{"id":1083,"date":"2009-08-05T04:44:19","date_gmt":"2009-08-05T08:44:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/?p=1083"},"modified":"2009-08-05T04:44:19","modified_gmt":"2009-08-05T08:44:19","slug":"gary-braasch-earth-under-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/1083\/gary-braasch-earth-under-fire\/","title":{"rendered":"Gary Braasch – Earth Under Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"
\nGary Braasch has photographed climate change more extensively than any other photographer. His book Earth Under Fire<\/em> is a definitive work on the subject.
\nFind out about Gary Braasch here.<\/a>
\nFind out about Earth Under Fire here.<\/a>
\nGary and I have been talking at length on many subjects. Here’s the first installment of our conversations.
\nJohn Paul Caponigro<\/strong>
\nTell me about climate change. \u00a0And tell me about your book – Earth Under Fire.
\nGary Braasch<\/strong>
\nIn June 1997 I was stuck in a cold tent on the Alaska tundra\u00a0with fellow nature photographer Gerry Ellis.\u00a0\u00a0We had come to photograph caribou and other tundra animals, but for these weeks, anyway, we saw very little.\u00a0\u00a0But while we read our books in the tent and talked of life and photography, we also chatted about the major issues in nature and conservation.\u00a0\u00a0What were we going to do in coming years: what locations, what species, what issues were going to be the most important to photograph?.\u00a0\u00a0And also, who was going to hire, publish and pay us for this?\"\"
\nAs it turned out, that otherwise really boring time on the tundra was partly a turning point for both Gerry and me (he had started a stock agency but had his eyes on education and the protection of baby animals in Africa; that work, \u201cWild Orphans,\u201d became his NGO, Globio). \u00a0\u00a0I generated lists of environmental issues and realized that climate change was possibly going to be really important, but no one was photographing it.
\nBefore I left Alaska that year, I had not only found a huge herd of caribou to photograph, but I also talked to some scientists about how Alaska was warming. \u00a0And I went out by way of Prudhoe Bay, seeing and smelling the industrial oil field. \u00a0I also met the crew of a Greenpeace ship that was bird-dogging a drilling platform offshore. \u00a0They were already committed about the connection between fossil fuel and global warming. \u00a0The science, the wilderness, the source of oil and the issue all began to come together for me. \u00a0\u00a0About a year later, an article by Bill McKibben in Atlantic Monthly about how everything we do makes and is affected by greenhouse gases further inspired me.\u00a0\u00a0On my copy of that article I scrawled the idea:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cWorld tour of global warming.\u201d
\nBut how to approach such a huge subject?\u00a0\u00a0I knew from reading science journals and reports that scientists were seeing changes in many places, sharp turns from the slow change seen in years and years of measurements and data, shifts that seemed to correlate only to rising earth temperatures and added CO2. \u00a0Because popular articles and books on climate change were\u00a0based on predictions, which are easily dismissed, I wanted to look at the Earth itself and report\u00a0on the changes already under way. \u00a0As a journalist, I wanted to move beyond the raw statistics,\u00a0the secondhand and political arguments, and talk directly to the scientists who are documenting it. \u00a0So, since I had shot many stories of scientists in the field (like about the spotted owl) I began emailing or calling a few of the leading researchers to ask to come document their field work. \u00a0I also would ask where changes were the most visible and what other indicators there were of global warming. \u00a0I wrote my first project description:
\n\u201cThe goal of\u00a0World View of Global Warming\u00a0is to illustrate the physical changes and compelling science on all continents, which show that global warming and other climate shifts have begin.\u00a0\u00a0Too often public information and political debate lack a basis in science and are without a vision of how the earth is changing.
\nWorking with private grants and magazine assignments, I will visit those locations where climate science is undertaken and where effects of global warming have been documented.\u00a0\u00a0As often as possible my photographs will actually show changes (or comparisons with old photographs).
\nWorld View of Global Warming benefits from a dialogue with scientists and observers around the world who have provided hundreds of scientific contacts and papers.\u00a0\u00a0In the initial phase ending in 2001, I am focusing on polar regions, shrinking glaciers around the world, coral bleaching, insect and animal range changes, and rising sea level.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Images will appear in magazines and books.\u201d
\nMy first act was to pull my research into shape, and make a more formal list of locations to photograph. \u00a0 Thinking (rightly as it turned out) that I could not rely on too many magazine assignments, I applied to\u00a0Blue Earth Alliance\u00a0\u00a0(www.blueearth.org <http:\/\/www.blueearth.org>\u00a0 a tax exempt photography support NGO founded by photographers Natalie Fobes and Phil Borges]. By December 1998, my proposal received backing from Blue Earth and initial funding was secured from a family environmental fund with which I had previously had contact.
\nI have to say\u00a0that at this point I had little idea of what I was getting into \u2013 \u00a0how many studies there were, how much it would really cost, how rapidly climate science would develop, or what controversy it would raise.\u00a0\u00a0Global warming was already an issue and battle lines had been drawn:\u00a0\u00a0Al Gore had returned from the Kyoto climate meetings but the US Senate refused to consider the Protocol and the Clinton Administration did not push it.\u00a0\u00a0The 2000 election campaign was still in the future and the world\u2019s scientists were just writing drafts of their famous 2001 IPCC report \u2013 both events which would change the face of our national reaction to rapid climate change.
