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In his work as an environmentalist and an artist, the photographer sees an overarching theme. "The tree thing is the theme that runs through my life, from where I live [on a pristine hillside surrounded by healthy trees], to my father's profession [as an arborist] to my photography. I have a vision for trees as public art that exists on a dynamic timeline that will emerge over the next 100 years," he said as he sat in the spartan kitchen of his family's longtime home on Clayton Road.
"That is probably a good excuse for not spending more time on my art," he added with a rueful smile. "I seem to spend more time on this [conservation efforts] at the expense of my time in the darkroom, but there is such [development] pressure on these agricultural areas."
That is not to say he has not been productive in his art as well. Over the past three decades, Mr. Zetterstrom has produced two major portfolios, traveling extensively to collect images for the "Moving Point of View," which consumed his interest for more than 20 years, and the overlapping "Portraits of Trees" series that continues today. Each of these collections, examples of which can be found in major venues such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery and the Getty Museum of Art, found their basis in the environment.
"I still photograph trees," he said, "but now I am busy planting and siting trees and promoting Arbor Day programs in the region at the expense of my art," he said.
Mr. Zetterstrom is the founder of Elm Watch, a two-state grassroots organization that attempts to preserve the health of the remaining heritage elm stock at the same time that it plants new, Dutch elm disease-resistant specimens throughout the region. He was also instrumental in the development of an arboretum at the vocational agriculture center at Housatonic Valley Regional High School in Falls Village, where young elm trees are nurtured before being transplanted in other places.
The photographer has never been one to sit and wring his hands over perceived threats to the landscape he loves. Since his return to his hometown in 1970, following his education at the Colorado College and completion of two years of alternative service during the Vietnam War, he has embraced a number of causes.
"Environmental awareness was just coming on in the early 1970s," he recalled. "The first Earth Day was in 1970, and I got involved with [then-state Rep.] Toby Moffett's Connecticut Citizen's Action Group." The CCAG, founded by Mr. Moffett and Ralph Nader, is still active today, and fights for consumer and environmental justice in Connecticut. It had immediate success from its inauguration, racking up victories in protection of inland wetlands, passing a "Bottle Bill" that required recycling of redeemable plastic and glass bottles and more.
With his appetite whetted for environmental activism, and alarmed by a proposal that would have created a new Route 7 and Route 44 corridor through Northwest Connecticut, Mr. Zetterstrom dove into the issue of public transportation, fighting a battle to maintain the Harlem Valley railroad line with the aim of diminishing the need for more and larger roads.
He also fought to "Bust the Trust" in Connecticut, to broaden the use of the state's highway trust fund to include public transportation. In the process, he worked for the first time in conjunction with the Berkshire-Litchfield Environmental Council, a group of citizens that advocates for the natural environment of Berkshire and Litchfield counties, and the Housatonic Valley Association, which has a similar mission based in the Housatonic River watershed.
At approximately the same time, he became involved in efforts to stop a proposed hydroelectric project on Canaan Mountain that would have blasted away a large part of the mountaintop to create a huge reservoir, and would have flooded much of the valley below to form a lower reservoir.
By the mid-1970s, the hydroelectric plan was dropped as public reaction to the proposal intensified, and the efforts to "Bust the Trust" were successful. "That was my liberation," said Mr. Zetterstrom, who then concentrated his creative efforts on expanding his "Moving Point of View" portfolio. The photographs, shot from a moving car, were begun as an environmental statement while he was fighting over use of the highway trust. He shot thousands of images over a two-decade period, culling only 40 that met his exacting standards.
As he began to move beyond that series, his art-and his life-took a slightly different direction. While photographing a lone elm tree in a hilltop field in Sheffield, Mass., he realized he had been photographing the tree in different seasons for years. "I began thinking that we should do something to preserve it in ways other than on film," he recalled. "That was the nexus in 1999 of Elm Watch."
He noted that elms were planted across the nation in the mid-1800s, becoming the street tree in most towns and spawning the ubiquitous "Elm Streets" found in almost every town and city.
"In the 1830s, the Village Improvement Society in Sheffield planted 1,000 elms in one of the earliest attempts at environmental manipulation," Mr. Zetterstrom related. "Elms are such dramatic symbols, but they were doomed [by the introduction of Dutch elm disease, a disease that has killed more than half the elm stock nationwide since 1930]. Now, the National Arboretum has carefully developed disease-resistant elms, and we have planted 77 in Berkshire and Litchfield counties. That number will go to 80 before we end this season. In addition, we have numerical nuggets of heritage trees in the region that we have protected-although that is much more expensive and repetitive."
Although he admits that it is unlikely Elm Watch will ever achieve the 1,000-tree benchmark set by the Sheffield residents of 1830, the group makes steady progress, planting memorial trees and restoration trees in communities in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
Mindful of the lessons learned from the destruction of the elms, Mr. Zetterstrom has been active in Canaan in a tree-planting program that has added almost 80 trees to that town's landscape. Not all the trees are elms, however, because monocultures can be wiped out more easily than diversified plantings.
Mr. Zetterstrom commented on the continuing growth in the number of environmental agencies in the region and how their efforts overlap at the federal, state and local levels. That will be the subject of a talk he is to give Wednesday at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass., as part of the museum's exhibit, "Power of Place: The Berkshires." The talk, "Reciprocity: Place, Art, and Environmentalism," is set for 11 a.m., and addresses the influence of the landscape on his art and activism.
Mr. Zetterstrom will provide a 100-year perspective on environmental threats, and will illustrate the response of land preservation groups. His slide presentation will incorporate images from the current exhibition and will discuss development projects that would have dramatically altered the quality of the Berkshire landscape if it were not for regional and local land conservation efforts.
"So many of these efforts converge in the Berkshires and Connecticut," the photographer said. "There is a whole array of individual groups working toward the same goals."
He mentioned The Nature Conservancy, which attempts to preserve wildlife habitats by conserving large blocks of land; The Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which has maintained so many ridgelines, the HVA and its work in the river corridor, the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations, which preserves both natural and cultural sites, and the newly approved Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area, a 29-town district that stretches from Lanesboro, Mass., to Kent, and which will strive to protect and promote the cultural heritage of the region.
The efforts of these groups and many more are often complementary, and their successes often have unexpected results later on. "There are things that cycle back later," Mr. Zetterstrom observed. "We stopped the Route 44 corridor in the 1970s and later that land became the location for the North Canaan Greenway."
In addition to his talk Wednesday, Mr. Zetterstrom has photographs in the Berkshire Museum exhibit. The show includes works that range from the earliest known Berkshire landscape painted in the 1850s by George Inness to those of American Impressionists and contemporary artists. The show will run through Oct. 30. The museum is located at 39 South Street in Pittsfield, Mass. For more information, call 413-443-7171 or visit the Web site, www.berkshiremuseum.org.
