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News from BDSJS and Facing Climate Change
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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