This May 4th and 5th, Blue Earth is bringing together photographers, NGOs and communications professionals to explore best practices, synergy and the collaborative future of storytelling. Whether you work with an organization that’s trying to reach new audiences, or are a photographer interested in cause-driven projects, you’ll leave the retreat with new ideas, strategies and connections.

We helped put together the program and if you’ve been interested in taking a workshop with us, this will be even better. We’ll present the backstory to a few of our recent projects during an event packed with folks from Braided River, The Gates Foundation, FusionSpark, Pandau,The University of Washington, Blue Earth and more.

The retreat will be hosted by the Langley Center for New Media on Whidbey Island, just an hour north of Seattle. Enjoy an early bird registration discount through April 25.

Full details at blueearth.org.

A huge thanks to the folks at Goose Point, Harrolds Fish & Oyster Co, and Taylor Shellfish for all their help!

UPDATE: Here’s a fantastic article from Crosscut that explains the issue in more detail.

 
Impossible Bird: Here I Am
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

And our local paper, the Methow Valley News, did a very nice profile of us the last week of January. They only kept the article online for a week, but you can read the text of Ann McCreary’s article after the jump.

Methow Valley News
January 25, 2012

Filmmakers explore climate change and more through personal stories
By Ann McCreary

Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele travel the world to produce documentaries that connect people and nature, giving a personal face to issues that often seem too big to grasp.

When they are not traveling in Scandinavia, Africa, South America, or around the Northwest, they make their home in the Methow Valley.

Drummond and Steele are storytellers with a particular interest in the issue ofclimate change. Rather than trying to explain this complex phenomenon with facts and figures, they seek out people around the world to tell the story in very personal ways.

They describe their work as “character-driven narratives” that combine powerful photography and video by Drummond with audio engineering, writing and production by Steele.

“We’re trying to tell personal stories of individuals, community and life,” said Steele. “We’re not just talking science.”
Drummond and Steele began collaborating a decade ago when they were students at Carleton College in Minnesota. They took a three-month trip to the Peruvian Andes, capturing images and stories to create a multimedia production about the people and landscapes of that rugged country.

Realizing they worked well as a team, they launched a personal project that has become an ongoing focus for several years – telling the story of globalclimate change through people and communities. The story for them began with a trip to Norway where they told the story of Sami reindeer herders, and how a warming environment is threatening their traditional way of life.

Having moved to Seattle, Drummond’s hometown, after college, Drummond and Steele began an examination of the impacts of climate change in the Northwest, launching a long-term documentary project that they call “FacingClimate Change.” Their multimedia stories explore the impact of globalclimate change here in our backyard through the personal stories of people who live and work in the region.

They have filmed and interviewed wildfire fighters, potato farmers and snow makers at Snoqualmie Pass to make an abstract issue understandable on an individual level.

“The thinking behind that (approach) was that so much of climate change is about whether scientists were right or not right. There is a huge disconnect with people who were living with it on the front lines,” Steele said. She and Drummond strive to create that connection between science and people through their multimedia productions.

Their work has been presented in a variety of venues, including Confluence Gallery in Twisp, environmental conferences, Mother Jonesmagazine, and the Houston Center for Photography.

The couple moved a little over a year ago to the Methow Valley, renting a house on Beaver Creek. They realized they could continue their work anywhere, and came to the valley to escape the city and enjoy the recreational opportunities.
Continuing their work in climate change, Drummond and Steele have begun a new project with the working title, “The Northwest Project.” They are focusing on impacts of a changing environment on individuals and communities in the Columbia River Basin in an eight-part series to be completed this spring.

The project uses a study called the Washington Climate Change Impacts Assessment as a foundation to examine how climate changeaffects eight aspects of the environment: water resources, coasts, forests, oceans, energy supply, storm water, health and agriculture.

Field work on four of the stories is completed. One segment, for example, focuses on the Umatilla Tribe in northeastern Oregon, and the tribe’s use of roots and salmon as traditional foods.

“Those traditional gathering practices are inextricably linked to cultural continuity. They are using traditional foods as a way to prioritize and manage natural resources,” Drummond said.

“We’re looking for examples where people are expressing what they’re facing on a day-to-day basis. No one can argue with someone’s hopes, dreams and fears,” Drummond said.

When completed this year, the series will be published online with a summary of relevant science and resources. Working with Department of Ecology, Drummond and Steele will present the series at a number of events in the communities that are featured, to promote discussion between scientists and community members.

“Our goal is to really increase the diversity of people engaged in this issue, to ground the science through personal examples,” Drummond said.

Partners in the project are the Washington Department of Ecology, the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group – a research group studying climate change in the Northwest – and Cascadia Consulting, an environmental consulting group. Drummond and Steele have received funding for the project from NAU, an outdoor clothing company in Portland.
In addition to their work related to climate change, Steele and Drummond work with nonprofit organizations and other clients. Last summer they traveled to Mozambique to produce a documentary about the first optometrists to work in that country for an organization called the Mozambique Eye Care Project.

