Talking Shop: Visualizing Climate Change

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: And welcome to another Talking Shop with Covering Climate Now. I’m Mark Hertsgaard, the Executive Director at Covering Climate Now and the Environment Correspondent for the Nation Magazine. Thank you all for joining us today. Our subject: visualizing climate change. For those of you who may not know, Covering Climate Now is a global consortium of some 600 news outlets that reach an audience of well over 2 billion people. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help all of our colleagues everywhere do a better job of covering the defining story of our time. It costs nothing to join Covering Climate Now. There’s no editorial line to follow, except respect for climate science, and you can visit our website to find out more. You’ll find our list of partners.

You can join our Slack channel, sign up for our excellent weekly newsletter, The Climate Beat, and learn about the journalism awards that we give away every year and apply to join Covering Climate Now. So today’s briefing on visualizing climate change could not come at a more fitting time. Extreme weather is ravaging people and nature all over the planet. And visual journalists are on the front lines of reporting the climate story and they face different challenges than their print and digital colleagues. As Jeff Goodell, our friend at Rolling Stone Magazine and the author of the excellent new book, The Heat Will Kill You First, has said, heat is an invisible killer.

So how do visual journalists, videographers, photographers, how do they capture an invisible reality and make it vivid to audiences? Happy to say we have assembled a stellar cast of experts today. We’re going to talk through those and many other challenges related to visualizing climate change as a story. And we’re going to start with our esteemed colleague, Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson at Reuters, who will be today’s moderator. Gabrielle, take it away.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Thank you, Mark, for the introduction. Over the past months we’ve been seeing record heat waves in Europe, China, and the US, flooding in parts of Asia, as well as ongoing historic droughts in many regions. Climate reporting has never been so central to news coverage globally. How we tell climate stories visually has changed in recent years. The visuals that tended to accompany climate reporting previously were images of polar bears or the fun in the sun images during a heat wave. We know that these sorts of visuals do a huge disservice to the seriousness of what we’re facing. And in most newsrooms, journalists are working hard to get away from these tropes. But what does a strong climate change visual look like?

And as the crisis accelerates, how do we improve how we visualize climate stories and not fall into new cliches? When we think of the imagery of climate change, the most obvious ones are the breaking news visuals of wildfires, flooding, droughts, of people in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. This is of course a crucial part of the story and in some ways the simplest to visualize if not cover, but it’s just an element of what’s happening in the world. How do we show the longer term effects of climate change, such as the impact of unpredictable weather patterns on agriculture? The role of climate change on migration patterns? How do we visualize the story about emissions? Visuals have instant impact. They create emotional connection.

The idea that a photo speaks a thousand words is a cliche for a reason. Visual storytelling is often at its most powerful when it has a clear narrative, is centered around a specific person and place. The most powerful climate stories are those where the visuals and the text support one another with the scientific and political context provided in the text, video interview or a graphic. It’s by thinking about each story cohesively that will create the richest and most compelling journalism. Today we’re incredibly lucky to have some outstanding visual journalists doing really inspiring work joining us to explore these issues. Please join me in welcoming the panelists. We have Mette Lampcov who is a photojournalist and documentary photographer based in Los Angeles.

She covers the impact of climate change and climate breakdown in California and how it affects the environment and local people. She’s covered wildfires, flooding, drought, and specializes in understanding water dynamics in California forest ecology and fire ecology. Her work’s been published in publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian and High Country News. Louis Aguirre is a news anchor and environmental correspondent for WPLG, Local 10, the ABC News affiliate for South Florida. Since 2021, Louis’s been producing and presenting the station’s weekly environmental series, “Don’t Trash Our Treasure,” focusing on local issues impacting our natural world.

And Yadira Hernández-Picó, an award-winning Puerto Rican documentary photographer and educator. Her work highlights the human dimension of climate change through visual storytelling projects mainly in her home country. Her long-term project chronicling the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. “Volver a casa” is the recipient of multiple awards. So to get stuck in, the first question will be for Louis. For you, what’s the power of visuals in climate reporting specifically?

