We’ve been working with a lot of great clients recently, which hasn’t left us with much time for our personal project, Facing Climate Change. However, we have some exciting news to share!

Over the summer and fall we received two generous contributions that allow us to focus exclusively on finishing a new series of stories, based in the Pacific Northwest, through this spring. One of the grants came from the Kongsgaard-Goldman Foundation for $8,000 and the other is from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for $12,000.

The other good news is that we have a new project partner, the Washington State Department of Ecology. They helped us connect with the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and we plan to work with them to distribute the stories through a series of community events next summer. It turns out that our series fits perfectly with a community outreach mandate they have for their upcoming Climate Change Response Strategy.

You can learn more about Facing Climate Change on our website, and follow our progress over the coming months on this blog.

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!

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.

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.

Our Sámi reindeer and wildfire work from Facing Climate Change is now on view at the Washington State Convention Center. The exhibit, Forecast: Communicating Weather and Climate was curated by Lele Barnett and presented by the American Meteorological Society and EcoArts Connections.

Thirty Washington artists are featured including our good friend Maria Coryell-Martin and Seattle photographer Chris Jordan. More details can be found on the American Meteorological Society blog.

The show opens January 24 and runs through April 5. We’ve been told that 60,000 people are expected to move through the space during the Flower and Garden Show alone!

“What’s it like to try to breath on a high pollution day? Do ten jumping jacks, hold your nose, and breath through this.” Aileen Gagney from the American Lung Association handed me a thin bar straw.

For the human health story from our new Facing Climate Change series, we’ve been exploring how climate-related air pollution impacts people who have asthma. As temperatures rise, researchers project an increase in the number of days where ground-level ozone concentrations exceed regulatory standards. The ozone is created when sunlight reacts with emissions from vehicles and other sources, and it makes people who have asthma suffer more attacks. Those most likely to be hit hardest by health consequences like this include low-income families and seniors, another opportunity to consider climate equity.

We’ll be working with the King County Department of Health over the coming weeks to bring this issue to life. Check back soon for updates on our new stories.

Weathering Change opens Saturday, July 31 at the Confluence Gallery in Twisp, Washington. The show explores how society and the arts adapts to an evolving, changing world. A number of images from our Sámi and wildfire climate change work are on display. These are new prints made with Tyler Boley that were in the Ansel Adams Gallery last fall. As we enter the peak of fire season, we’re particularly excited to bring our wildfire images back to the valley from which they came.

We’ll be giving a talk at the gallery on September 9, at 7 p.m. Weathering Change runs through September 18, 2010.

In 35 years the State of Idaho went from selling this land for around $1/acre, basically begging farmers to make the desert bloom, to buying the water rights back for almost $1,000/acre. What’s left is a sort of post-apocalyptic landscape of sheet metal barns with telephone numbers still scrawled on the doors, houses with boots under beds and paystubs in kitchens, four million pounds of dry steel pipe that used to carry Snake River water, and some enormous new wind turbines.

Benj and I worked long days, photographing at sunrise and sunset and interviewing farmers in between. We spent nights in the back of our truck up on the plateau, just us, the wheatgrass and wind. Except for the first night, when we woke up to find a pair of tiny headlights making their way across the empty space. As the vehicle got closer, the driver flipped on a spotlight and we knew someone had called the police. After a few minutes of questioning, a second officer arrived on the crime scene. Once we convinced them that we were taking pictures, not old farm equipment, they turned into the friendliest cops we’ve ever met.

We spent a lot of time chasing light down straight dusty roads laid out in a one-mile grid. (Bell Rapids Road becomes the 400 road. If you follow that to the 5600 road over to the 300 and up to the 5700, the light will inevitably be better back down the 400 to the 5500.) 25,000 acres is a lot of ground to cover — for us and for the Snake River water that once made these fields green.

One of the places we visited was near a new wind farm and we all had to wear hardhats, which made it difficult to bend over to dig roots. It also made it tough to wear headphones, though that was only one of the many challenges with trying to record audio in 35 mile-an-hour winds. We were mostly looking for bitterroot, or Lewisia rediviva (think green sea urchine meets pink kleenex), and digging for it beneath towering wind turbines was like walking the ridge between ancient practice and modern technology.

After you dig bitterroot you have to prepare them for eating, and it takes three times as much effort to peel one as it does to pull it out of the ground. In that sense, gathering roots is like making a good story. Once you have all the pieces, the hard work begins. In the coming months we will edit Benj’s images, log my wind-blown audio and shape these nuggets into a story about how climate change impacts traditional foods.

Jen and Jeni recently graduated and will now work full time on Three Degrees at the UW School of Law. They needed a new website to showcase their work and reach out to the community they’ve built around the conference. Darin and I designed a new identity, WordPress website, and HTML email template. The photographs on the site are from Facing Climate Change and Peter Essick’s climate change work for National Geographic.

Visit threedegreeswarmer.org.