00:00:51.220And the world needs to hear what these voices have to say.
00:01:00.760Today we are speaking with James Balog.
00:01:04.300For 40 years, photographer James Balog has broken new conceptual and artistic ground
00:01:09.760on one of the most important issues of our era, human modification of nature.
00:01:15.360An avid mountaineer with a graduate degree in geography and geomorphology,
00:01:19.960his new film, The Human Element, is an innovative and visually stunning look
00:01:23.620at how humanity interacts with earth, air, fire, and water.
00:01:27.380Its world premiere was at the San Francisco Film Festival in April.
00:01:31.240Since then, it has been screened from across North America to venues in Europe and New Zealand.
00:01:37.440To reveal the impact of climate change, James founded the Extreme Ice Survey in 2007.
00:01:43.820It is the most wide-ranging, ground-based, photographic study of glaciers ever conducted.
00:01:48.740The project was featured in the internationally acclaimed documentary, Chasing Ice.
00:01:54.440James is the author of eight books and extensively published in the world's magazines, particularly National Geographic.
00:02:04.140So to begin, I'd love to ask some questions about the stories you tell in The Human Element and how these elements are operating in the Anthropocene.
00:02:13.520So, for instance, in The Human Element, you visit Vindindale, Pennsylvania, where your grandfather lived and died as a coal miner.
00:02:21.320and the dynamics of coal in this country are intricate and emotional. They're also often
00:02:29.060brushed aside by those who don't have any sort of connection or understanding and you interview a
00:02:35.520former coal miner Brody Dixon who says quote when you work in the coal mines coal becomes part of
00:02:41.760you. You go in the ground miles under the earth. Imagine rock dust going everywhere. It gets on you
00:02:48.640under your clothes, under your skin, under your nails, in your eyes, in your mouth. There's
00:02:54.960something spiritual about it. You become connected to this thing in a sense. It becomes part of you,
00:03:01.520end quote. This portion of the film also narrates your family's connection to Cole.
00:03:07.620So I'd love if you could begin by sharing more about the emotional or let's say invisible
00:03:13.080dimensions or repercussions coal has on families and individuals? And what complexities are
00:03:18.880continuously being lost in the conversation on coal? Well, those are really big questions and
00:03:26.560very long answers. I'll try and keep it simple. First of all, I assume that most everybody
00:03:35.720listening to this podcast is probably a fairly passionate environmentalist, probably left
00:03:43.420leaning, and I am too. And we tend to have this, oh, what's the right word? We have a somewhat
00:03:54.520myopic view of things like coal and the people who work in that environment. We tend to have a
00:04:01.880sort of a holier-than-thou righteousness at times. And what we wanted to do with this part
00:04:09.640of the film was to reach across the aisle and to acknowledge that we are all connected in some
00:04:16.440fashion or another to this fossil fuel age. Nobody stands separate from this. You know,
00:04:22.700when I have to drive somewhere to photograph a redwood tree, or when somebody jumps in a raft
00:04:30.280to float down the Colorado River, or you pack up your Gore-Tex gear to go up to the Arctic and go
00:04:35.780on a climbing trip, you're in some fashion dependent on the fossil fuel economy. You know,
00:04:41.260an awful lot of things that we use are connected with fossil fuels. So that's kind of the first
00:04:46.800order of business. We all have to recognize that we're in and of that system, and we're not some
00:04:52.020self-righteous twits who stand outside it. Now, that became very personal for me when we were
00:04:59.000shooting that part of the film that you refer to. The grandparents on both sides of my family were
00:05:05.720from coal mining towns in Pennsylvania. My father's father was killed when the roof of a mine
00:05:12.500in a little town called Vintondale collapsed in 1946. I wasn't born yet. I never knew him,
00:05:18.700but his sacrifice and his martyrdom became a critical part of family lore.
00:05:25.500you know those those people back in that time worked incredibly hard and took tremendous risks
00:05:33.900you know they were they were leaving very limited circumstances in my case in eastern europe
00:05:40.540in russia actually my ancestors came over looking for a better life looking for job opportunities
00:05:46.860and they found it those opportunities here in the united states and they worked very very hard
00:05:53.600all their kids went to college. You know, it was kind of amazing what they were able to do.
