@BanffNP's Wildlife Cameras: What is the Meaning of This? (I Ask, Nicely, in a Totally Non-Confrontational Way)

This past week, thanks to the Twitter, I came across this new video montage created by Parks Canada...

...It's a time-lapse video of a year in the life of one of their (relatively new) wildlife cameras, set up throughout Banff National Park, and tended now and then by the rangers.

I love it, right down to the well-chosen Creative Commons Soundtrack.

Not only is it compelling, fly-on-a-tree-trunk viewing for the nature lover (ahem), but it's a fascinating glimpse at the possible applications of 'watching' wild animals in this way.

Granted, it's kind of ominous, too. Urban/suburban/semi-rural humans are already under surveillance 24/7...and we now extend the honour to the animals? There's ecological value to the surveillance project, though...and park rangers hardly conjure suspicious feelings in me, so, OK.

Plus, Parks Canada refers to it as a 'privileged view', which is rather poetic, I reckon.

But it put me in mind, as so many things do, of something Marshall McLuhan said.  It was during a TV debate with Norman Mailer that I reviewed prior to including it in a program of public screenings celebrating the centenary of his birth this month at the CBC Broadcasting Centre in Toronto.  With the launch of Earth-orbiting satellites, McLuhan said:

'The planet is no longer nature. It's no longer the external world. It's now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.'

(By the way...this part of the debate is also transcribed, to different ends, in Jeet Heer's recent, invigorating article in the Walrus, too: http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.07-media-divine-inspiration/1/)

Yes, yes...the content of an artwork, in this case, one courtesy of Parks Canada, with the intention of fascinating us, giving us the 'courage' to sit in complete safety before our screens, while a predatory cat saunters by in the dead of night, eyes ablaze.

Engaging us in the notion of nature, employing a language (surveillance), and an editing style that even the most citified soul can find a way into.

Would we stream a live feed of one of these b&w cameras in hopes of spotting a moose by chance? Not likely. It wouldn't come close to conjuring the sensory experience of the real thing.

It's in the midst of the voyeuristic excitement of watching a montage of wild things be wild that I realize - yes, something has been lost: The idea of that place where a tree falls, and there is nobody around to hear it.

But it's already happened, it was underway decades ago...and it's still... happening. Satellites swarming; cameras in the trees.

It's a privileged view.