Becoming a Placekeeper

Most environmental advocacy is about using less: Less fossil fuel, less plastic, less water. That’s important! But giving things up is a hard sell when you’re not in touch with what you’re saving. There are many great programs and camps for connecting you with nature. Placekeeping is an app to help you do it wherever you are.

Explore

Explore your world – near your home, where you work or go to school, or even on vacation.

Take photos. Today, the average American takes 20 photos per day, mostly of family and friends. You probably also take photos of typical postcard scenes: deep vistas, urban landscapes, to record that you were there.

Try to bring your focus closer. Look for things that are different. Maybe it’s a flower blooming; maybe it’s overgrown weeds where you think they shouldn’t be. Above all, think about places that you or someone else might return to.

These are the sort of places we’re looking for. Built is any human-made structure, such as a plaza, building, monument, or memorial. Cultivated is ground that is planted and tended, like a garden or other managed planting. Wild is natural area that grew in largely on its own, unmanaged. Edge is where two of these meet.

Cultivated spots can be public or private. Many private gardens face the street or sit in front of stores, within reach from public ground. Take photos of what you see.

Return

Try to repeat a visit over the year; or someone else can.

There’s a niche practice in photography simply called Repeat Photography. A prime example of natural landscapes comes from the US Geological Survey’s (originally Desert Laboratory) Repeat Photography Collection. The writer and documentarian Camilo José Vergara took repeat photos over many decades (it was hosted for many years by Rutgers, but no longer online; the full collection is now at the Library of Congress).

A crowdsourced project named Chronolog was launched in 2017; it provides anchored camera holders at specific locations - 1,500 sites worldwide. Our aim is to allow you to pick a spot without waiting for it to be set up.

In the 1995 film Smoke, Harvey Keitel plays a Brooklyn shopkeeper who photographs the same street corner every morning for years. He explains his quirky habit to a customer looking at the photo collection: “It’s just one little part of the world but things take place there too, just like everywhere else. It’s a record of my little spot.” That’s the mindset we want.

Keep

Let’s go beyond merely photographing a spot. Many need tending, too. We’re looking to find who the existing stewards are – typically municipal groups, garden clubs, scouts – or otherwise solicit new ones, particularly for public or edge places.

Follow-up with the Conservation Board or Garden Club in the area (who might be stewarding nearby sites for best practices). Typically, get a sense which plants are well-behaved, and which are taking over through overgrowth. Often these might fall across native/nonnative lines, but not always (Duckweed is a native aquatic plant which can overcome ponds).

Our basic approach:

Respect the wild. Tend the touched. Remove the harm. Tidy the edges.

See our guidelines and examples.