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News from BDSJS and Facing Climate Change
Blue Earth Print Lottery
Believe it or not, the hardest part about being a documentary photography team is not finding important stories and making great photographs, it’s raising the money to do that work. Since 2007, Blue Earth has provided us with vital fundraising support for Facing Climate Change. Last week they held their seventh annual print lottery in downtown Seattle.
As our project’s fiscal sponsor, Blue Earth enables us to apply for grants that require 501(c)3 status, and to offer tax-deductible contributions to individuals. They have also provided us with a network of other photographers working on environmental and social issues. Currently, Blue Earth selectively sponsors over 20 projects.
A year ago, we were invited to join Blue Earth’s Board of Directors as the organization’s first project representatives. As Board members, our goal is to encourage project photographers to get more involved with the organization. And we’re on the right track, almost half of our project photographers attended the print lottery last week!
Our thanks goes out to everyone who helped to make the event a success. It was a fun evening, full of good food, great photography, and old and new friends. If you were unable to make it, you can still support the important work of Blue Earth by becoming a member.
Above: We donated this image from our series “The Tinder People” to the event.
Anniversaries
Benj and I had our first wedding anniversary this August, though we lived and worked together for ten years before we got married. In fact, ten years ago this September we embarked on our first major collaboration: Bone Wood Alpaca, an exploration of people and landscape in the high Peruvian Andes.
The project came about through a Larson Fellowship that we received from Carleton College. This small grant allowed us to traverse the Peruvian Andes during the fall of 2001. Upon our return, we combined my writing and Benj’s photographs into a hand-bound book and multimedia presentation.
Loving each other. Loving what we do. Every moment of it.
People were giving us chicha beer, cheese, laughing at me trying Quechua words. A man asked why we didn’t bring tv’s and radios from the United States. At least, he said, buy a carrot, two carrots. Women joked, told us to take their smallest children. They gave us bread. They wanted to know about me, about money, about the World Trade Center. They taught me Quechua words for where are you staying and I love you too much. They wanted to know where we were going and when we could come back. They told us our names were beautiful.
Natural Histories Project at ESA
The Ecological Society of America recently held its 96th annual meeting in Austin, TX. Our friends from the Natural History Network presented a symposium there, and they brought along our broadsides from the Natural Histories Project. Read what attendee Hayley Gillespie has to say about the “beautiful portraits and inspiring (but often haunting) words” on her blog, biocreativity:
“What I love about this project is that it is both a true celebration of natural history – which is inspiring in itself – but it is also something that can speak to very diverse audiences. It shows the faces of natural history – young and old, male and female, diverse backgrounds. It shows that anyone can be a natural historian, and that everyone can find a reason to care about this field, whether or not it is part of their profession.”
Read Hayley’s full post.
New conversations on From Decline to Rebirth
At the end of March, the Natural History Initiative held its second and third workshops, focused on the themes of education and research. We documented the first of these workshops, which explored the topic of natural history and society, back in January – creating a series of broadsides and the interactive website, declinetorebirth.org. Well, we’ve just added more than 40 new conversations about the future of natural history. Here are quotes from a few of my favorites:
SAUL WEISBERG
“When I think of a rebirth of natural history, I’m thinking of a whole bunch more people doing it. You can always have more people doing it. I also think of people recognizing, and making the connection between, all of the branches of science and art and realizing that natural history is the root of that. I’m not trying to say we need to recognize natural history as the big umbrella, but it’s the little root tendrils of all of this, and if we get disconnected from the roots we’re going to lose something really important. If we keep connected to the roots, all those branches can keep growing and grow really strongly. When I’m thinking of a rebirth, that’s where I want to go.”
listen »
GARY MACHLIS
“He told me, rather shyly and certainly without braggadocio at all, how two years before the earthquake he had his high school students build from scratch – a seismograph. And they learned to maintain their seismograph, and read it properly, and understand earthquake physics, and geology, and history, and learn first responding, how to respond to an earthquake and how to do first aid. He taught them all that, and when the earthquake came…” listen »
STEPHANIE HAMPTON
“Well, I have to admit that I felt a little bit alienated when people were equating natural history so much with the outdoors. . . I would argue that my connection with plankton is just as strong as somebody else’s connection with a forest. And that happened in the lab.” listen »
ROBERT PAINE
“Anemones have odd cellular structures so that they don’t suffer from aging. I’ve watched one anemone out there; it’s sort of become a pet. My first trip to this island in 1968, there it was, the same size in the same place. And last year, there it was, same size, same place. People probably wish they could be anemone-like.” listen »
Visit declinetorebirth.org to hear the rest of these conversations, and many more. We’ll have additional new content after the fourth and final synthesis workshop in June.
ABOVE: Workshop participants sit beneath broadsides that showcase portraits and quotes from the previous day’s conversations.
Pathways for Youth
We recently had the honor of working with our friend Michael Liang at North Cascades National Park to produce a story about the Pathways for Youth initiative.
Pathways for Youth is an effort to create the next generation of public lands stewards and National Park Service employees. By deliberately connecting existing programs and partnerships, North Cascades is creating a continuum of meaningful park-based experiences. Our story follows several young people who discuss their own unique pathways through educational programs, internships and seasonal employment.
The visuals for this piece are primarily video interviews and video portraits. We set up a mobile studio and filmed all 10 interviews over one long day during a youth leadership conference at North Cascades Environmental Learning Center.
Visualizing the youth’s pathways presented the perfect opportunity for us to experiment with motion graphics and we employed a simple trail motif to tie experiences together. For music, we once again worked with Nick Drummond‘s ever-evolving collection of riffs and melodies.
We enjoyed this opportunity to collaborate with a few old friends from the North Cascades and hope the piece will help the Park continue to create opportunities for the next generation of stewards.
2/27/11 UPDATE: North Cascades National Park received almost $400,000 to expand the Pathways for Youth program in 2011. Congratulations to all involved! Read more
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