Parks Climate Challenge: The full three-part series

Posted 21 January 2010 by Sara in Multimedia, Other Photography

So far we’ve had a busy winter, finishing up last year’s projects and preparing for new ones. One of the projects we recently completed is a three-part multimedia series for the National Park Foundation. You might remember reading about the first Parks Climate Challenge piece we created last summer. It tells the story of 19 urban high school students who spent a month in North Cascades National Park learning about climate change. For the second piece, we followed the group to Washington DC, where the students engaged with federal agencies and completed a demonstration service project on the National Mall. The final story of the series documents service projects that the students designed and lead for elementary schools in their home communities.

The biggest challenge with this series was how to integrate all three stories, especially because we only had a few days in the field to document parts two and three. We also didn’t have the excellent photo and audio journals that the students kept in the North Cascades. On the other hand, by the time the second and third pieces rolled around, the students were not only comfortable with us and the idea of documentary storytelling, they were also fully committed to addressing the problem of climate change. This meant that what we did get was of exceptional quality.

Working with these young people was one of the highlights of our year. I can’t imagine anything more inspiring than to see the next generation engage with climate change, the natural world and documentary storytelling.