When you put the subjectivity of the art together with the context of the science, you have this very powerful conjunction of opposites and together they are greater than either one could ever be.
We still carry this old caveman-imprint idea that we're small, nature's big, and it's everything we can manage to hang on and survive. When big geophysical events happen - a huge earthquake, tsunami, or volcanic eruption - we're reminded of that.
I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a transitional area that was surrounded by farmland that wasn't being cultivated.
There is a glacier in Iceland, Solheimar, which has retreated a great deal, and every time I go back there and see what's not there any more, it does something to the heart. It makes you realise it's possible for a gigantic natural element to just disappear.
The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.
This air we breathe is precious, and the glaciers helped me understand that and stay focused on that.
Glacial pace is actually an incorrect concept. The glaciers move a lot faster and they react a lot faster than people imagine.
Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted.
We are now beyond nature's normal variation in terms of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a million years. It actually goes back a lot further than that, but the ice core records show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone.
Once upon a time, I was a climate-change skeptic.
Climate change is real. Climate change is being substantially increased by humans and the carbon we put into the atmosphere. And it appears to be speeding up. If science has made any mistakes, science has been underestimating it.
