Global Warming — seeing, will hopefully, bring belief
When I was reading CNN this morning, I saw a link to a science article called “Meltdown: A global warming travelog“. I’ve always heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. I believe in it mostly because there’s so many times that I just can’t express what I want but if I show it to someone they “get it” immediately.
Global warming is, next to the economy and health care, one of the most important problems facing our country and the world. Global warming effects the world — not just the US. Even more important, because it does effect the entire world (remember it’s global), it will effect us here in the US whether we believe in it or not — no matter how much our politicians pretend it’s not important.
Well, I went the CNN article which was basically a short paragraph description and a short narrated slide show of photos. I found the slide show to be so jaw-dropping in images. I’m talking about the before and after glacier photos:
- The Pasterze Glacier in the Austrian Alps, in 1875 and then in 2004.
The Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, Canada, in a 1917 and again in 2005
The difference between the two photos shows more clearly and concisely than any million words just how much trouble our Earth is in.
I haven’t read the entire book, What Matters by David Elliot Cohen and photography by Gary Braasch. But you can check the book out at its website where there is a e-version available that appears to be free. Here’s the book description from Amazon:
For more than a century, photography has revealed truths, exposed lies, advanced the public discourse, and inspired people to demand change. Socially conscious pioneers with cameras transformed the world—and that legacy lives on in this eye-opening, thought-provoking, and (we hope) action-inducing book. Like Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth before it, we believe that What Matters will fundamentally alter the way we see and understand the human race and our planet.
What Matters asks: What are the essential issues of our time? What are the pictures that will spark public outrage and spur reform? The answer appears in 18 powerful, page-turning stories by the foremost photojournalists of our age, edited by The New York Times best-selling author/editor David Elliot Cohen (A Day in the Life and America 24/7 series), and featuring trenchant commentary from well-recognized experts and thinkers in appropriate fields. Photographer Gary Braasch and climate-change guru Bill McKibben provide “A Global Warming Travelogue” that takes us from ice caves in Antarctica to smoke-spewing coal plants in Beijing. Brent Stirton and Peter A. Glick examine a “Thirsty World,” chronicling the daily search for clean water in non-developed countries. James Nachtwey and bestselling poverty expert Jeffrey D. Sachs look at the causes of, and cures for, global poverty in “The Bottom Billion.” Stephanie Sinclair and Judith Bruce present the preteen brides of Afghanistan, Nepal, and Ethiopia.
Sometimes the juxtaposition of photographs can be startling: “Shop ’til We Drop,” Lauren Greenfield’s images of upscale consumer culture, starkly contrast with Shehzad Noorani’s “Children of the Black Dust”—child laborers in Bangladesh, their faces blackened with carbon dust from recycled batteries.
The combination of compelling photographs and insightful writing make this a highly relevant, widely discussed book bound to appeal to anyone concerned about the crucial issues shaping our world. What Matters is, in effect, a 336-page illustrated letter to the next American president about the issues that count. It will inspire readers to do their part—however small—to make a difference: to help, the volume includes extensive “What You Can Do” sections with a menu of web links and effective actions readers can take now. This year give What Matters.
It looks from what I read of the e-version (sampling some chapters), that this might be a book that can get people talking about global warming beyond the usual response of “if global warming exists it wouldn’t be so cold in the winter”. Our climate is changing and it’s changing far more rapidly than scientists have predicted. There’s now an almost clear passage at the north pole. Antarctica is losing huge chunks of its iceshelf and other areas are degrading. There was a recent report that the nitrogen is now being released from the northern ice where its been sequestered. The Earth is in trouble and it’s time to stop talking about whether the problem exists and talk about what to do to adapt to the changes that global warming is going to make in our lives — I think we’re beyond talking about how to stop it. Now we need to deal with the repercussions and this book might, with it’s wonderful photographs be a way of explaining it to those who need to see to believe.