00:05:59.540We revisited Vintondale with my father, who at the time was 89 years old, and he took us around
00:06:05.800the town. He showed us the home where he had grown up, this little shack that the mine company had
00:06:11.460owned. He showed us where the mine opening into the mountainside had been for the mine number six,
00:06:19.380where the miners would go in every day and they'd ride these little cars six, seven, eight miles
00:06:25.020down into the darkness in the mountain and go chiseling out the coal. And as we were filming
00:06:31.420all of this, I realized that I had had sort of an imbalanced relationship in my unconsciousness
00:06:40.120and my heart and my head with that history. And the imbalance was that I never fully accepted
00:06:48.240that heritage without feeling a sense of shame from it. And the more I've thought about it,
00:06:54.980the more I've realized that many, many, many people in this country share similar sorts of
00:07:02.500family ancestries that are connected with being working class, with doing manual labor,
00:07:10.240whether it's farming or logging or fishing or construction or road building or whatever,
00:07:15.260lots of railroad building, you know, lots and lots and lots of our ancestors were connected
00:07:20.920to all of those sorts of works. And you have to eventually realize through that connection to the
00:07:29.100truth of what your background is, that there was, that those earlier people did what they had to do,
00:07:37.640that it was noble work, it was virtuous work. And the noble and virtuous work of our time
00:07:43.460is to go beyond the limitations, go beyond the tools, go beyond the technologies, go
00:07:49.320beyond the ways of thinking and being that those people were forced to use and do better
00:07:55.680and take our society and the opportunities for our children further and farther.0.99
00:08:03.740I'm really glad that you speak to the complexities of the guilt and the shame of coming from a
00:08:12.840resource extractive colonizer inheritance, so to speak. And I know I've dealt a lot
00:08:21.960with that in my own life and also coming to this place where not to say that I should necessarily
00:08:30.680be ashamed, but also knowing that I do have to take responsibility for the ways in which I
00:08:35.680uphold the Anthropocene and this very destructive system that's creating climate destabilization
00:08:42.940and social destabilization globally. It's walking that fine line of holding ourselves
00:08:51.960accountable, but also not letting the enormity of the situation totally crush us underneath the
00:08:59.400weight of the pressure. So I really appreciate you speaking to that, especially in such a personal
00:09:04.080way. Now on this other element. I really love the fact that you're so aware right away of the
00:09:12.160Anthropocene. And I came up with a term about 10 years ago that I use quite a lot in the public
00:09:22.280lectures I give, and that is human tectonics. Human tectonics are the actual deeds that we do,
00:09:30.160the acts that we do, the behaviors that we do that create the Anthropocene. So the human
00:09:36.600tectonics and the Anthropocene are two sides of the same coin. Again, human tectonics are the
00:09:42.720actions. The Anthropocene is the geologic time in which these actions are taking place and forever
00:09:48.940bending the archipistory. And it's critical to realize that we are in the middle of that process
00:09:54.020right now. We're actually, we're at the beginning of realizing that we're in that process.
00:09:58.540I love the term human tectonics. It really brings to mind the power that we have as a species. And we're seeing that in the Anthropocene and in an epoch that is shaped by our behaviors, by the way we relate to each other, by the way we relate to this planet and resources and our consumption.
00:10:23.820So I really appreciate that. And I'd love to think more about human tectonics and just sit with that. But I want to move on to the element of air. And in the film, you visit a family in Denver, Colorado, that is plagued with asthma brought on from air pollution.
00:10:43.000and I have to say I was just in Utah for Sundance Film Festival and the air pollution
00:10:50.400in Salt Lake City was really unbelievable. I was really shocked to learn that more than half of
00:10:58.260all Americans live in unhealthy air every day and it's estimated that nine out of ten people
00:11:03.780on earth are breathing in highly polluted air and we know that by admitting waste into the air
00:11:09.520we are changing its chemical characteristics. We know that this also results in heating of the
00:11:15.660atmosphere. But I was actually hoping you could share more about the idea that in terms of
00:11:22.320elements, when we change the air, we change ourselves. Yeah, that's kind of the critical
00:11:30.540issue that lays right at the bottom of the foundation of the human element as an idea,
00:11:37.700the film. And it came, that idea came to me about 10 years ago and it took a long time for it to
00:11:44.140gestate and turn into the film we see today. But essentially the baseline realization is that air,
00:11:52.340even though you can't see it, is a tangible physical substance. It weighs 14.7 pounds per
00:12:01.420square inch at sea level. It has, it has weight and mass and volume. It's real, you know, it's
00:12:08.260there around us all the time. And in fact, I've come to believe that, you know, if we were able
00:12:15.780to really see air, we would be having a much different conversation about climate change.
