© 2000 Gary Braasch
Scientists explore the receding edge of Marr Ice Piedmont in Antarctica, where ice shelves are disintegrating due to extreme warming. Click photo for more images by Gary Braasch and others.
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The 1980 eruption of Washington's Mount St. Helens changed Gary Braasch's photographic life. "Before it happened I was just doing beautiful nature pictures," says Braasch, though in fact he was already working for the protection of the Northwest's old growth forests, the subject of many of his pictures. Within hours after the mountain infamously blew its top, before local police could even barricade the roads, Portland-based Braasch had put his knowledge of forest paths to use and was shooting pictures of the eruption. "I was really lucky to get those pictures without being killed," he says. "But beyond that, it was as if the explosion of Mount St. Helens represented the cultural explosion of concern about the heavy logging of the area's forests. And it was around then that scientists really started to understand what makes these forests so special."
Braasch's photographs of the eruption were widely published, in magazines such as Time and Smithsonian. "Those pictures put me on the map as a photographer, more than the forest work," he says. "But the experience also made me realize that I'd been wasting my time doing only beauty shots, as successful as I'd been at it. So I started to make pictures that were guided by scientific understanding of the forest."
Trained as a journalist, Braasch began to parallel his photography of the forest and other nature subjects with extensive research. In the late 1990s he found the issue that would define his career, and lead to his involvement with the International League of Conservation Photographers: global warming. He was way ahead of the curve in terms of awareness of this issue, now burning hot, and probably the first nature photographer to dedicate himself to it. "In late 1998 I put out a call to my editors that I was going to start working on global warming," says Braasch. "I had a good run of ecology-related assignments, but my first real gig on climate change was next year, when Discover magazine sent me on a National Science Foundation expedition to the Antarctic." Braasch had never been to our coldest continent, where the early effects of global warming are most dramatic. Spending a month on a ship with knowledgeable scientists who "couldn't get away" from him, he got a crash course in climate change.
"Part of my project is keeping up with scientific news and journals," says Braasch. "But it's not always easy to understand the careful language and terminology involved. So I often don't know the full story until I talk to the scientists." Ever since the expedition, Braasch has hitched his photography to the scientific community: "If I see an interesting article about global warming, I e-mail the scientists who wrote or researched it to see if they're planning any field work, and ask if I can come along and take photographs." Braasch has paid his own way with grants from small environmental foundations and private philanthropists, often with the backing of Blue Earth Alliance, one of conservation photography's great advocacy groups. That funding finally allowed Braasch to travel, in 2005, to some of the other locations already being affected by global warming, from the tiny Polynesian nation of Tuvalu to Bangladesh, where rice fields in densely populated delta are already subject to tidal flooding and the projected rise in sea level over the coming decades will displace tens of millions of people.
Braasch tells the tale of climate change as much through texts and captions accompanying his photographs as through the photographs themselves, both in his richly authoritative global warming website (worldviewofglobalwarming.org) and in his books, starting with 1988's influential Secrets of the Old Growth Forest and including the newly published, deeply researched Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World (University of California Press, $35). Indeed, Braasch's science-based approach can be photographically problematic. Sometimes his visuals show dramatic change -- old pictures of intact glaciers paired with his photographs of the same scene today -- while others do their best to represent global warming's less visible effects. "A lot of the photography I'm doing about global warming is either very tough to produce, involving long treks into the mountains to find glaciers, for example, or it's really not very beautiful," he explains. "But there's a story to be told, and the story is as important to me as the photographs."
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