For many travelers at Denver International Airport, seeing James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey—timelapses constructed from hundreds of photos of glaciers retreating around the world, which ran for years on screens in the airport’s terminals—highlighted a contradiction. Viewers could watch the rivers of ice that are critical to the Earth’s ability to support life vanish before their eyes on their way to and from flights that are one of the drivers of the warming melting the glaciers.
Balog’s photography has always inspired “cognitive dissonance”—the mental and emotional discomfort that comes with holding conflicting beliefs and attitudes. Learning that the photographer who has for decades documented the impacts of the warming climate, from Hurricane Katrina to California wildfires, descended from a family of Pennsylvania coal miners can inspire such dissonance. So can learning that the man who made iconic photos of species endangered by human actions grew up hunting.
Such contradictions aren’t so much questions that arise from Balog’s photography and writing, but what have driven him to create them. Long before anthropocene was proposed as a term to explain the geologic age in which humans are the most defining force of the planet, he was documenting what the word described for National Geographic, Time, the New York Times Magazine and many other publications. The Earth Vision Institute he founded allowed for the type of long-term focus that a new geologic era would require. The documentaries
Now, Balog’s hefty new book, “The Human Element: A Time Capsule From the Anthropocene,” presents an anthology of his words and pictures from a lifetime of bearing witness to human impacts on the planet. Inside Climate News’ excerpt from the book includes an essay, “Carbon Inheritance,” and, of course, a selection of his iconic photographs.
