Hello: everyone from London I’m Whitney Richardson Global Events, Manager at the New York Times and former photo editor where I’ve worked with incredible visual journalists around the world to help our readers better understand our times.
Throughout the month of April, we’re, bringing you the green house, a five-part digital event, series focused on the state of the planet. Fifty years after Earth, Day launched in April 1970, with millions of us around the world, currently practicing social distancing.
How will communities rally around this milestone anniversary? Last week’s session, we were guided by top top times climate journalists as they discuss what they’re learning about climate change during the corona virus pandemic.
Today we will look at the power of using visual journalism and new technologies to document the effects of our warming planet. We will also consider the difficulties of covering a topic that is global in scale quite like the corona virus and how our journalists have approached the challenge head-on.
You may submit questions at any time during the event in the Q & amp A window. Please note that this event is being recorded. I’d, like to start by introducing you to today’s. Speakers I’m here with Josh Haner New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning staff photographer, who is joining us from his home in San Francisco.
Josh has spent the last five years working in more than 12 countries, not only on land but underwater and from the air to document the pressing and wide-ranging realities of climate change, using drones and still photography.
We’re, also joined by Derek Watkins, currently based in Portland Oregon, who’s, a lead, graphics, editor at the times. The projects that josh and Zarek have collaborated on have won numerous awards, including World Press Photo word for innovative storytelling.
Two webby awards and they’ve received two Emmy nominations: Josh, let’s turn to you since Earth Day launched 50 years ago, there’s, been a dramatic evolution of how the public understands our impact on the planet.
The Times climate scheme has invested heavily in reporting these changes with new stories weekly and there often paired with really strong visual journalism. I imagine because the effects of climate change happens on such a slow timescale and with it being such a vast concept, it could be difficult to capture visually.
Why did you take on this project and why did you choose to approach it using drone technology yeah thanks? So much for for to everybody for for coming today to talk about something that I’m, very passionate about.
As Wendy mentioned for the last five years, I’ve, dedicated my time to covering stories about climate change, and when I started this project, I looked at what people had been doing for four decades, and these are some of the images that I was Able to find these are magazine covers from the last decade, and this is really the generic image that I associated with climate change, which was a lone pair of polar bear on a floating piece of ice in the Arctic or calving glaciers or a mixture of the Two – and I really recognized that when I saw these images it made me turn off, and I didn’t really want to read these pressing and important stories.
It became sort of a generic image, and so what we decided to do with the times was really commit to a new form of visual storytelling and dedicate lots of resources both my time, Derek’s time and a team of editors.
We started a climate desk that now has more than 12 reporters, and we believe that this is the most important topic right now, probably with the exception of the coronavirus at the moment, I believe that climate change is one of the most important stories to tell so What we’re, going to start with, is a video that we put together it’s about four minutes.
I’ll narrate it as we go through, but this is some of the drone footage that I & # 39. Ve captured in these twelve countries, and so it’s head right on in there [ Music ]. This is the southern region of the Gobi Desert, [, Music, ], [, Music, ], [, Music ].
I’m. Sorry [, Music ]. I am [ Music ] through video query telling within the moon. This is trying to show how here is their living situation in order to see some of the palm trees that have been eroded and fallen down, [ Music ].
This was actually done with a handheld mini cam sort of the same kind of stabilization that the drone uses to just try to put people into this refugee camp in leisure, agadez, [, Music, ] – and this is really why we begin began this project, which is people Estimate that by 2050 there will be between 50 and 200 million climate refugees around the world.
So this is a problem that we’re, really just starting to become exposed to Thanks thanks everybody truly powerful work. Thank you so much Josh. Now this series, hasn’t only been published online and in print reaching thousands of people around the world, but in the last year I know this work has also traveled as a photo exhibition curated by Megan lorem.
The Times is director of photography. The work has also been exhibited for audiences in London and Paris and Scotland. Most recently in Hong Kong, though I know it was forced to close early due to coronavirus.
