New growth in logged forests inspires photographer's hope

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Finally tonight, a story from PBS News Student Reporting Labs. That’s our high school journalism training program. They take us to meet a photographer from North Bend, Washington, who shares his passion for the natural world and highlights how trees that were logged more than a century ago can be surprising sources of inspiration and hope.

Scott Rinckenberger, Nature Photographer: To me, this work matters because the entire world is this interconnected web, and everything relies on everything else for the system to work properly.

And it’s been humanity’s fatal flaw that we have not fundamentally understood that in a lot of ways, and we have taken and we have taken and we have taken and we have undermined the very sort of foundation of how we survive.

I want people, especially younger people, right now to feel empowered. I want people to feel like there is a future to be created that can be better than the one that’s currently being proposed.

I consider my gallery a sanctuary in the same way that being out in the woods or being out in the mountains can be a sanctuary. It’s given me also a place where we can come together and gather around shared values. For instance, here at the gallery, earlier this year, there was an attempt to sell-off a lot of public lands.

And so we had a big letter-writing event where hundreds of people from the community came and wrote letters. We provided all the beautiful postcards with images of the places that were being threatened and all the postage. And it was an amazing opportunity to take a stand.

The show that I currently have in the gallery, The Forest Abides, it features photographs of old growth stumps that were logged around the turn of the last century and then subsequent new growth that’s happening on those landscapes.

I like to think of the photographs in The Forest Abides show as a set of portraits, because there’s such an individualism to each of these trees, but there’s this sort of very individual way in which the forest is regenerating.

Yes, so it’s got three different trees growing out of it, and then you can see that still got the springboard notch that shows that loggers were up there climbing around on this cliff to cut that tree down, which is pretty wild to think about.

And so each of them I think of in terms of these really interesting character studies. And it’s really hard for nature to speak for itself, so it takes this sort of collective of people who do study it and who do understand it and who do care about it and who do love it to tell the stories.

And I think that, if they could talk to us, the way that I’m reading it is that they would say, slow down and be patient. Just watch.