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.

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!

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Listen to the full program

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.

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.

Using the Assessment as a scientific foundation, we will research, photograph and produce eight multimedia stories about individual people and communities that breathe life into the report’s key findings. We’ll announce more about how this work will be released soon, but at the moment there’s a lot of research, planning and outreach between us and the first story. And that’s what we’re busy with now: reading through the report and other resources, collaborating with the Climate Impacts Group to narrow down our topics, and finding individuals that illustrate projected impacts and vulnerabilities. We’re also meeting with potential partners who can help provide action pathways, distribution channels and the additional financial support we’ll need. Pre-production is never quite as exciting as the fieldwork, but it’s just as critical to a great story.

Okay, that’s all for now. For the latest on our project stay tuned to The Thought Kitchen, check out our blog, sign up for our newsletter, or follow Benj on Twitter. And keep cranking on your own projects. Back in November, we got to attend the Change Makers’ party at Nau’s pop-up store in NYC. It was a fantastic space full of amazing clothes and innovative ideas, but the highlight of the evening was meeting other athletes, artists and activists who devote themselves to positive change. Thanks for all you do!

NOTE: This is the first 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.

The fact that my mom and dad live in one of the most fire-threatened communities in the nation adds an interesting twist to our story. We are working with the Payson Ranger District to learn more about the 330-foot-wide buffer zones that they are thinning around vulnerable forest communities. Since 2001, the district has thinned or burned 44,000 acres as part of what fire prevention officer, Gary Roberts, calls (get ready…) a long-range, far-reaching, landscape-scale, fuels reduction strategy. The Payson Ranger District recently received a $2.6 million federal stimulus grant to continue this work. We’ll have more to share from our time here soon.

Sara and her family clear brush from around their Payson home.