“It was our first foray into the health care world,” Steele said.

The couple has also produced a video about the Sustainable Prisons Project, a partnership of the Washington State Department of Corrections and The Evergreen State College. The project trains offenders and correctional staff in sustainable practices.

Last year they traveled to Tanzania to photograph and interview researchers working in a Conservation International project called Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring, designed to provide an early warning system on the status of biodiversity in the tropics. The project places field stations in tropical locations around the world.

The researchers shared stories of elephant encounters, harrowing boat trips and their dedication to the work of monitoring remote field stations in countries including Peru, Malaysia and the Congo.

Gathering and retelling people’s stories is a “lifelong project – you never feel like your work is done,” Steele said.
“Its so much fun,” she added. “Whether it’s a community in Pendleton, Oregon, or a city in Mozambique, we get to meet people we wouldn’t meet any other way.”

Blue Earth, a nonprofit organization that helps photographers complete documentary projects on environmental and social issues, has announced a new photo contest. They’re looking for images that exemplify their mission to raise awareness about endangered cultures, threatened environments and social concerns through photography. Jurors include Jason Houston, picture editor at Orion, Gary Halpern, president of PhotoMedia, and Eric J Keller of Soulcather Studio. Think Tank has donated three beautiful bags to go along with the cash prize. Enter by March 31, 2012. Full details here.

Before the snow began to fall, I made a quick trip out to Hagerman, Idaho to revisit the Bell Rapids agricultural development for Facing Climate Change. Sara and I completed most of our fieldwork for that story in 2010, but it’s a tale of change in Big Sky Country and I knew I had to get above it. (Field notes from our first trip are here.)

Once again I turned to LightHawk for help. LightHawk is an organization that supports environmental initiatives with mission-based flights and this was our third collaboration for Facing Climate Change. With beautiful clear weather, pilot Dennis Fitzpatrick and I spent several hours in his Cessna working our way up the Snake River and over the 25,000 acres of abandoned fields.

What had been missing from our coverage – the scale of this economic shift and landscape-level change – was easily captured from the air. I made images of ghost pivots (the abandoned tracks of irrigation systems) under the shadows of new wind turbines, empty potato barns with their roofs blown off, and the Snake River winding its way through the dry plain.

A big thanks to Dennis and LightHawk and stay tuned for the release of this piece and the rest of our new climate change series later this year!

Joel de Melo Bambamba and Suzete Guina are studying to become two of Mozambique’s first optometrists. After a series of civil wars left their country one of the poorest in the world, the population of almost 24 million is just beginning to recover. Yet, there are zero optometrists in Mozambique, and poverty and blindness are inextricable.

The Mozambique Eyecare Project aims to provide a sustainable solution to the problem of avoidable blindness through optometric education. There are 56 students enrolled in the project, thanks to a partnership between the Dublin Institute of Technology, Lúrio Univeristy in Mozambique and the International Centre for Eyecare Education.

This past spring, we spent two weeks in Mozambique to tell the story of Joel and Suzete and the project’s work at UniLúrio. We built an image library, a 10-minute video and a new website, mozeyecare.org, all launched for World Site Day. Our frequent collaborator Darin Reid did the design and built the multi-language site on WordPress. And a big thanks to the amazingly agile Nick Drummond who wrote and recorded most of the music in the piece.

Mozambique is one of five Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa, and as such, is somewhat disadvantaged when it comes to foreign aid. In fact, the optometry faculty at Uniúrio are all Spanish speakers because it has been difficult to find Portuguese or Brazilian staff. The similarities between Portuguese and Spanish also made our job significantly easier as Sara was able to communicate with almost everyone in Spanish.

A few behind-the-scenes photographs are below. Explore the “Stories” on mozeyecare.org to view more images from the project.

We made one final trip to Africa this year. In August, we returned to Tanzania’s southern highlands for Conservation International and the TEAM Network to build an image library and exhibit in support of the project’s next chapter.

“Most conservation science today isn’t ambitious enough,” says TEAM’s Sandy Andelman. “We are informing battles, but we are not providing the knowledge needed, at the scale needed, to win the war.” To meet this challenge, Conservation International, the Earth Institute and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation envision a monitoring network that combines ecological, agriculture and socioeconomic data from around the world. The approach is similar to TEAM’s biodiversity monitoring work, but the focus is ecosystem services and the scale is huge: 400 sites within two or three years.

To help bring this vision to life, we visited southern Tanzania to produce an image library and exhibit. We accompanied researchers collecting micro-climate data from farmers’ fields, installed camera traps on the steep slopes of Udzungwa National Park, and tried to show the link between intact ecosystems and the foods, fuelwood and clean water that communities depend on.

Though successful, the trip was not without challenges. Many of the “services” on our shot list were either highly restricted or illegal. A huge thanks to Joseph Martin, Emanuel Martin and Miller Sanga who went above and beyond to help us find what we needed. (Most tourists are looking for lions, not people doing laundry or making charcoal.)