Louis Aguirre: I’m so happy that we’re talking about heat, which is really known as the silent killer. And our planet has never been hotter. I think over the past 10 years we have recorded the hottest temperatures ever recorded on our planet. And that is something very difficult to visualize and to show, especially in the television medium. But right now we have a forest fire under the surface of the ocean. We’re losing coral reefs. We have a mass bleaching event that Florida has never seen before. That has been the focus of my heat impact story over the past three weeks. We have been diving with NOAA scientists and other restoration practitioners as they race to save the precious corals that they’ve been trying to bring back.

Nothing hits home, not just seeing the mass bleaching event and showing those powerful images to your audience, but also speaking with the scientists who are on the front lines of this. And along with powerful images comes powerful sound. And when you’re speaking to a scientist who are often the most stoic and the most neutral of interview subjects and you hear emotion in their voice and you hear fear in their voice, well that brings the humanity of the story at home for so many people. So along with the powerful images of this vast wasteland of white corals that were once so full of life just weeks ago that enticed divers from all over the world that represent billions of dollars in our tourism industry in Florida, that’s how you tell the story.

That’s how you make this hit home. Everyone is going to be impacted by this. Tourism is the lifeblood of Florida. Clean water is the lifeblood of Florida. And when you see what is the cornerstone of our ecosystem start to bleach away, pale away and die and possibly never come back, nothing underscores the urgency of this moment more than that. So I’m fortunate that I do my work here in South Florida, which is really a giant canvas for what’s happening worldwide when it comes to climate change. We’re experiencing not just bleaching events, we’re experiencing the loss of our waters, the overneutrification of waters caused by too much pollution, too many nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen coming in from our farmland in the middle of the state.

And also when you couple that with increased temperatures, not just in our atmosphere but in our water. It’s a recipe for disaster. So we’re seeing massive sea grass die offs, our manatees are dying. This is happening in real time. The narrative is happening and evolving in real time. So being a journalist here in South Florida and being able to tell these powerful stories, I’m never at a loss for using powerful images to drive this point home and that is really the cornerstone of my reporting.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Thank you. And to turn to you Mette. A lot of climate change coverage is related to natural disasters and there are three stages in that essentially, kind of like before the disaster happens, during the course of the event and then the long aftermath as people try to recover their homes as ecosystems hopefully manage to recover. Could you talk us through your approach to visualizing these different kind of elements of what’s happening? Because I know you take a longitudinal approach to your work.

Mette Lampcov: I think there’s an important story on each side, right? There is foreseeing what could potentially happen. There’s the science here to back it up to say these things are happening, they are evolving and we turn to news to just go to when the dramatic events happen. And I really try and look before and foresee and it’s there. We know a lot. We can foresee these things to a certain extent. Then there’s a dramatic event of a disaster as a wildfire, flooding is different. You can maybe foresee, but it can be a little more unpredictable. And then there’s aftermath. And I think the way I approach it, I guess it’s my job to research and look into these issues. And I’ve spent the last eight, seven years focusing on this.

And it’s speaking to fire officials, seeing what they’re seeing, what’s their experience, what are their last experiences, speaking to fire ecologists and people that go out and do research in fires seeing what happens. And I think it’s something we really need to look at more. Like Louis said, I speak to scientists. I spend a lot of time working closely with scientists, going out with scientists in wildfires or in different situations. And like you mentioned, they’re saying as an example, when I worked in Sequoia National Park over three years off and on. The scientists, they were quite outspoken saying, “We really feel like we’re preparing for climate change. We see it coming. We try to mitigate by more restorative fires and sort of putting low fires on the landscape.” And then the Castle fire happened and killed more sequoias than has ever happened. I just wrote it down. The Castle fire killed 7,700 to 10,600 sequoias. These are trees that need fire on the landscape to actually reproduce and have stood for thousands of years in the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains. And then just a year later was another massive wildfire that scorched more land. So I think there’s an important story in photographing the wildfire, but I think there’s an equally and even more important story to tell before, but the most important is telling the after story.

