Posted 22 August 2009 by Sara in Announcements, Facing Climate Change, Field Notes
This summer, 19 high school students from Chicago, DC, Denver, San Francisco and Seattle spent a month in the North Cascades. For many, it was their first time camping. They hiked to glaciers, swam with bull trout, dodged thunderstorms, taught fifth graders about CO2, and went canoeing for days. It was an opportunity to both connect with a national park and witness impacts of climate change.
When Benj and I were asked to create a multimedia piece about the
Parks Climate Challenge program, we knew that we couldn’t be with the group for their entire stay. It made more sense to facilitate photo and audio journals, which would not only capture the moments we missed, it would enable the students to tell their own stories.
North Cascades Institute purchased two Canon G10 cameras and an Olympus LS-10 audio recorder. This equipment was assigned to two photographers and a two-person audio team each day.
Benj and I joined the students three times throughout the month. At the very beginning of the program, we introduced ourselves, the equipment and the idea of documentary storytelling. We also did video interviews with everyone during those first few days. Our second visit was after the group’s first week with the cameras and recorder. We reviewed the material with the students, answered questions and presented our work from
Facing Climate Change. At the end of the program, Benj and I returned to do closing interviews and edit the students’ work (over 200 audio files and 9,000 images!) into a first draft to show at their amazing
closing ceremony.
After the students went home, Benj and I made some adjustments and incorporated the closing interviews into our
final piece. But, this is not the end for the Parks Climate Challenge team or for us. In September, we are following the students to the other Washington to meet with experts in climate change policy, national parks and community engagement. We will also be visiting some of their home communities, where they are working with teacher-mentors to design a service project at a local national park that engages more youth with doing something about climate change. If you enjoy this multimedia story, get ready for chapters two and three!
The Parks Climate Challenge program is a partnership between North Cascades Institute, North Cascades National Park, and the National Parks Foundation, made possible by generous support from PG&E.
Posted 1 June 2009 by Benj in Facing Climate Change, Field Notes
Lighthawk, the nonprofit that pairs conservation organizations, photographers and researchers with volunteer pilots, just featured our
January flight in their “Waypoint” newsletter. It’s a beautifully written account of how they helped us shoot flooding in the Snoqualmie Valley last winter.
Posted 23 April 2009 by Sara in Facing Climate Change, Field Notes
Faith Ann Heinsch spends a lot of time doing what I recently saw her do at a
wildfire conference in Reno: helping firefighters (sometimes skeptical ones) understand what we know about climate change and its impacts on drought and wildfire. She is a researcher with the Missoula Fire Sciences Lab at the
Rocky Mountain Research Station run by the US Forest Service. We just got back from visiting with her and a colleague named Jack Cohen (pictured below). Jack has been involved with fire research for over 30 years. He has some
revolutionary ideas about how human communities can safely co-exist with wildfires.
Both Jack and Faith Ann were very generous with their time, and helped to strengthen the foundation of knowledge this project is built upon. You can expect to see further reference to these interviews as our work progresses.
After our meetings in Missoula, we continued southeast to Manhattan, Montana. Our friend
Joe King runs the operations center for a wildfire consultant and contractor company there. Surrounded by snowcapped mountains – the Horseshoe Hills, The Bridger Range and the Spanish Peaks Wilderness – we took an annual wildfire training refresher and the dreaded
pack test, 3 miles in 45 minutes with a 45 pound pack. Later that night, we celebrated around a campfire and went bar-hopping with two new friends, Matt and Kiesha, in Bozeman.
Posted 15 April 2009 by Sara in Facing Climate Change, Field Notes
The wildland urban interface (WUI) is a place where homes, forests and wildfires meet. At the end of March, I went to a conference about the WUI put on by the International Association of Fire Chiefs in Reno, Nevada. The keynote address was on climate change, and there were interesting sessions about co-existing with wildfire, the recent fires in Australia, and the insurance industry and private protection services. There was also a six-foot, three-dimensional, fiberglass Smokey Bear for sale on the exhibit floor. . . If only I would have had more time for the slot machines!
Posted 15 April 2009 by Sara in Facing Climate Change, Field Notes
After visiting Reno and Houston, Benj and I spent the final leg of a three week journey with my family in Payson, Arizona. Locals call this “Rim Country” because the Mogollon (Muggy-un) Rim – part of the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau – lifts the land 2,000 feet above them. Arizona’s four largest wildfires in recorded history have occurred since 2000, cumulatively burning almost a million acres. Three of those fires seriously threatened communities in Rim Country.
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.
2 comments