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Joe: Hello, and welcome to Communicating Climate Change. I’m Joe Cone with the Oregon Sea Grant program at Oregon State University. I’m talking today with photographer and journalist Gary Braasch about his new book, Earth Under Fire, How Global Warming is Changing the World, published recently by University of California Press. This is a slight departure from our previous conversations with climate communication researchers, but I thought it might be stimulating to have a change in perspective. So here we have a practitioner of climate communication, a well-respected photojournalist and winner of the Ansel Adams award for conservation photography.
Welcome Gary. A book like Earth Under Fire -- 270 pages, 5 detailed chapters by you, additional essays contributed by climate scientists, 100 color photographs and illustrations -- is surely years in the making. As a journalist, perhaps you can begin by sharing how, when, and why you got started.
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Gary: Well, I ultimately got started as a nature photographer. Not only my love of nature and my interest in natural history, but because when I finally picked up a camera – and I was actually already out of college when I picked up a camera for the first time -- there was a lot of magic there. And for quite a while, despite the fact that I have a Master's Degree in Journalism, I focused very strongly just on the imagery.
Most of my work has been for environmental issues, natural history, science and so on. And so when along the way I started picking up information about climate change, that it was actually happening, noticeable by the scientists and so forth, this was through the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Finally in Alaska in the late ‘90s, in the space of just a few days I witnessed the major migration move by eighty thousand caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And I had already heard from scientists that they were beginning to see that the seasons were shifting; the seasons on which the caribou evolved into and what they rely on for the timing of having their calves, and everything. And within a couple of days on my way out of Alaska I flew into Prudhoe Bay, which is a little slice of northern New Jersey industrial land slapped down on the tundra. And, everything that I had been learning about global warming and the effects of fossil fuels and the emissions into the atmosphere suddenly really clicked in real time. There were these animals . . . effects were happening on their landscape because of what was changing in the atmosphere and it was because of too much fossil fuel which was being extracted really less than a hundred miles away.
So at that point I looked around and I actually did not see very many good photographs about the actual science of climate. And so as an environmental photojournalist, I already had my contacts in the publishing world and I knew how to talk to scientists, I hoped. So I just started emailing leading scientists whose papers had appeared in the journals. And I proceeded that way. That started in 1999, and most of this project proceeded by following the actual published peer reviewed science and advice from some of those scientists to try to paint a picture of where in the world climate change was being studying, where it was…where the effects were seen. And increasingly now, as we go into the…into this new century and where more and more people are aware of climate change, I'm interested in the bigger picture in terms of what's happening with our civilizations, what's happening with our cities and what are the tools that we have to change the…to change what we're doing.
So the book became just that. It's a digest of the science. It's illustrated science. Basically, 22 countries, all seven continents. There were about 50 scientists that were prime in advising me and that I reported on, but actually 170 scientists total is the number of people that I contacted, in one way or the other, to make sure this book was accurate.
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Joe: In the very last paragraph of this big book you wrote: “The goal of this work has been to witness and provide rare documentation of climate changes in the world.” Tell us what you meant by “witness” – just seeing?
Gary: Well, witnessing starts with seeing. But I think witnessing has the connotation of someone who brings back a story, who brings back something that they've seen and tells other people. That’s what I've tried to do. So I've gone and seen. I've gone to…I've been underwater with scientists who are studying the coral reefs. I've been at the top of mountains in the Alps, fifteen thousand feet. Also in the Andes. I've been beyond the Antarctic Circle and beyond the Arctic Circle to see what's happening there.
Of course, I did interview the scientists and I kept a lot of notes and I read their papers and I got advice from other people, so eventually I did have these both personal stories about what I saw and what it was like to be there. . . . So, yes, I'm bringing back stories and eyewitness accounts from places where climate change is absolutely being seen right now.
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Joe: In your goal for the book you also said you wanted to “provide rare documentation,” and to my eye at least, you show things that I think are rare and will startle many viewers. I’d like you to describe a couple of them. Tell us what this two-page picture of a large group of people is about and why you included it.
Gary: Well, the simplest explanation is that it shows a bunch of people standing along the…a roaded edge of a peninsula of dirt, or a road which is what it actually is, sticking out into water. It's from Bangladesh. And Bangladesh is, of course, in the delta of the Brahmaputra and the Ganges River, the largest delta in the world. A hundred and forty million people. It is the largest nation that is right at sea level and, of course, threatened by everything that's coming across the bay.