00:12:21.980If we could see it in all its physicality and see it changing, we wouldn't be arguing about
00:12:28.840whether or not climate change is real. So to go from that physicality to this question of the
00:12:36.940human impact, you've got to recognize the fact that whether you perceive the air as being polluted
00:12:44.720or not, like where you live on the coast of California, you're breathing very clear air
00:12:49.180relative to many of the rest of us. You're breathing air that's coming right off the Pacific
00:12:53.420Ocean. But even if it appears to be perfectly unpolluted and clean, it actually is still
00:13:01.260changing because of the greenhouse gases that are getting dumped into it. And the air is changing
00:13:08.320all the time with the carbon dioxide and methane and the nitrous oxide and all the rest of it.
00:13:14.320So we, in the film, focused on this family that had asthma and the children have to go to a special
00:13:22.260school where they can get constant medication to mitigate their symptoms.
00:13:28.720But so the story really starts with earth and we take materials from the earth, whether
00:13:35.840it's coal or oil or natural gas, or in some cases, firewood, we burn that stuff and we
00:13:43.320dump the effluent from the burning into the atmosphere.
00:13:46.840When you do that, then you change the air.
00:13:49.760When you change the air, you change the hydrologic cycle.
00:13:53.480You change the heat that's in the atmosphere.
00:13:56.640And the hydrologic cycle means, among other things, that you're heating the oceans and you're heating the air.
00:14:04.020And water that's frozen on land, i.e. ice, melts and goes into the seas.
00:14:10.320When the water goes into the seas, the sea level comes up and you have all these consequences that I'm sure we'll talk about in a minute.
00:14:17.920But in addition, when you change the chemistry of the air, you wind up with an altered heat balance in the world, and that in turn drives out vegetation, creates conditions that allow wildfires to explode more violently than ever before, and that's what the wildfire section of the film is all about.
00:14:39.400So all these things tie together, play together, work together, are revealed together in their interaction in this film.
00:14:49.200Now, as someone who has been working around climate issues for almost 20 years, I'm curious if you think the general perception of climate change has changed at all, or is it still our greatest hurdle?
00:15:04.240You know, I think about the sort of conversations people were having a decade ago, which was that we understood climate change as something that, you know, say the next two generations would begin to feel, you know, not our generation kind of vibe.
00:15:18.260Whereas now it has become apparent that not only are we the ones who are going to have to deal with it, but we're also going to have to be significantly impacted in this life right now.
00:15:31.200Yet despite this recognition, it would appear that many still understand climate change
00:15:35.660kind of in this abstract, out there, somebody else's problem way.
00:15:40.720So I'm wondering, what are the difficulties of addressing this perception of climate change?
00:15:46.060And how much of our perception is limited due to the siloing of fields like art and
00:15:54.420You know, what is the importance of creative integration?
00:15:56.520Well, again, there's a lot of questions and a lot of answers embedded in your very well-thought-out statement.
00:16:08.180I think the number one thing to realize is that there is a very strong majority of people in the United States who recognize that the climate is changing.
00:16:19.060If you look at the Yale University Six Americas Project and their polling, it's over 70% now that accepts that there is climate change.
00:16:29.760And there is a majority. I think it's about 55 percent. Don't quote me on this. I haven't looked at the graphs in a while. But there's a solid majority, better than the majority by which presidents get elected in this country, that understands that there is human triggering of climate change, that we are involved in some fashion.
00:16:51.480And those those two numbers, the recognition of climate change in general and the recognition of humanity's role in it, those numbers have gone up steadily.
00:17:03.900They took a little dip about six or seven years ago, but in recent years they have gone up.
00:17:11.440I think it's too easy on on on our side of the spectrum to feel a sense of frustration and to say, why isn't why isn't everybody getting this?
00:17:20.220Why are we so slow to change? Those are two separate questions. I think enough people are getting it. I just think that the institutions, whether it's government or finance or technology, are slow to change. So that's the part of it that we have to move on.
00:17:36.820And I would like to point out in the context of this issue that I have fairly recently come to the idea that we should be speaking about climate protection, climate protection instead of climate change.