Can you tell us about the experience of exhibiting this work yeah? These first two images have shown is from photo London, where we premiered this exhibition, and we thought it was important to sort of combine the still imagery with some of this drone imagery.
So we have a gathering of three TV screens that are showing this immersive work. Similar to what we just started, this conversation with – and this really gave us a unique experience in bringing this work to a public exhibition forum.
Most of this work that I spend months on these the light of day in the New York Times as one day in the paper, one really focused day online and so to give this more life and try to see the 5 years worth of work.
In one place, we thought was really effective, it also brings it to a new audience. This is shown in art contexts, and so, as Whitney was mentioning, I went to Hong Kong to premiere. This exhibition and its first stop in Asia, and this is a virtual exhibition that we’ve, had to put together from the exhibition.
I was in Hong Kong when the first case of coronavirus came there and we opened the show to great fanfare and hosted many lectures and things in the space. And then we had to close it and it is currently closed.
But we thought that it was important to be able to to give people the experience of seeing this art in this exhibition forum. So we’ve, put together this virtual online view, so that people from all over the world can can visit that.
That’s. Excellent, I’ve, had the opportunity to be at some of those exhibition openings and one of the questions that people tend to ask you as well as how this work got started, the very beginnings. How did you even get started with with Greenland, which I which I believe started in 2015? I want to walk us through that yeah.
So thanks so much. This is the very first project that I did on the climate desk or for for a bigger climate audience. I was sent to Greenland to accompany the US ambassador to Denmark, who is going to the top of Greenland’s ice sheet.
Greenland contains the second largest cache of frozen fresh water on the planet and at the top of that mountain of ice 10,000 feet up. 3,000 meters up is a research station, so we took one of these planes up to the top of the ice sheet to visit.
These United States researchers looking at how both pollution is impacting this ice sheet and they’re, conducting experience, experiments almost every day so on the flight up. What was really interesting to me was this is a frozen sheet of ice, so you expect it to be pretty much uniform white abyss and yet, when you’re flying over it, you see these blue spots and they’re actually from A visual perspective absolutely gorgeous as this iridescent blue green and when you’re, seeing this out of the windows of an airplane, it’s really gorgeous, and these meltwater rivers that are cutting through the ice and purely from a visual side.
I was fascinated with this, and so when I got back to camp to the main airport later that day, I met up with this researcher, Larry Smith and his group from UCLA. He’s now at Brown University now, and we flew out in a helicopter to his research site out on the ice sheet, and this is we’re working with his students.
They set up camp for a week right, very precarious. At the edge of the ice sheet, they have to strap into harnesses and and climbing line to make sure that they don’t get swept away in one of these fast-moving rivers, but their job was to send a boat back and forth across this River to try to measure just or get a sense of just how much water is leaving the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet.
So I also brought a drone. I’ve, been studying to become a drone pilot in the US, and this was one of the countries that I was allowed to fly in. So I brought a drone out on the helicopter and in this punishing environment freezing cold tons of wind.
I only had about eight minutes per battery to be able to make this flight, and I was thrilled that I got something to to try to use to try to place people into this really unique place that they’re, most likely never going to Get an opportunity to visit, and then this is where Derek comes in.
I brought all this visual content back and handed it over to Derek and a team that really worked with it and worked with the researchers to produce something truly incredible. So I’ll hand this over to Derek yeah thanks Josh and thanks everyone for uh for joining us.
So just to give you a little bit of background first on the desk that I work on in the newsroom, because it’s. Acting a bit unfamiliar to some people, I work on the graphics desk, and so we’re, a team of about 40 people or so, and we’re responsible for just a very wide range of visual journalism and a broader sense.
So we do data visualizations and charts. We do 3d modeling motion graphics. Even we have some people on our team. They’ve, been getting into doing stories using augment that in virtual reality in the past few years, so I’ve, been at the time since 2012.