They are known for huge floods and huge cyclones already. But I wanted to go there when the weather was relatively normal, to get an idea so how close do these people live to the edge, because we've heard the idea of sea level rise coming up two to three feet, maybe more, some scientists say now. What does that actually mean? And it might be more difficult to see that in the United States, although you can see it. But what about the people who are not really causing the problem, who have very little income and very little industry and who are right on the edge?
So, I went to Bangladesh to try to illustrate that. And I really didn't now exactly how I would do it, but the minute I got there and got on a boat I realized that, yes, there's really only about a meter from where the water level is to the beginning of the first level of rice paddies and the levels where the…where the villages are. And so this particular picture came about out of mostly the curiosity of the Bangladeshees. When I first saw this scene, It is a road that's been eroded away. And, it used to extend out several more kilometers into the river. The erosion is natural. But if you imagine a lot more depth of water, the erosion is gonna happen faster; that's the message here.
I had a boat that didn't…that looked like a normal country boat. I had leased it from some contacts and there was a family onboard that was basically supporting me. But the minute I said, let's go back and photograph that again, and the boat made a big turn in the river people noticed and more and more people came out. They saw me and before I knew it there more and more people streaming down from the village to see what was going out on the river.
Eventually, it got to be eighty to ninety people standing there. And that's an interesting number, because it turns out that because of their level of income – only about four hundred dollars a year on average – and lack of any really big heavy industry, that most people do not have vehicles. That it takes that many Bangladeshees, on average, to equal the CO2 output of a single American. The ratio is about ninety to one.
So this picture has additional symbology of these are the kind of people in the world who are not causing the problem. The problem of climate change, in terms of the heaviest output of CO2 and methane is being caused by a handful of nations, 30 nations out of the 190 in the United Nations. And this is one of the nations that has a very, very low output. And yet, here are all these people literally on the edge. And, gonna be more and more threatened by sea level rise, even if there are no more heavy storms.
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Joe: It’s a very striking image, and by the way, I should tell listeners that the podcast web site provides a link back to your own web site, where they can view the photos you’re talking about now. The second one I’d like your comment on is the last one, on the back jacket of the book. It raises a number of questions.
Gary: This is a picture of a mountain scene, and there is a hand sticking out. And the hand is hold an old…a black and white picture. And, the story of this is that this is the Andes. Very near Mount Huascaran, which is one of the tallest peaks in the Peruvian Andes. Glaciated landscape. In the 1930's, a group of mountaineers were exploring this area and one of them had cameras and he took a series of what are very famous… mountaineering-wise are very famous and geologically they're very famous, because they have been used as a baseline about what was it like back there in the thirties when so few pictures were being made of the Andes.
So I managed to acquire one of these prints and I carried it with me to the Andes. We're at about fifteen thousand feet. And I'm off the trail, for sure. I'm up on the slope of a mountain and I'm basically walking along holding this black and white picture and looking across at the…It's, obviously, the right landscape and the same one, but what exactly was the angle, how high was this photographer.
This is part of my…of my early idea – which has been repeated by many people now – that glaciers are very sensitive monitors of the temperature and changes in rainfall and the changes of the amount of time during the year when there's no snow falling on them as they're melting back. Though around the world it's…scientifically, it's absolutely a significant number. It's something way above ninety percent of the glaciers of the world, of the hundred and sixty-some thousand glaciers…major glaciers in the world that are receding. And some of them are receding at an accelerating pace as we go into this century. And, the old records of what they once looked like have been used by many people, especially scientists to sort of judge what…where we have been. So this was my attempt at this.
