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Facing Climate Change and other news
Sagebrush, potatoes and wind farms
It seems like we are spending a lot of time in windy places for our new Facing Climate Change stories. We recently visited 25,000 acres of abandoned farmland above the Snake River to learn about how and why it went from sagebrush to potatoes to wind farms in one generation. The agricultural development is called Bell Rapids and one farm owner told me he’s seen the wind blow sugar beets up out of the ground.
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.
Gathering bitterroot
We’ve been out in the field a lot lately, collecting stories for our new series. Most recently, we’ve been gathering roots with some friends from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation.
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.
A seat at the table
Earlier this week, Benj and I attended the Coast Salish Climate Change Summit in Tulalip, Washington. The purpose of the gathering was to discuss the impacts of climate change on tribal lifeways in the Salish Sea ecosystem. Over two days, tribal leaders, scientists, legal experts and other participants explored topics ranging from regional impacts to legal rights and the role of traditional knowledge in climate change policy and science.
A small section from the 40-foot graphic recording by Timothy Corey, who documented the Coast Salish Summit in real time.
We were at this gathering because we’re collaborating with the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community for one of our eight stories. The Swinomish, who helped to organize the event, recently completed a climate change impact assessment for their reservation and are currently working on a community action plan. The story we build together will explore what sea level rise means to people that have lived on the coast since time immemorial. How will it impact this small island nation culturally, economically and environmentally?
One of my favorite presentations from the first day of the Summit drew connections between climate change and diet. While the Umatilla Tribe of northeastern Oregon isn’t Coast Salish, they face many similar challenges. Their First Foods initiative uses the order in which traditional foods are brought to the table – water, fish, game, roots and berries – to guide the way natural resources are protected, restored and managed.
On the second day, conversations about being at the table expanded to the global level. The discussion turned to social justice, trans-boundary collaboration, and the importance of having a voice in local, national and international negotiations. These ideas echoed the intent behind the People’s World Conference on Climate Change last week in Bolivia, where more than 15,000 people from 120 countries gathered to respond to the failed talks in Copenhagen. “We need to talk about what is affecting our people,” said Chief Gibby Jacob of the Squamish Nation. “There is nobody who can tell our story like we can.”
NOTE: This is the third post for Nau’s Thought Kitchen blog. We’ll be providing updates throughout the year as we complete a new series of stories supported in part by Nau’s Grant for Change.
A toolbox with a paint brush
The first multimedia story that Benj and I created for Facing Climate Change was about Sámi reindeer herdsmen in northern Norway. Initially, we intended to tell the story through photography and writing, but once we were with the Sámi, we found ourselves in an audio rich world and started recording.
We didn’t have a plan for how we were going to use that audio until after we got back and started to think about the best way to tell our story. We considered all of the traditional venues for documentary work — fine art galleries, coffee table books, glossy magazines — but the print industry was struggling and reindeer herders don’t regularly flip through coffee table books and go to galleries. How could we share our work with them and our neighbors in Seattle? This is especially important with climate change. How can we engage diverse audiences with a complex, scientific issue?
Benj and I soon started to experiment with character-driven narratives that combine radio-quality audio storytelling with the power of still photography. This form of multimedia opened up a toolbox we now use to build stories across a wide range of platforms including the Web, live presentations, exhibitions and print applications. For example, assets from our recent story about the Sustainable Prisons Project were used on the project’s Web site, presented live in prisons and at a TED Talk, and published in Mother Jones magazine. Another advantage to multimedia is that it gives voice to the people we work with. Hearing a prisoner’s perspective makes for a more personal and engaging story.
But if you’re combining photography and audio, why not just use a video camera and make a movie or something for TV? Here’s an excerpt from a conversation, or “smackdown,” between Ira Glass from This American Life and Robert Krulwich from Radio Lab. Robert talks about why listening to radio is a more active experience, like painting. We think this applies to multimedia too.
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NOTE: This is the second of a series of posts for Nau’s Thought Kitchen blog. We’ll be providing updates throughout the year as we complete a new series of stories supported in part by Nau’s Grant for Change.
First update on G4C
My partner Benj and I are a documentary team that specializes in multimedia stories about people, nature and climate change. A few months ago Nau awarded us their first annual Grant for Change to support our long-term documentary project, Facing Climate Change. Throughout this year, we’ll post periodic updates about our work in The Thought Kitchen, and we wanted to start off by introducing ourselves and explaining a little bit more about what exactly we’re doing.
Facing Climate Change uses photography and multimedia to personalize the story of global change through local people. We began this work back in 2006 with a series of stories about Sámi reindeer herders in Norway, volunteer glacier monitors from Iceland and fishermen of the North Atlantic. The G4C is going to help us create a new series of stories that explore the impacts of climate change through people who live and work in the Pacific Northwest. From wildfire fighters and apple growers, to coastal tribes, paramedics and snowmakers, people throughout this region must confront and adapt to the consequences of warming. Their unique stories about who they are and what they do, their everyday challenges and long-term ambitions will help to make an abstract issue more accessible to local audiences, while also contributing to a global conversation.
We think that our own backyard is an ideal region for a case study, not only because of its diverse ecological, cultural and economic landscapes, but also because of an unprecedented new assessment that downscales global trends into local projections. At more than 400 pages, the Washington Climate Change Impacts Assessment documents the latest research on how climate change will likely affect eight sectors of our environment and economy by the end of this century: agriculture, coasts, energy, forests, human health, salmon, urban stormwater infrastructure and water resources. While our stories will be firmly rooted in the Pacific Northwest, these focus areas, combined with the region’s geographic diversity, represent impacts and vulnerabilities globally.
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