I got an internship in the graphics department just out of graduate school, and in that context my focus is generally on maps and geographical stories, because that’s. What my master’s degree was in was in geography, so that’s kind of context that I’m approaching this stuff with, and our desk often works with photographers, like Josh, on big feature stories like this, and I’ve been lucky enough because of my background and geography, and things like that to work with Josh on several of these climate related stories and part of the reason for that is that many of these climate and environmental stories you know, have this strong Geographic component baked into them it’s like a central part of the story, is how how are these places dealing with climate change and how do these processes play out on different different geographical scales? So our goal with Greenland, when Josh came back with all of his photos and and put us in touch with Larry Smith’s.
My colleague Larry Buchanan, and I started trying to think about how. How could we add to this story and, and what could be kind of add to it that Josh wasn’t able to capture from his vantage point right on the ice, and so what we kind of settled on is what you’Re seeing here looping through this video, this is a screen recording of the actual page that we published one section of it.
Where we begin zoomed out with the map of Greenland, then we zoom in closer go through different stages of satellite imagery, as we get closer and closer trying to give you a sense of the scale of the place and then, as we zoom even closer, we actually Transition to imagery captured from one of the researchers drones to where you can actually zoom in and see the tint on the ice where these researchers actually had to live as they did this research.
We borrowed this approach from the old powers of 10 documentaries in the 70s. If any of you were familiar with those, and then we also later in the story brought in some of the more data visualization side of things to show you that look.
This is not just a single pond on the ice sheet like Josh mentioned before there are thousands of these things, and so each of the circles here kind of represents a different spot where one of these rivers burrow down into the ice sheet just-just-just massive amounts of Water leaving the ice sheet every year.
Well now I know you guys also did work in the Pacific Islands Josh. Do you want to speak about that that series yeah? When I started this, we wanted to look where this water was going and to me climate change.
You know back in 2015 when I just started was something that was happening way in the future, and when I got to the Pacific Islands, it became very obvious very quickly that climate change was affecting people right now.
So this is edge. It islet at high tide – and you can just see how precarious this island already is most of the Marshall Islands and Kira bas, where I went. They they islands that make up those countries and those areas are below six feet above sea level, and I thought this really made it very obvious.
This kind of straight down. It almost looks like a live Google Earth view, but it was also important to meet the people that were at the front lines of this. This is a woman named Tubb wina in kira bus on the North Shore of her Island.
She organized ten women to plant mangrove trees in what became a physical barrier to the encroaching sea, and this really touched me because this is you know one person taking over or trying to take on climate change to keep her home safe for further generations.
The the countries have also tried to build sea walls along their edge, but oftentimes it’s, a it’s, a losing prospect. This is to three kids coming back from shopping at a local store and they have to time their shopping trips around the tide, and so they can only get to their homes during low tide, and so here they are transitioning back over before it becomes an island.
In a few minutes and a lot of people are building sea walls to try to block this rising sea, however, it doesn’t take into consideration what happened this water? It has to go somewhere. So if your neighbor builds a seawall all that water, basically redirects to your front door, and so it made me realize you really need this concerted effort to try to plan for what’s happening.
And what was heartbreaking here is seeing that their history was actually being lost to the sea. This is one cemetery there and they & # 39, ve, already lost seven rows of graves to erosion and that’s literally history and and their connection to these two to the land being washed out to sea.
Now I know you took a similar approach on a story in Bolivia, Derek. I know you worked on maps with that series as well. Do you want to share how that concept came together? Yeah um, I think. First, we did.
You want to go through the Chinese desert story. Josh that does lead into Bolivia. A little bit sounds great. Let me go back there yeah, so this is in China on that south end of the Gobi Desert that anger desert.
This is you saw some footage of this in the video we started with. We put together this this visualization from drone imagery to maps and hand that over yeah, my colleague, Jeremy white actually worked on this with Josh and I and again the goal being to kind of splice together.
This drone imagery was kind of a continuous zoomed out view of the desert that we were talking about so Jeremy put together. This motion graphic where you really kind of been a literally continuously string together, the drone imagery to the pulled back satellite imagery.
To give you a real sense of the scale of the place that we were talking about with this story, about desertification, in China, yeah and then back to what one thing China is really good at is mass relocation of people, and they do it very quickly.