00:17:53.340Because protecting the climate is something that feels real and immediate to people's lives, whereas stressing about and thinking about and changing your behavior today because you're worried about the climate change tomorrow, that's kind of abstract for many, many people.
00:18:10.920But people get the fact that the climate is changing around them.
00:20:09.440like i had mentioned at the beginning of this interview i saw chasing ice probably a dozen
00:20:21.620times and that was a film that you created that came out in 2012 and it told the story of your
00:20:27.720pursuit in gathering evidence of a changing planet through the extreme ice survey and eis
00:20:34.580implemented time-lapse cameras across the arctic to capture the continuous melting of the world's
00:20:40.200glaciers and it was stunningly beautiful and also very sobering to see these images and i'm curious
00:20:48.960as to what your reflection is and what the impact of this project has had on your life years later
00:20:55.040you know how has capturing glaciers developed your understanding of climate change and what
00:21:00.980has it meant to document landscapes that may never, ever be seen again in our, you know,
00:21:06.900in our lifetimes or any, anywhere in the near future? And do you think this visual legacy has
00:21:13.720moved the needle forward? Yeah. Well, yeah. You know, when I, when I first put out those
00:21:19.220time-lapse cameras and started the Xtreme Eye Survey in 2007, I thought it would be a three-year
00:21:24.580project, but the project is still going on. We're about to begin our 13th field season
00:21:30.160And that's simply because the the sheer historical interest of what we've seen changing in the landscape is too great to turn away from.
00:21:42.020You know, I'm aware of the fact that I've got a moral obligation, a scientific obligation, a historical obligation to keep this record going as long as I've got two legs and two eyes.
00:21:53.420You know, it's we're watching history unfolding in front of those cameras.
00:21:58.200So here we go, you know, field season number 13. And when I started the project, I really didn't know if I could execute it. I didn't know if I could make cameras that would work. I didn't know what the glaciers would do. I didn't know how I would fund the project.
00:22:18.500And I certainly didn't know how the public would react.
00:22:21.760But as it turned out, we almost right away got these stunning pictures of change in these huge masses of ice right in front of the cameras in relatively short periods of time.
00:22:34.120And suddenly that visual evidence became a central part of the climate change conversation.
00:22:41.700And I I've always found the the work and the pictures sort of a paradoxical combination of incredibly fascinating and incredibly horrifying.
00:22:56.400Uh, and frankly, that sort of, that, that, uh, contradictory dynamic between, uh, beauty
00:23:04.460and horror or fascination and, uh, and, and, and dismay, uh, goes through a lot of my work
00:23:18.520So essentially 40 years in a lot of different ways.
00:23:23.520And it's been the same thing over and over again.
00:23:26.320And I've there's no reconciling it. You acknowledge that you're in the middle of opposites.
00:23:32.060You're in the middle of paradoxes. And that just comes with the territory.
00:23:36.340And so you try and bear witness to it and bring the evidence back and show people.
00:23:40.960So I, you know, I keep doing what I have to do.
00:23:45.560It gives it gives life meaning and purpose, I guess, as difficult as it often is.
00:23:51.740You know, this this ice work has been has cost me terribly in terms of the health of my body, time away from my family.
00:23:59.320The financial cost is way up in the multiple millions of dollars that it's all had to be raised from grants and from personal donations.
00:24:07.940It's hard work. But I feel like it's my duty for better or for worse, my opportunity for better or for worse to show up and pay attention.
00:24:19.280I don't want to be an old man in a rocking chair sitting on a porch swing and having my daughters saying to me, you know, Dad, you knew what was going on.
00:24:28.700And you had the knowledge and you used to go to these places.
00:24:34.800I really appreciate so deeply your integrity and commitment to the planet and to storytelling and to expanding people's knowledge, understanding, even I'm sure Chasing Ice was an introduction to many people around what's happening with the glaciers and the images were so, so powerful that it was something undeniable to witness that.
00:25:04.100So I really appreciate that. And I have another question that's been mulling through my head. And I had just been to Sundance Film Festival and interviewed a lot of incredible filmmakers there.
00:25:18.080And it feels like environmental, social justice films, climate documentaries, and alternative media are all really desperately trying to tell hard truths and counter narratives.
00:25:30.220But at the same time, they are, of course, operating in the same capitalist system that creates the demise they are trying to convey.
