Saving the Landscape with Pictures?

My blog has come back to life!
One of the first ideas to write about following my trip to Massachusetts is, what role do the 400+ photographs play in the process of making my work and in the process of preserving the land? It is pretty clear at this point that the land will be sold and developed into housing. What remains of the woods will be the digital photographs and video that I took this summer. I find myself confronted with a strange question, do the photographs contribute to the destruction of the landscape by providing a certain degree of "preservation" in that they are a document of the place? So if the forest is uprooted, should I destroy the photographs along with it?