This is one of our. This is a resettlement village, so taking that that view of climate migration, another level, China is actually succeeded at moving hundreds of thousands of people to settlement in communities like this that are very different from the ways of life and the homes that most of these pastoral Communities have have had to relocate from so you imagine, people are still trying to live out their old ways of life.
People are still raising sheep. However, what the the country didn’t really take into consideration. Is they needed jobs to accompany this? Mass relocation and the only people that can work are women at a nearby desert, watermelon Grove and so the women from each community commute and work 12 to 16 hour days in back-breaking heat and bring home as little as 12 dollars a day for their families.
Most men, don’t, actually have any source of income in this new resettlement. Community and the children are left to to look for new ways of having fun instead of roaming, free and the in the dunes and playing with animals.
That really sort of left to this concrete abyss and from there we went to Bolivia and I’ll. Let Derek sort of talk through what happened there. Yeah. I think I thought it was important to see that a story about deserts and China just to show the kind of different ways that we approach some of these stories just depending on what we feel like the most important aspect of the story is so, whereas the The China story was very kind of photo driven because we had these very kind of poignant characters.
The trash capture captures like the kid running across the dunes. This Bolivia story was kind of. We took a similar approach to the that we did with the Greenland story, where we actually had this kind of scrolling map zooming in closer to the country.
So this was a story about Lake Popo and Bolivia, one of the one of the biggest lakes in the country. At one point that has been slowly drying up because of climate change, and so we took a similar approach as we did to Greenland again, where we start zoomed out with this map and then get closer and closer to the lake.
We actually use satellite imagery detections of water over the years to actually animate through this lake, which is shrinking from you know, agricultural use of water, but also more and more because of the effects of climate change.
It’s, just almost completely gone by the time. Josh was there, and so that was my challenge is: how do you document something that has already happened and Derrick really was able to show this through the map and for me I thought I was important too, to sort of show what remained – and this is a Really good use of a drone in my mind, because it sort of combines that intimate portrait of this is the mayor of the town and then zooms back.
To really give you the context of just the vast expanse of this dried-out lake. That remains, and this is a community of fishermen and suddenly their boats are moored in the middle of a dry abyss and people are left to try to figure out what this means for their boat, their culture and also their their.
What their means of making income, and so some of the communities along the edge, have had to switch what their sources of income are. This family is collecting, reeds and making hats out of them to try to sell to tourists.
Another family is trying to grow quinoa and unfortunately, there’s, a reason why they hadn’t grown quinoa in the past, which is not a very plentiful crop, especially with the vast changes in and from hot to cold that they suffer At this high elevation here in Bolivia, it’s also affecting what they eat so, instead of just living off a a menu of fish and vegetables that people brought in to trade with them, they’re now having to go to fast Food restaurants and nearby towns and it’s affecting how they make income instead of fishing or making handicrafts or growing quinoa.
They’ve, had to adapt and and commute sometimes 200 miles to the salt flats and work in back-breaking labor. In the hot Sun, on this white reflective surface to to gather salt and it’s really left behind a very sort of somber mood to this town.
A lot of people are moving away because there’s, no longer a lake with for which to to sustain them, and so after spending a year. Looking at this carbons casualties series, we sort of pivoted and wanted to look at how climate is affecting natural and cultural heritage sites around the world, and the first stop was Yellowstone America’s first national park and it’s.
This beautiful place, vibrant lots of tourism that is being affected by forest fires. Lack of snowfall impending biodiversity is, is feeling a lot of effects and lots of invasive species are moving in, and so it was our challenge to try to show some of that, both visually with still photographs.
I also could not fly a drone in a national park. It’s, a logistic issue, so this was taken from a helicopter, and so we needed to come up with another approach and that led us to to this map yeah. So we use the map here again to kind of just contextualize things.
Give you a sense of a broader view of the park. If you & # 39, ve never been there to get a sense of what the place is kind of like and like Josh mentioned since Josh couldn’t fly a drone which does often give you that kind of pulled back view.