And, I went to the Andes on another job and manage to tack on this trip up into the Cordillera Blanca and found that I was able to find this position and make a shot. And it turns out the glacier has moved back about a kilometer and is almost gone. It used to fill a small little valley. The valley now has two little lakes in it and there's a tiny little patch of ice hanging on the headwall, and that's all that's left of it. And, significance of glaciers in the tropics is much stronger even than glaciers here in the Northwest and in the temperate zone. The reason is, is that in many places in the tropics the glaciers are absolutely the only water supply of many villages and in terms of even big cities like Lima and Quito, they get a significant amount of their water, way more than seventy-five percent in the dry season from glacier melt. And, indeed, all the glaciers that feed their reservoirs are also shrinking at a very rapid pace. And so this is a very serious issue to millions of people around the world. If you count the people in the Himalayas whose glaciers are much more extensive but also shrinking who, again, are dependent on that water, we're talking billions of people who are immediately affected by a shrinkage of glaciers.
We haven't seen very much water shortage yet, because the glaciers are just starting to get to the point where they will get so small that that will actually happen. But it is happening and there's no sign of it decreasing. That's an important point, that it's not leveling off in any way.
The second thing about these glaciers is that they contain a record of climate that includes how heavy the monsoons were. They include a great deal of dust from the center part of the planet. They offer a different reading on the history of the earth, compared to the glacier cores that most people may have heard of which came from Antarctica or Greenland. And so, this is like a library that is being essentially on fire or being, you know, destroyed.
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Joe: You’re listening to Communicating Climate Change and a conversation with photojournalist Gary Braasch. So, Gary, this series of podcasts has been reflecting on how those of us who communicate with the public about climate can improve our effectiveness. My guess is that you may have had a framework which guided the communication choices you made for your book? I mean, you organized it, you made certain choices, presumably to be more effective in communicating about this topic. Have you thought about that, and would you share what your ideas are?
Gary: In the first place, I did have pretty amazing photographs. I was not sure when I started this what I was going to see in every location. And I certainly was not sure whether or not I could make pictures that actually said, without much captioning, that this is about climate change, or about…or about change in general. That was a really big question. In a way it's like when, you know, when you read Ansel Adams on photography, you know, he talks about landscape photography, and much of that is just you're just photographing the air. You can't really move and change your aspect very much. You're given this particular presentation at a particular moment and it's up to the photographer to try to use it.
Climate change is sort of like that and it happens over quite a bit of time. The change is subtle, but it adds up. And a lot of it has to do with what's in the air and in the oceans. And so the first thing I knew from my previous work was that giving people a view of what the scientists look like, or the critter that they were working on, or the landscape where the study took place, vastly increased both their interest in what was happening and their ability to sort of imagine the facts were presented to them how it fit together. I learned that with my work with the old growth forest.
So, first of all, when I went to Antarctica I was really lucky. I got an assignment early to go to Antarctica, and that gave me a real leg up because Antarctica is a fantastic, incredible, most exciting landscape. And when I was able to take those magnificent picture of these glaciers on the edge of Antarctica with huge crevasses and extended calving fronts, and put that together with the scientific fact that most of the glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula, the edges of Antarctica, are moving faster and are putting more ice into the water, this becomes a picture that is both exciting and you get what's happening, first of all visually, but then you understand from a very short caption that this is a picture of fast moving glaciers which have been connected to climate change.
And so that's most of what I did. And then I took pictures of the scientists, hopefully on scene, using the tools that they're using, doing what they're doing, and those have probably been the most successful pictures.
I made an incredible trip to Tuvalu, which is a tiny island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, eleven thousand people that is like Bangladesh, is right on the edge. In fact, they're even closer to the water there than Bangladesh is. And they are actually already suffering in terms of saltwater from higher sea levels coming up in the roots of their plants and starting to get into their water supplies. So this is a country, and a United Nations member, and everything, that actually…absolutely does face the possibility that within this century, maybe even sooner, that they would find that their land is no longer habitable. This is a huge story.
Everything that I have in there has some kind of reference, mostly in good science. There's a certain amount of grey matter in terms of reports form government agencies, and so forth, in there. But, we back everything up and tried to make the language readable and accessible, but to try to make clear that from these individual examples in the photographs and in my…and in my own personal narrative, my personal witness, there is all this absolute science and real observations around the world that are part of the same …that indicate that this same kind of effect is happening many other places. And, therefore, we build this picture which some people say is still…I tried not to be depressing but, in fact, you get through the first three and a half chapters, or so forth, and it's a lot of bad news, in terms of all the changes that are happening.
