THE PHOTOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTATION OF
CLIMATE CHANGE
E Magazine Special Issue on Climate Change
E Magazine Sept-Oct 2000 ©Earth Action Network, Inc.
Climate change is happening -- I see it with my own eyes, right now.
I have stood in the empty rookeries of displaced Adelie
penguins and felt a chill from huge chunks from a receding ice shelf on
the Antarctic Peninsula. I saw the young black spruces growing higher
than ever before on boreal hillsides in Alaska and witnessed subtle changes
on the tundra. I can see the ablation of glaciers near my home in the
Pacific Northwest and have rephotographed 65 year old images of great
Andean glaciers to show them wasting away. In the woods of Eastern North
America I walked through spring wildflowers and spotted incoming migrant
songbirds, knowing many of them were increasingly early. Along the coasts
I have seen rising tides and heavy storms erode beaches.
I made these and other observations during 1999 and 2000
as part of a personal photographic project, "World View of Global
Warming." I wanted to get beyond the raw statistics, the charts,
and the predictions. I wanted to create an alternative to the numbers,
the arguments over "who is to blame" and what palliative measures
governments and corporations might be willing to take. I looked instead
at the earth itself, with the eyes of a natural history photographer.
Global warming and the climate changes it brings are actually set in motion.
Physical systems, ecosystems and species are already changing. In remote
locations and our familiar gardens and parks, scientists are devoting
their careers to documenting the effects, taking measurements and interpreting
the results in peer-reviewed scientific studies. But this evidence is
missing from the political debate, rarely written about, and not seen
by the public.
It is not well known in hometowns or in Congress that
these results are strong confirmation of global warming predictions. They
coincide with the well-documented sharp rise in world temperatures in
the 20th Century. Many are considered by the writers of the upcoming Third
IPCC report to be significant enough for a special section about climate
change effects on ecosystems.
Photographing these effects poses a great problem, however.
Changes have been unfolding for 50 years or more. Each year's effects
are small. They are subtle and incremental, if not literally invisible.
But after a year and a half of visiting scientists at their sites and
hearing their passionate concern, working with past photos and records,
and documenting the painstaking record keeping of scientific field work,
my photographs build up with an incremental effect. The images are compelling
to those who had been skeptical. Do any photos "prove" that
global warming is a fact? The pictures, like the natural science they
depict, do not render courtroom proof, but rather evidence of tight correlations
among, and long-term observations of, physical events. They begin to add
up.
Photography's message is strengthened because global
warming's effects are being seen in the Earth's most beautiful and sensitive
landscapes. Treasured and threatened ecosystems and creatures are in transition.
Like some early signs of heart disease or cancer in our bodies, the first
effects are strongest in the extremities of our planet. The poles, the
mountains, the animals and plants on the edge of their ranges are feeling
it strongly.
I have come to feel that I am documenting one of the
crucial, overarching events of the 21st century. As it exacerbates overpopulation
and food crises, climate change may affect more people than did war in
the last century. Whether or not humans are to blame, there happen to
be 6 billion of us on the planet now - and we are deeply interconnected
and affected by all these changes. We are going to have to adapt to them,
live through them, and reduce activities that make it worse. This is a
magnificent and urgent story that is just beginning to be told - all of
us will see it and live it.
2000 Gary Braasch - Published in Sept 2000 issue of E magazine
Photographs from the World View of Global Warming are available for license to publications needing science photography, environmental groups and agencies, and other uses. Stock photography and assignments available.
Please contact requestinformation@worldviewofglobalwarming.org or Gary Braasch Photography (503) 699-6666.
Use of photographs in any manner, in part or whole, without permission is prohibited by US copyright law. These photographs are registered with the US Copyright Office and are not in the Public Domain.