It was kind of even more important. We felt to try to pull you into things with the map with a story like this, we always kind of want to embrace the the style of Josh’s. Photography, you know, josh is such a talented photographer and the images he brings back are always so rich.
That kind of the task for us and graphics is to at least not embarrass ourselves by in comparison right, so we try to use his photos as a visual foundation in terms of how we actually style these maps, and so it was especially important with this again Since we didn & # 39, t have the drone imagery to fall back on to try to give that kind of photo realistic view, and you continued this approach.
This series another place that we visited was Easter, Island, yeah and so the East, this Easter Island story, um about the again the vanishing heritage on the island. Um was actually a few months prior to the Yellowstone story.
But again we used this kind of same approach. Um one one thing that was different about these stories compared to the previous stories. At this point, we are several years after the Greenland story that we worked on, and so technology had just gotten better in that time, and especially for things like cell phones, you know a lot of the journalism that we published.
Now, probably a majority of it is read on a phone and so and that time phones got to where they were able to actually render these 3d images live in the browser, as you’re scrolling through so this story about Easter Island, we used Kind of this 3d approach to zoom way out and see the globe sitting on the page and with Yellowstone we used the 3d approach to let let you actually kind of fly across the terrain and hopefully give you that that more photorealistic view of things that really Draws you in this is fantastic, so I want to open it to questions in a second.
So if you have questions for Derek and Josh begin to put them in the Q & amp A section at the bottom, but really quickly Derek before we go to questions, I’m curious about how the past 5 years of using these platforms have Influenced your work, particularly during breaking news moments, and, and what do you think is a future of using these technologies and visual mapping for our story coverage? If you can tell us in one minute yeah so Josh mentioned early on, you know.
Obviously, the coronavirus is the biggest story we have right now and one of the things that using these technologies in the kind of feature or longer-term stories, one of the things that using these technologies in those stories has helped us to do, is to be able to Turn things around more quickly on a deadline that is, that is more related to news that as it developed right.
So this is a story that you’re. Seeing now that we published just a few weeks ago, that kind of we we produced in probably a week or two that tries to really kind of break down how the virus spread started in China and then kind of spread through the country and to kind of Show you, with this data visualization the the failures of the Chinese government to cut off traffic and time, and so this looks different visually from these kind of rich satellite imagery driven maps that we’ve been doing to accompany Josh’s.
Photography but under the hood really, it builds on a lot of the same concepts and a lot of the same code that we wrote for those stories and so everything kind of builds on top of itself. And we’re, always looking for ways to kind of use.
What we’ve done in the past to do do clearer explanations, produce clear explanations in the future and looking forward this, this project that you worked on. I thought I think this is sort of where we’re heading in a lot of ways.
You want to walk us through yeah, so I I went to the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, with my colleague, Rebecca Lai and Nico Koppel, and the research and development department here at the Times, and we put together this story about this Haitian community on one of the Islands that was really heavily affected by the storm and tried to kind of give you a sense of what happened to their neighborhood and one of the one of the new approaches that we used.
Hopefully, in a way that really draws you into that place is to capture drone drone footage and then Nico’s. Team actually fed it into a computer algorithm that builds a 3d model based on the footage, and so you can see in this footage that I shot here in the community.
We actually are able to string together these these kind of handheld bits clips of footage to hopefully orient you better and make it feel like a place. You know these were these people’s homes and they’re, trying to pick up what’s left, and so it’s really about trying to make you feel like you’re there as Much as we can yeah so powerful.
Thank you so much for that presentation to you. Both we have questions coming in. I’ll start at the top. Amelia has asked in addition to these impressive images. If you had the opportunity to document interview or talk with the inhabitants of these areas and get an idea of the effects of climate change from the perspective of those most affected Josh, I’ll.
Send that question to you yeah thanks so much for your question, that’s, that’s. Part of my reporting, when I go to these communities is really trying to find out what is going on when I get there on the ground and we don’t go in knowing what the story is.
We go in sort of realizing that this community is less than six feet above water and within a generation it’s, most likely that there is going to have a lot of erosion and that will affect them, and so it’s.