We need to change. Well, exactly what would that change look like? Who is already doing this change? How possible is it? And what is the short-term future? And, my ending message is, is that we have control over a bunch of our energy use and we should be moving very rapidly to making these changes. It will take quite a while to make a complete changeover. We're gonna need some new inventions. We're gonna need a lot more money moving in that direction. But, in fact, we can make these changes, because people have already made them. The technology is already there and they absolutely do work. And, this is a significant message.
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Joe: What are you learning as you go around speaking about the book and making presentations? What insights do you have about either the specifics of the content that you're presenting, or the nature of the kind of reception you're getting? You’re contacting the public in a direct way about climate, and your observations would be of interest to other communicators.
Gary: Well, first of all, my reception has been very good everywhere. There remains, what I think is a small number of people, but nevertheless very vocal, who for one reason or another do not believe that climate change is actually happening, or that humans are involved in causing it. And I have talked to many of them. They email me, because I have an active website. And some of them are just intractable. There's something in them that makes them not want to believe it and that's…I guess that's where you have to leave it. But by far the majority already understand it's an issue, are looking for things that they can do and many of them, when I have hands raised about who's changed light bulbs and who has a high mileage car, and so forth, more and more people are raising their hands. And people are actively looking for something to do.
The other big thing, just briefly, is that I don't think anybody, or very few people, understand really all of the depth and the breadth of the change that is going to have to happen. It's not gonna happen overnight. It's gonna change a great deal. But, we're still gonna need energy coming into our homes and businesses. And, it will just be from a different source, but many things are going to have to change in a step-wise…and it needs to be planned by some…by people who know already how to build infrastructure and how to run a nation.
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Joe: You wrote that essentially we can make the changes needed to address the climate problem, but “what is lacking is the will to change.” I’d be interested in knowing more about where in the world you did see that will put into action.
Gary: The places I saw that most so far are probably places in Europe where they, for some reason other than their political system and in their…in their understanding of science, of how science works, they have gotten the idea earlier. They have understood what the science was saying at a much earlier pace. Now they have the same kind of political holdback, they have the same kind of conflicts between people's lifestyles and the kind of products that people have, and how much energy they're…that they're…that they use to make them that we do. But they have tended to move a bit faster. But at the present time, it's been Europe that's leading us.
So you see the Netherlands, which has huge issues with rising sea level. They have fought the sea for many hundreds of years and they are actively adapting; that is that they are making their levies higher. The people in the Netherlands now are realizing that they're not only fighting the ocean rising, but they're also fighting the possibility of a lot more floodwaters coming down the Rhine, so they're also building internal dikes. But, one thing they have done, for example, is they're beginning to move those dikes back to re...to allow the wetlands that were…It was all, of course, a big delta there too, just like Bangladesh, only it's a much more advanced country in terms of economics. They're now allowing more water to flow into the wetlands that were there so that they could soak up more of the moisture and, therefore, help protect them. So, that's one country where you can see them very actively making changes in the way that they run their infrastructure in order to take… to see…to take advantage of both what the natural landscape can give them and to be ready for the disasters that they see that are possibly going to come.
What happened in New Orleans was certainly a wakeup call. But in New Orleans it was really more about internal structures, the social protections and the way that governments work. And what I say in my book is that even though Hurricane Katrina was not the strongest storm and there were a lot of human failures, the possibility that human failures would be involved in any disaster is very large; it's probably inevitable. The idea that there would be more cities at risk and possibly stronger hurricanes, and certainly higher sea level, means we're gonna have more situations where an entire city with millions of people in it is going to have tremendous problems at a level that we have not seen before.
But one of the biggest overtones for me of studying what I…what I learned about climate change is that the entire society, the entire civilization is going to be changed, it's going to have to react to this. All of us, as family members and as parents and as kids, are gonna have to realize that everything that we do in life also puts out CO2 and how can we reduce that and get started on that on a daily basis. That's where the willpower comes in.
Joe: This has been a conversation with photojournalist Gary Braasch, one of a series about Communicating Climate Change. This is Joe Cone of Oregon Sea Grant, an ocean and coastal research and education program at Oregon State University. This and other climate podcasts, and their complete transcripts, can be found online at seagrant.oregonstate.edu. That’s “s-e-a-grant”: one word, “dot,” “oregonstate” as one word, “dot, edu.” Thank you for listening.
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