How do we restore? What can we learn from these wildfires? I mean these are examples, right? Take lessons, go out and spend time with scientists, have them tell you what they’re seeing. Because if we’re just showing the drama, I don’t think we’re learning a lot. We’ll leave it to a certain extent. There’s more to it than that one extreme event. There’s something leading up to it. There’s something that happens, a wildfire goes through a forest or neighborhood, takes a day or two, it’s gone. But then the devastation left behind is massive, ecologically or people’s lives. I photographed a neighborhood that burned close to LA a couple of years back and it’s taken people two to three years to rebuild. All for that matter, lose their homes and their savings. So I think those stories are kind of lost.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: And on this point of the aftermath and the kind of the long tail after an event, I’d like to turn to you, Yadira. So after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, you were documenting the aftermath of the disaster in your own community. Can you just tell us a bit about how that’s informed your coverage?

Yadira Hernández-Picó: Absolutely, Gabrielle, thanks. Actually, I’m having problems hearing myself. Can you hear me clearly?

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: We can hear.

Yadira Hernández-Picó: You too? And are you seeing me well because we were doing some tests with my video. Going to turn it off so you can hear me.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: We can hear you and see you.

Yadira Hernández-Picó: It’s fine. Well, I can tell you about my documentation after Hurricane Maria. It is from my own experience. It is firsthand because Hurricane Maria left a massive humanitarian crisis in its wake. It was an unprecedented catastrophe here in the island, just a brief of context on the storm, it is considered the deadliest or worst natural disaster ever recorded in Puerto Rico. So today actually, there are still citizens living without water, without electricity, facing food shortages. We all did struggle financially. As I tell you, we never saw that before. Actually nearly 5,000 people… I am really having problems hearing myself. I’m going to turn the video off. Maybe I hear better. Do you hear me better now?

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: We still hear you.

Yadira Hernández-Picó: So today there are still citizens living without these basic needs, like I was telling you. And more than 3,000 homes are covered with blue tarps. When Hurricane Fiona, last year on September 2022, just days before the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico. And according to a Harbor Report, nearly 5,000 people died, the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. So that’s really meaningful. So the series I developed, Volver a casa or Returning Home, explores the resilience of some of the island’s most vulnerable and isolated communities in my hometown of Maricao, it is located on the western part of the island. And in terms of coverage, answering your question after this context, I think that with very few exceptions, the stories of people in these vulnerable communities are frequently nameless and dehumanized. So from my perspective, from an insider in my reporting in this specific case, every photograph is accompanied by the hurricane survivors’ names, quotes, and starts to give them… Not a voice, I think they already have one. I hear that a lot. But to give them the chance to express themselves. And we can go here to a lot of political and colonial implications in Puerto Rico, but we’re not going there.

But more importantly, I wanted to provide the hurricane survivors with a space where they can, through photography and stories, through that combination, send a message that will have a wider audience to understand not only their situations and needs, but more importantly how underrepresented communities are disproportionately affected due to the increased exposure and vulnerability to climate change.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Thank you. Okay. So that’s really interesting. And I think within what both you and Mette say, there’s kind of two really good points to take out of it; the looking at the aftermath that lasts longer than the event itself and giving people the space to be able to get their own message out there, to express their own experience of it. So the victims of these events also have a voice on the world stage. Of course, they’ve got a voice anyway, but we can help amplify that.

And so I wanted to turn back to Louis and ask you a little bit about the daily grind of journalism. Now you present a weekly show about climate change and we all know that when we’ve got to find stories in a limited subject area week after week after week, that can be a challenge sometimes. How do you keep people engaged? What are your audiences looking for? How do you keep it fresh?

Louis Aguirre: So I live in South Florida where we’re experiencing this in real time. And it’s not a show, it’s a four to five minute segment, but I could do a show. That’s the plethora of stories that we have going on here on a daily basis. My primary role for my station is a news anchor. I’m a presenter, so I’m on set presenting various newscasts during the day. The climate journalism I do on my time, on my free time when I’m not presenting. So it takes me a week to gather the resources that I need and the assets that I need to tell a compelling story. But I could be telling a story if I had the time, and the team, seven days a week. There’s no shortage of stories when it comes to climate reporting here in South Florida. As I said, we’re experiencing this in real time.