00:25:39.180And in fact, film and media take up a lot of resources, and they are dependent on generating revenue as well.
00:25:45.020and I am not separate from this system and so I feel this in my own questioning and existential
00:25:53.200crises at time so I guess not only am I curious about the responsibility of the media and say
00:26:02.220Hollywood but I'd also like to know as a filmmaker what do you ask and expect of your audience you
00:26:10.300know, are you putting a story out there and hoping for the best? Is bearing witness enough? Or do you
00:26:17.460feel a responsibility to create direct calls to action? Well, those are extremely good questions
00:26:24.340for the film industry, especially in the television industry. A few of us, certainly our team,
00:26:31.660the team that did Chasing Coral, the team that did Racing Extinction, and Josh Fox's folks,
00:26:41.160we're all very conscious of the fact that it's not enough to just make a movie and to get in
00:26:47.720the film festivals and to have Netflix buy the film and yadda-da-da-da. We are witnesses,
00:26:53.560we are voices, and the world needs to hear what these voices have to say. I once heard an
00:27:03.360anthropologist speaking on the radio, and she said, you know, one of the salient characteristics
00:27:09.720of the human race is that we seek patterns, and we like to tell stories about those patterns.
00:27:16.300And I thought about that, and I realized that the sciences are the pattern recognition.
00:27:22.160they're figuring out how the world works how this piece fits with that piece uh in the course of
00:27:29.100time measuring the the processes of things fitting together through time and the storytelling is of
00:27:37.200course communication and the arts interpreting uh what's going on in the world maybe on a very
00:27:43.000very you know personal and individual kind of a way in some cases or maybe illuminating the science
00:27:48.960in other cases. So I feel a very deep sense of responsibility to show up and bear witness,
00:27:56.780as I already said. It has to be done. Because otherwise, the bad guys rule the narrative.
00:28:04.300If we don't tell the stories, the stories that ExxonMobil is telling will be the only ones that
00:28:10.900the world will know. So as much as it sometimes feels like we're fighting a rear guard action,
00:28:18.120because the power of the forces arrayed against us is so enormous we just have to do it it's just
00:28:28.100the way it is so um you know that can be hard to live with sometimes it can be really tiring
00:28:33.840it can be depressing it can burn you out i've had plenty of burnout times in the course of this
00:28:38.800past um almost 15 years now um but you just have to do it it's the truth of our time and
00:28:47.060we have the mechanisms for speaking the truth. Now, do all filmmakers feel that? Do all Hollywood
00:28:53.860production studios feel that? Hell no. You know, the industry is, for most people, it's about
00:29:00.940making money. You know, they do Project X and the project goes through a certain cycle and they
00:29:07.920collect whatever revenue they can through that cycle and they move on and they do another
00:29:11.860production. But a few of us stay with the mission and stay with the causes and move forward and try
00:29:19.240and reshape the narrative that society is getting about itself. Thank you for being so direct and
00:29:26.080honest. I'm also really happy that you brought up burnout, you know, sharing with us that you
00:29:31.940have experienced burnout, but that you got back on the horse, so to speak, because I think for
00:29:37.500a lot of folks because of the way that many of us have been conditioned in North America
00:29:45.300there's this fear of getting started there's a fear of just doing it there's a fear of burning
00:29:52.180out or maybe the fear is if somebody burns out they'll never be able to go out again or it's
00:29:58.560kind of like well try not to burn out but I really when I heard you respond my take was
00:30:04.160this work is hard and it's exhausting and there's times that it will take you away from the ones you
00:30:11.060love and there's times that you will have to sacrifice all that you are to push a story forward
00:30:17.180but that's also just part of the gig and burning out at times as part of the gig and I feel like
00:30:23.940if we can just speak honestly truthfully and prepare ourselves for this lifetime of work
00:30:32.800and commitment, dedication, and really sticking with our vow to what we believe in, I feel like
00:30:39.920that love is what sees us through rather than whether it's just the numbers or the accomplishments
00:30:48.460or the financial successes or even the successes we have in an environmental impact, social justice
00:30:57.780way you know there's there is always more but it's not um it shouldn't stop us it shouldn't
00:31:03.840be something that scares us and and so i i would love to hear you kind of speak more to that because
00:31:10.640even thinking about the three we've talked about so far the the photos of the redwoods that you
00:31:16.480took back in the early 2000s and chasing ice and now the human element these are all huge
00:31:24.040large-scale projects and you've mentioned they've taken years and so much effort and so i'm thinking
00:31:30.440about for the people well i guess you know i want to read a quote in the human element you say
00:31:35.840quote we depend on the stability of the fundamental elements of the world an imbalance in one element
00:31:42.520leads to the imbalance in another people are the only element that can choose to restore balance
00:31:49.080our deeds are leaving their imprint in the fabric of time things we know we shouldn't do and the
00:31:55.080things we do with grace truth and honest commitment it's up to us to make the right choices end quote
00:32:01.180so i'd love if you could share at least one vision you have for our species that promotes balance
00:32:08.400and then if you could also speak about finding personal balance and for those of us listening
00:32:16.120these, you know, passionate activists, how we can find balance in the long run?
