LOCALadk Magazine

LOCALadk 27 beneath the playfulness is a diagnosis of civilization that he presses hard. "Our world is drowning in trash," he has said, "while we are running out of natural re- sources. I spend my life showing the world that beau- tiful things can be made out of trash." The math he offers is staggering: in the United States alone, twelve million tons of scrap wood are sent to landfills every year — enough, by his calculation, to build 2.5 million troll sculptures. "If we would understand the full meaning of this sentence," he has argued — "that trash equals trea- sure, and trash equals wealth and opportunity, then we would understand our world is actually not drown- ing in trash, it's filled with wealth and opportunity to build a better world." Everything he makes demonstrates this. His trolls are assembled from old pallets, reclaimed barn lumber, construc- tion scrap, used bourbon barrels, windfall branches, stones, shells, and whatever local donors and volunteers bring to the site. The heads, hands, and feet are built in his Copenhagen studio and shipped to each location; the bodies are constructed in place, over a mat- ter of weeks, by his team working alongside community volunteers. At Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, North Carolina, the build drew 336 volunteers over three weeks, requiring 24 tons of lumber, 50,000 screws, and 17 tons of old bourbon barrels for a single troll's 620 - foot tail. When a site opens its volunteer signup, servers crash. The Facebook group Dambo Troll Hunters has more than 160,000 members who travel specifically to find and photograph the sculptures — and who frequently volunteer to help build them. This, too, is part of the philos- ophy. "I can give an example," Dambo has said, "but it's the whole world that has to waste no more." The act of building together, from materials the community has collected and donated, makes the message embodied and local. It belongs to the place. A forest that almost wasn't There is a particular reason why Dambo's trolls, with their message that what we call waste is actually wealth, that what we are tempted to discard is actual- ly alive with possibility, feel so precisely right for the Adirondacks. This landscape nearly learned that lesson too late. Small-scale logging began in the Adirondacks as early as 1803, when the region's great stands of white pine were first targeted for timber. Through the 1820s and 1830s, loggers stripped the perimeter for- ests and pushed steadily inward, following the water- ways with their rafts of felled spruce and their porta- ble sawmills. By the 1860s, the scale of extraction had alarmed at least one observer. The environmentalist George Perkins Marsh, writing in 1864, captured the moral emergency with a sentence that still rings: "We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much." Marsh was not merely worried about scenery. He un- derstood that the forests were infrastructure — that they held the watersheds, filtered the rivers, and mod- erated the climate of an entire region. To treat them as expendable raw material was not just aesthetically destructive; it was potentially catastrophic. Others were listening. In 1868, surveyor Verplanck Colvin began warning about the depletion of Ad- irondack resources, and by 1873 he had recommended the creation of a state forest preserve to protect what remained of the watershed. The Adirondack Park was estab- lished in 1892, and two years later, in 1894, New York state ratified one of the most remarkable con- servation statutes in American history: a constitutional amend- ment declaring that state forest preserve lands "shall be forever kept as wild forest lands," never to be leased, sold, or timbered. What nearly became a stripped and silted industrial zone became, instead, a living demonstration that a landscape given back its wildness will recover its abun- dance. Trolls on the trail Into this landscape, this summer, come the trolls. TROLLS: Save the Humans, a temporary traveling exhibit, is the latest chapter in what Dambo describes as a world- wide fairytale, written one installation at a time. The six trolls at The Wild Center carry individual names, personalities, and stories — each one a character in a larger folk tale that Dambo has authored and that un- folds across the trails of the Center's 115-acre campus. In the mythology Dambo has constructed around this exhibition, these six are young activists. They have watched from the forest. Trolls, according to his story, live for thousands of years and carry long memories of the world, as humans have grown increasingly discon- nected from nature. They have come, not to judge, but to teach. Each one models a different form of atten- Thomas Dambo creates sculptures of trolls out of recycled and reclaimed materials.

• Cover