We are experiencing the hottest July ever recorded in South Florida, since records were ever kept in over 130 years. We experienced a record shattering heat index of 116 degrees yesterday. That’s never happened. We weren’t supposed to experience these heat indices for another 30 years. And I don’t know if this is an aberration or if this is just a window of what we’re going to experience in the years to come, but this is very scary and this is impacting everyone’s daily life. Yesterday we had to evacuate the Veterans Hospital because their generator went down and they had no AC.

So all of these stories are related to climate. It is my job as a journalist to make sure that everybody understands that that is the through line for all these stories. Climate impacts so many different facets of our life. We’re seeing an uptick in violence. There is research showing that when you have heat stressing, that that also influences violent behavior. So there’s not one aspect of our daily life here in South Florida that isn’t touched by this story right now.

We’re seeing what’s happening in Maui right now, and we’re holding our breath because while we don’t have the wildfires that we experienced out west and what we’re seeing right now in Maui, we certainly have our natural disasters that have manifested in our backyard. We had one of the worst storms ever. Ian hit the West Coast last year. We’re bracing for hurricane season right now. Our ocean temperatures have never been warmer or hotter than they are right now. Usually it’s an El Nino year, so we might get a break. But the storms that will come, will come with a bigger punch. We’re no stranger to sea level rise here. We’re no stranger to sunny day flooding, which we have here. And we’re no stranger to fish kills, which we’re seeing more and more frequently now because of what I’ve said. Our water’s never been as hot as they are right now, and our pollution levels never being as high as they are right now.

So there’s never any shortage of stories for me to cover. As I said, it’s like playing whack-a-mole every single day. My job is really to engage my team of colleagues to take these stories and to run with them and also underscore how climate is related to all of this. But we’re talking about climate every single day here. Everyone is looking to South Florida, especially Miami, to see how we’re going to stand up to, and not just stand up to the resiliency challenges, but also what are we doing to mitigate the effects? How are we doing to engage the South Florida population to take more proactive measures to make sure that we are in fact being on the front lines of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions? Are we really engaging politically with the leaders that are in charge to actually make those policies or enact those policies that are going to lead us in that direction with speed and scale, which is what this moment in time is calling for?

Those are the stories that we’re telling; right now our governor just green lit a cartoon to be shown in schools that teaches kids the other side of the climate story, the climate denial side of the story. That’s insane when you’re having a mass bleaching event and the hottest temperatures that we’ve ever experienced in the state’s history. Now we can’t tell you how to feel about a story, but we can talk about it, let the audience draw their own conclusions. So there’s never any lack of stories here in South Florida, unfortunately in my backyard. But then that’s the responsibility that I have as a journalist to bring these stories forward and to champion these stories and make sure that if I can’t tell them, I find someone in my newsroom who will.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Thank you. And Mette, obviously you get deep into research with scientists, and so your work’s very based on that scientific research and knowledge rather than just what’s inherently happening in front of you. How do you translate that in a very visual sense? How do you make that explicit visually as opposed to it being something that’s added by the text?

Mette Lampcov: Yeah, I think, sort of for translating it for my brain, is rather being hired just to go and photograph a story, or me pitching a story that I researched. And at times I do get hired because I know certain areas and understand the specific topic.

But I think the way I approach this sort of research and what comes out visually is getting as much, being as well-informed as I feel I can get within reason. Reading some science papers possibly, doing a lot of Googling, reaching out to scientists that work in the area, meeting them when I’m there if possible, meeting people from the local community who live in the area who can tell me what they’re seeing and what’s happening and to get both views so I can get some expertise. And that could be, again, it could be fire, it could be drought, it could be leading to climate justice in a way. It could be people by the Salton Sea, they’re living in severe drought, borders reducing, they’re exposed to toxic dust.