00:32:22.440Well, it reminds me to come back to the personal balance, because right now I'm going to go
00:32:27.300off on kind of the, I don't know, I guess it's personal, but it's also collective.
00:32:31.880You know, back in the 60s, when NASA was scrambling to try and get astronauts to land
00:32:42.100on the moon, they had a slogan that was the, uh, sort of the, the mantra of all those flight
00:32:50.320controllers, uh, in the mission control. And the mantra was failure is not an option.
00:32:58.580And I heard about that slogan. Um, I had heard about it, I guess, decades ago, but I heard about
00:33:06.260it quite early on when I was working on, uh, on the extreme eye survey. And I realized, you know,
00:33:11.920that's a perfect framing concept and with a slight twist. Yes, definitely failure is not an
00:33:19.120option. We don't have an option to fail on climate protection right now. But the other thing we don't
00:33:25.760have an option on is despair. Despair is not an option because when you're despairing, you get
00:33:32.980depressed. And when you get depressed, all you want to do is curl up in a corner, pull a blanket
00:33:38.080it over your head and be cynical and make things go away and tell the world to screw off. And0.87
00:33:45.360we just simply can't do that. And just not even a year ago, I was driving past a beautiful part
00:33:56.420of southwestern Colorado in the San Juans on this beautiful spring day, looking up at these
00:34:03.000snow-covered peaks. And I realized that, you know, in modern psychology, they talk about how
00:34:10.840depression is anger turned inwards. You get frustrated, you know, you kind of,
00:34:17.840not all depression is that, of course, but many times you're looking at something outside yourself,
00:34:23.080you feel angry at yourself because you can't do anything about it, and you turn it inwards and
00:34:28.380you get depressed. Well, action, I realized, can be anger turned outwards. So instead of taking
00:34:37.660that anger and that frustration and turning it in on yourself and being bummed out and depressed and0.98
00:34:42.400curling up in the corner, you say, damn it, I'm going to pull that out of the darkness in my gut0.98
00:34:47.440and I'm going to go out outside myself and do what needs to be done. And I think that's key0.97
00:34:53.560to moving forward for all of us. So that leads me to another really key point. And that is that
00:35:00.660we can do all these different things to reveal the truth of what's going on. We can use art and
00:35:06.780we can use science and we can use politics and we can use activism. So let's just say for the
00:35:12.560sake of simplicity, art and science may reveal, but heart and soul must resolve. The two sides
00:35:21.940of that equation go together. In the end, this is all about the human heart and the ethics and
00:35:30.360the belief systems and spirituality. All of those things need to be harvested here so that we can
00:35:36.620resolve these issues because there's no one magic silver bullet that can fix this thing.
00:35:42.860This is a big multi-layered problem, and we need to bring all the forces of humanity that we have
00:35:49.240to bear to fix this problem. So I would say again, art and science may reveal
00:41:53.960and that's the path that I've been on all these decades since.
00:41:59.540So I'm not sure how I got off on all that,
00:42:02.140but I think it was connected with what you asked me.
00:42:04.940Yeah, definitely. And I feel like sometimes the question can just spark where the passion really wants to go. And so I really loved hearing where you went with it. And there was another quote that I was reading that you had, I think, spoken, and I want to read this.