It’s, a difficult thing to come into a place where something hasn’t yet really happened and ask them if they’re afraid of what might happen with rising seas. But in a lot of the Pacific island communities.
They are well aware of what’s happening. They see, king tides, that are getting more frequent and inundating their homes and the people there are dealing with. What I think is the most difficult decision.
Are they going to double down on trying to protect their homes, or are they going to make a really difficult decision to leave their homes and relocate to another place and leave their culture and their heritage, and that’s, something that’S not lost on the people that I talked with, and I was I was surprised at how many people are not willing to move, and so that became really apparent.
Talking to people is like literally, this is where our ancestors are, and people are very warm and open. I’m showing up in these communities and I have to follow cultural Editions so in Kira boss, when I land on a new island, I’m taken by an elder to an elder on the community and we go through a sort Of ritual welcoming into welcoming me into their space where they put their hands in the sand, and I have handprints on my cheeks.
So when I go interact with people, they know that I’ve, followed some of the cultural techniques or the the cultural expectations on coming into these very often very small tight-knit communities. Thanks for the question thanks, Josh Derek elsewhere in this question from Julianne to you, she asked how has knowing that many readers are going to be accessing your projects on mobile devices change the way you practice your craft.
Thank you for the question that’s, a good question it has. It has made us. I think more aware of the value of simplification to the point where, when you or when you were delivering things that you feel are very important to readers on such a tiny screen.
You have to get rid of all of the fluff and you need to be very focused on communicating exactly what you what the most important things to communicate are, so I think one way that it has actually helped us, and this is influenced actually what we publish For you know, desktop laptop screens as well, I think it’s, helped us to really streamline things and to really step up our game in terms of editing stories visually to really present boil things down to the essentials.
I think you know it’s, just it’s. It’s, a difficult problem to solve, but it’s. Getting it’s getting easier, because these these little devices are getting better and better. At you know, dealing with complicated graphics like this, and people are getting more used to consuming news that way, so in from always a give and take from a photo perspective where so having to adapt to mostly a vertical aspect ratio.
So a lot of what I photographed with a drone and things are very stripping and horizontal. I think I only showed horizontal imagery here, and so it really affects my compositions. A lot when I’m starting to think how does this appear? Not just in print not just online but on mobile, where more and more of our audience are accessing it right.
It’s really tricky, but it has come together so well as a consumer of your work, a question from Bridget who said that these pictures say more than all of the climate scientists combined and asked. Has any thought been given to having them displayed in public places that don’t require a person to actually go and see them like billboards, bus stops and buses somewhere that people can’t avoid the inevitable well.
Thank you. So much Bridget for the kind words we have made an ad campaign actually for the New York Times called the truth is worth it where we focused on one of the projects that I did with reporter Nick Casey on the Galapagos and the changing biodiversity there, and So that premiered during democratic debates and in pretty large television audiences, but you had the idea of billboards or some other type of public events Whitney you helped to organize some public exhibitions in Scotland and also we were at in Davos two years ago as well.
Trying to get this in front of real changemakers, so do you want to say what we might be expecting to come? I’ll, actually transition to the next question, which I think is even more important, which is.
Do you know how capturing these stories in this way has influenced or not public policy? Around climate change? Yeah? It’s, an interesting question. It’s, something that what I can look at is the engagement from our readers and what we know is that and the more effort that we put into this kind of visual storytelling with Derek’s wizardry and my images and other Stories that we take a long time to produce, we see a huge increase in just the amount of time that people spend with these stories.
First stories that lack the visuals, and so that’s, really uplifting to me. Um from a news perspective. Our job is not really to change policy its to present this to as many people as possible and try to let people make their own decisions like when they see these stories that Derek and I produce that’s.
All we can do and all we can hope for it’s. It’s. What each individual person decides to do now that they’re equipped with this knowledge and with these stories that we’re sharing and hopefully through these visuals, it gets shared more and more and more, and that’s.