Upon our return, we quickly produced a dozen large-format prints for a donor meeting in New York. (More details on the meeting can be found at nature.com.) The exhibit will continue to travel in 2012.

View a portfolio of favorite images »

TEAM currently has 18 site managers from tropical forests in 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This diverse group of scientists gathered in Dar to network, train and solve shared challenges from their home sites. Similar to the Natural Histories Project, our job was to find a way to bring this group of voices to a wider audience.

Over a few days, we completed short interviews with each site manager along with a high-key portrait. We pulled quotes from each that, when read together, help explain the researchers’ work and why it’s important. The issues TEAM is tackling are serious and the data significant, but it’s the dedication and passion of the people in the network that makes the project compelling.

The resulting piece, The Faces of TEAM, is distributed as a printed-on-demand magazine (order here) and an iPad-optimized PDF.

Excerpts below:

PATRICIA ALVAREZ
“Your days can go really crappy. Trust me. I got this scar here. I’ve been stung by a sting ray, a scorpion… You can have a really, really crappy day. You lost a boat. Your gasoline was taken by the river. It’s raining. Your tent is invaded by ants. You have the worst day of your life and you’re ready to cry and say I hate this place. I hate the jungle. They should burn the jungle and put cement on it. I’ve said it. And then you see this little monkey looking at you. It can be a little frog, it can be a fungi that I’ve never seen in my life. And that’s it. That’s the magic of Cashu.”

DAVID KENFACK
“The most exciting for me is the camera traps. The camera trap data is going to be very important for the management plan of the park because so far there is no clear picture of what is in the park as far as animals. Sometimes when we go to town we have encounters with elephants, but we don’t know how many elephants are there. We don’t know where they are. So with the camera trap studies we are going to have a better understanding of what is in the park, where it is, how dynamic the population is and so on. It’s also important for the entire country because it’s going to set an example for how to monitor wildlife. I think it’s the first time that this type of equipment has been used in Cameroon.”

BADRU MUGERWA
“I find it amazing that a small group of people came up with this idea. Now it has grown to a global scale and it’s an honor to be part of this network. It’s already part of the team vision, expanding more, having 40 sites. So I think my work is to keep it going. It’s not all about collecting data for a PhD study over three years and then keeping your data on a shelf. We need something long-term going on, and data shared on a global scale, just the way TEAM does it.
I think if we’re going to help other life survive, regardless of all the threats we are facing, it has to be a joint collaboration. We have to join hands to help other species to live, to continue existing.”

Daniel Travatte, the bee-keeping inmate, was recently profiled in the Kitsap Sun. He was released from prison last June and is now raising 70,000 bees professionally. Read the full story at the Kitsap Sun.

The captive-rearing program for the Oregon-spotted frog continues to exceed expectations. Earlier this year, egg nests were found at the release site, indicating that the frogs had survived and were beginning to reproduce in the wild. Last week, 163 new frogs were taken to Joint Base Lewis-McChord and Harry Greer was able release the frogs himself. Harry, an inmate who has worked on the project since its inception, is now on work release. Read more on the SPP Blog.

LightHawk’s View From Above annual report just came out and I was honored that a photo from my Skagit series was featured. The organization provides donated flights to conservation organizations and has been a huge help with our work. A big thanks to LightHawk and pilot Linda Chism for their continued support.

Read the report.

In late July over a hundred tribes and First Nations from the US and Canada paddled towards the Swinomish reservation near La Conner, WA. The Tribal Canoe Journey takes place each summer in the Salish Sea, and this year the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community was the host. On the first day of the event, the host tribe formally grants the visiting canoes permission to come ashore to eat, rest, and share songs, dances and stories. Most of the canoes are paddled by youth, and for many of them the journey is an opportunity to learn and reconnect to the traditional ways of canoe culture.

Nick and Tyler have a busy touring schedule this fall. More details at nickandtylerband.com.

On the last day of the workshop, Nancy Baron – a naturalist featured in our From Decline to Rebirth project – led a communication training on the “risks and rewards of science communication.” Her book, Escape from the Ivory Tower is a fantastic resource designed to help academics and researchers strengthen their communication skills and effectively reach non-scientific audiences. We were honored to join Christopher Joyce from National Public Radio, Ken Weiss from the Los Angles Times, and Nicola Jones from Nature as the journalist trainers. Side by side, we interviewed the participating scientists in front of the group, and then collectively deconstructed the conversations. Our favorite part was watching seasoned science reporters such as Chris and Ken work their magic; I think we learned as much as anyone.

(Check out this recent piece from Christopher Joyce on nuclear peril in Japan. And Ken Weiss was behind the LA Times Pulitzer Prize winning series Altered Oceans.)

We’ll have more to share from our work with TEAM in the coming weeks. Below are a few photos from the workshop and overnight trip to the Udzungwa National Park field station.

View the full gallery »