00:42:23.040so you said quote we humans are so anchored in our natural existence we struggle with the concept of
00:42:29.780dying and not being here the great existential truth we all have to somehow learn is that we
00:42:35.940are all mortal and that death is a part of our lives as sad as not being here mortality is part
00:42:42.720of the job that we have as people and so i'm bearing witness to mortality in these pictures
00:42:48.960in a deeper way I'm bearing witness to time that's something that never stops time is always
00:42:54.660marching on and I'm taking some molecules out of the current of time and marking what there is now
00:43:01.280that won't be here in the future I really love what you what you communicated there and it makes
00:43:10.280me think back to the glaciers and chasing ice and these you know once towering masses of ancient
00:43:16.520ice are now crumbling before our very eyes. And I'm curious if you feel a connection between our
00:43:22.600existential stability and the diminishing longevity of glaciers, or how does this relate
00:43:29.080to our inability to grasp mortality and our country's obsession with increasing lifespan
00:43:34.440beyond its normal expectancy while simultaneously curtailing the lifespans of so many other beings
00:43:40.380around us. Wow. Well, first of all, I thought that was a pretty nice quote that you read. I
00:43:48.340actually wrote that. Where did you get that? Yeah, it might have also been from an interview.
00:43:54.240I'm looking back through my notes to find exactly where, but I will find that at some point and send
00:43:58.420it to you because it was beautiful. I would very much like to have that and incorporate that into
00:44:06.000this book. I could riff on that for a whole chapter. No, that's, I must have been on a very
00:44:14.300good wave when I was surfing their way out of me. So yeah, I'd love to have my hands on that one
00:44:20.420again. Maybe it's a hyper aware part of me that's been with me for a long time. Maybe it's a morbid
00:44:28.400part of me. Maybe it's a part of my Russian heritage. You know, Russians are kind of famously1.00
00:44:33.960existentially dark and melancholy. Maybe it's, I don't know what, but I find myself for a very1.00
00:44:44.200long time, maybe unhealthily conscious of mortality, conscious of the fact that the world
00:44:52.540that I see as I sit here today is transitory and that it won't always be this.
00:45:02.100And so there is an aspect of that kind of inner awareness manifesting itself in the photographs and the projects that I choose to take on.
00:45:15.600You know, I find that there's an almost impossible to define combination of thoughts and feelings and ideas that have to come together in order to kind of get the hook in my soul and make me go forward with a project.
00:45:32.980And I suppose now that you mention it, that sense of time passing and mortality is maybe one of those generally unseen, undiscussed factors that I'm looking for to pull me into a new project.
00:45:52.080So I appreciate your bringing that quotation out of the darkness again.
00:45:57.280Um, but yeah, we're, you know, we're all, we're all, we're all little bits of flotsam and jetsam
00:46:05.680floating along in time. And maybe, maybe time doesn't go on one direction the way a river does.
00:46:11.240Maybe it just goes around in big circles and who knows, you know, we'll never know what the answer
00:46:15.840to that is, but, um, we are literally molecular elements in this great, you know, seeding churning
00:46:26.100thing of existence. And of course, we all feel that when we have loved ones who die,
00:46:32.100or friends who die, or you're at a funeral, or you're at a birth, you know, you get it during
00:46:37.340those really acute moments. But in most of our lives, you can't live with that searing realization
00:46:43.520of mortality all the time. And so you just kind of go blithely tripping along and getting a cup
00:46:47.900of coffee and driving to the grocery store and whatever it is you have to do. But in fact,
00:46:53.580this is all passing all the time so there's a part of me that you know feels that acutely
00:47:02.640in these in all of these all these projects all these pictures in all these places for 40 years
00:47:08.840this is time you know I'm parachuting into time these different slices of reality as they're
00:47:15.040passing in time and I'm trying to put it put a memory of that in a rectangle and let it go forth
00:47:22.980and forward into the future. I often think of this work as being a time capsule. And if I had
00:47:29.940more energy and more time and more tolerance for fundraising and more proposals and more
00:47:36.040meetings and constantly running around to try and pitch ideas, I would like to see all of this work,
00:47:43.040especially the ICE project, wind up in a gigantic protected time capsule somewhere in a cave in a
00:47:49.200mountainside. And it stowed away for 500 years and not opened up. And let somebody back open
00:47:56.000that cookie jar 500 years from now and see what this was really like. I've always been super
00:48:01.780interested in history, even back when I was in grade school. And I started college as a history
00:48:08.180major, dropped it, but I still read thousands of pages of world history on a regular basis.
00:48:14.980I've been diving in deep on the American Revolution for about a year, among other things.
