A professional nature photographer for 30 years, Gary Braasch has published his work in Life, Time, Discover, and other prominent magazines and in several books. In 2006 he received the prestigious Ansel Adams Award from the Sierra Club. UC Press recently published Braasch’s latest book, Earth under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World, culminating a decade of travel, research, and photography. Recently Gary Braasch was interviewed by his editor, Blake Edgar.
Your previous photographic work has focused on topics closer to your home in the Pacific Northwest, such as old-growth forests and post-eruption ecology at Mt. St. Helens. What inspired you to document global climate change?
All that work led directly into this project. Not only had I seen evidence of change in the Cascade Mountains while photographing the forests—like increasing dry summers and forest fires—but also the more rapid changes around the recovering landscape of the volcano provided an insight into repeat photography. The more immediate impetus to do a project on climate change was a trip to Alaska in 1997. I had been hearing of rapid changes there, such as thawing permafrost and changes to tundra plants, and of course had seen reports about global warming in general. One day I was lucky enough to witness the Porcupine Caribou herd migrate in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a wildlife spectacle the equal to African migrations. Two days later, flying out of the airport at Prudhoe Bay, I saw (and smelled and heard) the industrial oil field laid across the tundra. Seeing one source of American oil right after seeing isolated wilderness animals whose landscape was being affected made the global warming connection real to me. Within a year I had made a preliminary list of climate change locations to photograph. I also began to notice that no one was making very good photos of climate science, so as a natural history photographer, I saw an opportunity.
During the course of eight years pursuing this project, you traveled to over 20 countries from pole to pole. Is there a place you visited that epitomizes the environmental and social consequences of global warming?
Twenty-two nations; all seven continents. I think that place is the United States, and specifically Alaska. Beyond the facts mentioned above, that we drill for oil there and have wilderness where temperature change is beginning to have an effect, Alaska is ground zero for many other changes. The most important is the displacement of hundreds (soon to be thousands) of native Americans whose villages are being eroded away due to climate changes; this is a social and cultural change of great magnitude to these native people. The possible loss of most summer Arctic sea ice is another huge change that is well under way. I cover the 2005 low point in summer ice cover on the Arctic Ocean in the book, and this year the ice shrank even more. This directly threatens the polar bears, who evolved to hunt from the ice and are shown to starve or become dangers to coastal towns; they are likely to be listed as a threatened or endangered species by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service come next year. And the Northwest Passage opened for the first time in human history, which will change geopolitics of the surrounding nations, possibly creating more tensions and almost certainly (and ironically) spurring easier exploration for more oil.
There isn't any other one place where so much is going on.
If I had to name another place it is Tuvalu, where effects of rising sea level are apparent several times a year. Not only the water coming in over the roads and into the neighborhoods, but more importantly entering the water table and poisoning the crops. Tuvalu, a nation of 11,000—smallest in the United Nations—could be wiped out by a large cyclone at the time of very high tides. But it is more likely that the atolls will just become less and less habitable, and the people will have to migrate. Where they will go, how they will live there, perhaps much farther from the sea they know well, and what it will mean to the United Nations to have a sovereign nation eliminated by climate change are very serious questions.
A lot of technical science underlies our assessment of the extent and potential effects of climate change. Did you keep up with the published research while making personal observations in the field?
I have subscribed to the main scientific journals and serious science magazines for quite a while, and my clip files are pretty thick. The world of papers now available online is a lot better on our trees! Published research formed the basis of my itinerary in the first place; I started my project back in 1999 making cold calls or emails to scientists who had published climate articles--for example, Terry Chapin and Gus Shaver in Alaska. As the years have gone on, the number of papers has exploded, and I have relied more and more on trusted advisors and honest digests of scientific work to guide my reading (EurekAlert!, for example, run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science). When it came time to re-research everything for the book, I went back to the original papers in nearly every case to make sure I had it right, and I know the copy editors at UC Press also double-checked many of the original research papers.
This project must have accumulated a hefty carbon debt from the travel necessary to complete it. How do you atone for that in your daily life? What can we all do to reduce our impact?
The number I calculated from for this project and book is about 260,000 miles by air and vehicle (although some of the rentals were hybrids). I combined locations as much as I could, and tried to avoid short airplane flights which are much more polluting. But the airplanes are flying with or without me, and as I say in the book, our society probably will have to rethink how we use and fuel airplanes even though there are few alternatives now. My lifestyle has always been pretty conservative—my family in Omaha were recyclers and light-turn-offers and local produce buyers out of financial necessity—and what I learned in my environmental photography and reporting underscored how important that is. I have a very small house, walk and bike a lot, and have always bought used smaller cars. I had one of the first Blazers back in the ‘60s but since then have never owned an SUV. I recently was able to find a used Prius. Not much waste in my life, but recently I changed all my light bulbs (25 of them in a small house!) to compact fluorescents—and my electric bill is 20 percent lower than a year ago. This stuff works! Consumers who make these choices will soon want more from the companies who supply us: all-electric cars, integrated solar roofing material, auto-turn-off of all home electronics, completely efficient homes and offices, and so on.
Earth under Fire bears witness to what can seem an overwhelming and insurmountable problem. What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
First, that the effects of even a degree of global warming so far are seen far and wide across the globe—they are pervasive and not theoretical or far in the future. Neither are the benefits of moving rapidly into the available technologies of renewable energy, which promise to provide health, employment, community, and financial benefits while they help slow climate change. Finally, this is the first book to address the much broader implications of climate change: threats to biodiversity and nature; geopolitical readjustments as energy and resources change; the link to "peak oil" and the terrible human toll from our use of fossil fuel; the changes required in cities and for corporate leadership; effects on inequality and human rights in many places; and the need for new alliances and leadership among the nations of the world.
Will the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change inspire governments and corporations to rise to the challenge of climate change?
I think it is a wonderful thing that the scientists and Mr. Gore shared this honor. It will elevate the issue worldwide, and I can already see this happening. Whether it will inspire governments and companies is quite another matter, because there is such inertia and protectionism built into these systems. Dr R. K. Pachauri and Mr. Gore can now argue with stronger voices, and convince more to change. And others can use the heightened visibility to get more information out to more people who lead and vote and purchase.
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