What we’re, trying to do with things like this platform and with our public exhibitions it’s, really trying to find more outlets for what we think is such an important story. It’s. A great point and Annette has asked: what would you say is the most important element of photo journalism and engaging viewers in such a large and misunderstood topic, and this can go to both you Josh and Eric yeah Derek.
You want me to jump on that. First yeah sure yeah, so I mean, as I started this conversation, I was trying to get away from these stereotypic images that that I thought make people turn off. When you hear when you see a headline about climate change, I the way we present these stories.
Is. We really have some immersive visual at the top to really try to get you to feel something about the story that you’re about to engage with, and so when I go to these locations, I’m, really focused on how do I make that one.
I call it a thesis image. How do I make that one image um, really impactful? That makes you want to to engage, and so in some stories I’ll, find that thesis image on the first day, but more likely than not.
I’ll meet people and learn about the story. A lot more before I figure out what that main image says, and so that’s really changed the way. I work a lot of times I try to in the past. I would focus each day on what I could make for the the best image that day.
But now I’m, really thinking on a bigger, more project, oriented view, and I’m lucky that the times allows me to to spend as much time as I do. I usually spend about two weeks to a month preparing for each of these projects before I go into the field and that’s, filling out drone approval paperwork, getting licensed in foreign countries to fly arranging meetings and trying to figure out how I can Move from place to place safely, and so it’s.
It’s. You know there’s, a lot of logistic issues involved as well, more so than actually making the pictures. Most of these assignments, I’m. Only on the ground for six to ten days and the rest of it is about, is really about planning.
Just to add on to that Josh, I think for me, you know I I’m, also kind of a consumer of your photos as well. You know I never see what you have until you come back with the stuff. So from my perspective you know a store.
You’re. Never gonna have a story about climate change that that lets. You understand every aspect of it. You know it’s just too large you’re, not going to have the story that explains climate change, and one of the I think really interesting and valuable.
Parts of this series of stories for me has been that they’re all character-driven, and you spend time with these people and you’re. You’re, seeing the local effects in these different places of climate change from all these different perspectives, and I think that’s, a really important part of understanding it in a way that you can’t.
If you just pay attention to the big picture, it’s, important to understand these smaller stories and how they play out so that’s been something that’s been really exciting to see, as these stories have developed.
For me, and I’ll, do one more question from Anna who asked: where do you see your next stories taking place? Which places do you see essentially disappearing soon? That must get to right away yeah. So one of the pieces we didn’t have time to show today, but I encourage you to look it up as a story we did on the Galapagos, and so you know I’m trying to figure out what stories I can Tell during this time of coronavirus and one of the places where I can actually be very socially distant, is underwater, and so I’m starting to think about what stories I might be able to tell about our underwater biodiversity and coral reefs.
These are things that we’ve, seen a lot but but haven’t really moved the visual discourse forward on so thinking through that, and I’d, also like to look at solutions. So much of this work that we’ve shown today is about the effects of climate change, and you know, after five years of really living that and seeing just these really emotional stories around the globe it.
It leaves me wanting for something more positive, something that sort of is more hopeful and that’s, that’s very difficult to show visually like I imagine, solar panels done in a visual way or water desalinization effects, and it’s, it’s.
One of these things that I’m still trying to get my head around well. We definitely look forward to seeing your work as it comes out. Thank You, Josh and Derek for your time and thank you. Everyone who joined us for today’s session and for your questions next week for our green house series.
We bring you to events on Wednesday, which is Earth Day join climate reporter Kendra, pierre-louis and book review. Editor call Beckerman as they recommend the top climate books. You need to read this year and next Friday join climate reporter Jon Schwartz, as he speaks with young climate leaders, Jamie Margolin and the kick vanessa Nakata along with Earth Day co-founder, Denis Hayes.
Both events start at 11:30 Eastern and you can register to our full slate of digital events. By going to times events nytimes.com a recording of today’s event and other events in the greenhouse series will also be a bell on that site.
We look forward to speaking with you again stay safe and have a wonderful weekend. Bye, everyone.
Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8SwuLinoHkA