\nEarly in 1999 I cranked up my contact with climate scientists I already knew, most from my previous Alaska work.\u00a0\u00a0I put out the word to my magazine editor list, seeking assignments and other scientific contacts.\u00a0\u00a0I already had work coming up in the Peruvian Amazon, so I added on a week of travel into the Andes to photograph receding glaciers, using contacts I found through The Mountain Institute.\u00a0\u00a0I arranged to travel later in the year with some of the scientists I knew in Alaska who were studying change on the tundra. The big break came from a contact I had previously made at Life magazine, Steve Petranek, who had become editor at Discover magazine. He saw my emails about my new project and hired me to accompany a writer on a National Science Foundation geologic research cruise to Antarctic Peninsula ice sheets and glaciers in April 1999.\u00a0\u00a0The next year I parlayed this into my own return trip, using research about Southern Giant Petrels( which I had learned about while in Antarctica) to gain an assignment for International Wildlife.\u00a0\u00a0While on this second trip, I used every opportunity to learn more about and photograph climate change.\u00a0 I had never been to Antarctic before these trips in 1999 and 2000 \u2013 but now not only did I have a complete story about change down there, but was also able to gain more visibility as a nature photographer with scientifically-accurate images of Antarctica. \u00a0I was getting off to a great start.
\nOf far greater importance than the process of the project and the individual photos I began to make, was my role as a witness to climate change.
\n\"\"
\nNo need to remind of what happened in the 2000 election, of the anti-science Administration that George W. Bush installed, of the horror of 9\/11 and the near total focus it created on war and national defense. \u00a0 Global warming was thoroughly off the radar and actively dismissed by the government and many corporations and their PR flacks. \u00a0Through all of this scientists continued to work, putting out a world review of effects and changes in 2001 and an even stronger and better documented one in 2007. \u00a0Through all of this I followed as — at first — the only photographer that I knew of on a full time climate project (even now there are only about 10 of us who focus on it a great deal).
\nMy photographs, seen in Discover Magazine, on the NRDC website and in an exhibit they curated along with the AAAS scientists organization, began to be seen. \u00a0In 2001 and 2002 I established my website. \u00a0And the requests for images from teachers, magazines, websites, citizens organizations and scientists themselves began to come in. \u00a0By the time I got a book contract from University of California Press in 2004 and completed my list of must-photograph locations the next year, I had been to 22 nations and all continents.
\nI was a witness to what otherwise were just numbers or facts in news stories: \u00a0\u00a0I have stood in the empty rookeries of displaced Adelie penguins\u00a0and photographed huge icebergs separated from an ice shelf in Antarctica. I have seen the jagged fronts\u00a0of receding Greenland glaciers and observed subtle changes on the tundra. I have tracked down Alpine\u00a0glaciers depicted in 150-year-old images and rephotographed them to show them wasting away. In the\u00a0woods of eastern North America I have walked among spring wildflowers and watched for migrant\u00a0songbirds, which are arriving earlier each season than in decades past. Along the coasts I have seen rising\u00a0tides and heavy storms erode beaches. I have heard the anguish in the voices of native Alaskans as\u00a0they describe their village being washed away, of Chinese farmers facing famine caused by drought, and\u00a0of Pacific Islanders driven from their homes by increasingly high tides.
\nPhotographing this subject presents a great challenge. Changes have been unfolding for fifty years\u00a0or more, with most effects being incremental, or invisible. Pictures are not science; they can, however,\u00a0provide direct evidence that global warming is happening now, all over the world. They provide contact\u00a0with eyewitnesses\u2014lifelong observers, Native peoples, and teams of scientists who are seeing rapid\u00a0change across the expanse of Earth\u2019s living systems. Pictures also show that the effects of global warming\u00a0are taking place in Earth\u2019s most beautiful and sensitive landscapes, especially at the extremities of\u00a0our planet\u2014at the poles, high in the mountains, and in the ocean\u2019s rich nearshore environments. Animals\u00a0and plants on the edge of their ranges, as well as people who live on shorelines or who still subsist\u00a0from nature, are the first to feel the effects.
\nThe photographs in Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World\u00a0\u00a0helped to make real the scientific evidence that\u00a0entire cultures, ecosystems, and species are being forced into transition, the continued existence of some of them threatened\u00a0by our use and abuse of fossil fuels and the soil of the earth.
\nStay tuned for more with Gary in the coming weeks.
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gary Braasch has photographed climate change more extensively than any other photographer. His book Earth Under Fire is a definitive work on the subject. Find out about Gary Braasch here. Find out about Earth Under Fire here. Gary and I have been talking at length…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[815,1140,254],"tags":[236,1138,1139,985],"post_folder":[],"yoast_head":"\nGary Braasch - Earth Under Fire - John Paul Caponigro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.johnpaulcaponigro.com\/blog\/1083\/gary-braasch-earth-under-fire\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Gary Braasch - Earth Under Fire - John Paul Caponigro\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Gary Braasch has photographed climate change more extensively than any other photographer. 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