00:48:20.800But the point is, think about history.
00:48:23.500Think about how, you know, we talked about 500 years.
00:48:43.620what 500 years from now will look like you can barely get your head around what 200 years from
00:48:49.560now will look like but in any event the world that we're living in right now is changing and um
00:48:55.460and uh there there's something really profound and beautiful and in heart-wrenching in the fact
00:49:03.480that that changing world is being preserved in the in the images in these uh in this work
00:49:10.020Yeah, I'm always so moved and appreciative of looking back at archival photos of the Redwoods. So, you know, just as an example of seeing what the land looked like, who the people were who were, you know, the colonizers, so to speak, that were shifting the land so drastically and the first peoples who were here as well.
00:49:32.840And it really helps us understand because we're not in a culture anymore so much where we are connected with our past. And so, of course, we don't fully understand our future because we have lost such a deep connection to who we are as humans. And I'm speaking to those of us wrapped up in this dominant culture. So I definitely see so much power in that.
00:49:58.000And as we are wrapping up this conversation, I have one last question for you.
00:50:04.100So I read that in doing outreach for this film, you have been visiting places that are really otherwise left out of the environmental movement.
00:50:13.600And it seems like your film diverges from other climate documentaries and that it isn't just preaching to the choir on the science behind climate change and global warming.
00:50:23.720And I'm curious about the response you're receiving and how is widening the audience to these issues vital in creating actionable change?
00:50:34.200Well, I think it's key that we speak across the aisle, as they say, on the floor of the Congress in Washington.
00:50:42.620You know, we can't just talk to those who are already converted.
00:50:46.840So we need to find different mechanisms for telling stories that relate to different constituencies.
00:50:53.720And so, yeah, I mean, we have a story in the film that takes us to a mountaintop coal mining site in Kentucky, where some entrepreneurs are taking some terribly degraded landscape and turning it into a gigantic installation of solar panels to generate electricity.
00:51:15.300We're looking at sea level rise in Lower Chesapeake Bay, which is a pretty conservative part of the world.
00:51:23.460And yet people are touched on a real, immediate, regular basis by the consequences of sea level rise.
00:51:30.140They live with it in their front yards and in the splashing salt water under the tires of their cars annually.
00:51:40.740So you need to tell stories that a lot of different people can relate to. I found it especially gratifying to be asked to come to Kentucky, to both Louisville and Lexington, and show the film, The Human Element, to people who are from the business community in that part of the world.
00:52:00.520Now, remember, Kentucky is Mitch McConnell country, just to help bracket what the local politics are like.
00:52:09.360And in the one audience, it was in front of a whole bunch of coal mining executives and heavy equipment suppliers who work in the coal mining business.
00:52:19.600And those folks were really gratified by the fact that we told a balanced story.
00:52:27.800And they said that explicitly to me afterwards in the cocktail party after the screening, but also in the standing ovation they gave us when we came up on the stage.
00:52:38.200And it was because they said, look, you don't paint us as a bunch of toothless rednecks spitting tobacco.
00:52:45.100So you treat us as human beings and you acknowledge that, yeah, OK, this situation is imperfect, but, you know, that there is a path forward.
00:52:55.680And a lot of these coal mining guys are saying, you know, we know that coal is not forever.
00:53:04.100And you showed us through this solar panel thing, one of the possibilities for the way out, out in deep in the heart of Appalachia, where there really aren't very many jobs except for coal mining.
00:53:15.100So you're showing us some possibilities here, and we appreciate that.
00:53:18.720So we have to, you know, kind of keep on that track.
00:53:23.640And I'd like to close with an explicit reminder that we people are all in this together, you know.
00:53:35.100We're not only in this together as a society, as a financial system, whether we like the capitalist enterprise or not.
00:53:45.100we are in this together. And we are also all nature. We're not separate from nature. And
00:53:52.300that's what you rightly pointed out some time ago, the Anthropocene is saying to us. And that's the
00:53:58.700key to so much here. You know, a lot of environmentalists have resisted the idea of
00:54:04.320the Anthropocene because they claim that it's making us feel like we're these dominant kings
00:54:10.320of nature again, which I don't think that's really what it's saying at all.
00:54:14.400What the Anthropocene means is that we're acknowledging through an intellectual maturation
00:54:20.760of Western civilization, we're acknowledging that we are in and of nature, part and parcel