriorated landscapes.
“Reduce the increase in human population, and maybe even decrease it; and use resources more scarcely.”
The general feel of the panel was that there is not enough being done to restore current landscapes to the beauty displayed in the photographs in the museum gallery.
Responding to a question regarding the priorities of landscapes and what can be done to improve them, Bayles concluded the panel by stating, “There is a paradigm of saying we can deal a poker game where everybody wins, and I don’t think we can do that.”

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