And I think how to then translate that into an image can be really, really difficult because what I really want to do is show reality. I want to say, “Climate change isn’t just drama.” Climate change is an everyday issue that is impacting essentially all of us. It impacts certain people more than others depending on where they live. And we should show that reality. That is my responsibility in my opinion.

So I think I feel like when I go out on assignments or when I go and do this work, it’s like digging as deep as possible. How can I really show this? And I think it’s making the human connection, really learning as much as I possibly can before I go out, and then photographing it. And if the project allows the time, it’s to stay long enough to get to those visuals. And I think it’s the close human connection and the landscape, but then my captions and the knowledge I have should be in the captions or be included in the text.

So I want to work very closely with the reporters and always do, when I’m allowed, is so that my experience really gets into that text and in that caption. And so I like working with very long captions where I’m allowed to say what is really happening in this image. As an example, I can take a picture of, it may be in Sequoia or Salton Sea or snowpack, I’m fascinated by the snowpack of California. That’s where all the majority of our water comes from. And when you look at the snowpack, you go, well, there’s a bit of snow. That’s lovely, isn’t it? But the reality is that snowpack, it’s shrinking fast, it’s melting fast, it’s coming off the mountains fast, it’s evaporating fast. And that goes from the Sierras to the Colorado River watershed. So it needs to be told in the captions. And I think part of my really determination is allowing reality and visuals that aren’t only dramatic to tell important stories.

So we are educating our audience, not drama is climate change. Climate change is everyday reality that is affecting us all. And like I mentioned before, I feel like going to the supermarket and taking a picture of a shelf of the produce and saying, “This is climate change.” Because right now in the Central Valley, extreme heat is affecting people that are picking that food. They’re dying of heat exhaustion, and the food isn’t growing well enough and food can’t be produced, it becomes more expensive. Not only that, and one thing we don’t talk a lot about, is nighttime dew temperatures. If it doesn’t get cool enough at night, our ecology and that’s our food, to our trees, aren’t surviving as well. And so food also becomes less nutritious.

So to me that’s tell the whole story. Once I had one editor, not going to get into the details, tell me my work wasn’t sexy. I don’t want to make sexy work. I want to make real work. So that’s my passion is that I really think it’s our responsibility as visual photographers and the editors I work with communicate with me. Let’s show reality. Let’s show nuance because it’s really important because it helps people understand. And somebody else mentioned really also the importance of making sure, in the written work, in the captions, why this is happening, that has to do with fossil fuels and it’s manmade. It is CO2 in the atmosphere and storage of heat in our oceans, and we need to talk about these things and make it happen.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: And thank you. I think there’s kind of like an interesting idea is that there of what you said about the workers in the fields. Often the way I found is that we can tell a story that isn’t so easy to visualize is through a person’s experience. If we follow that person, then we can tell the story through their eyes. And I think that can be a really helpful thing when we’re talking about things like heat, where there isn’t always the most obvious single image visual. Yadira, one thing I’d like to ask you which was, in your experience from the work that you’ve been doing in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, what images did you find engaged audiences the most in your work?

Yadira Hernández-Picó: Definitely people. The impact definitely the human… of the climate change story, and every… It’s kind of… Okay.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: I think we can hear you now. It’s better with the video off.

Yadira Hernández-Picó: Okay. All right. So I was telling you, especially people, especially and when you’re working from your own community… Yeah, somebody turned my video off. When you’re working from your own community, I think it’s an even bigger responsibility as a journalist or as a photojournalist when you’re reporting because they know you, because it’s like your backyard, because it’s your neighborhood. So I agree with Mette. Go back, follow up, go beyond the headlines, get to know them. I’m actually, I’ve been revisiting these people, rephotographing them in the same location as the original images to survey what has changed and what hasn’t. But also posing a broader question about Puerto Rico’s ambiguous status of all the oldest colony in the world. As you brilliantly said in the introduction, there is also a scientific and a political context in this that you can’t ignore. So I saw a comment, “What we can do?” I tell you; gain people’s trust, gain people’s respect, show them that you are there to dignify their experience and honor their trust.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Thank you. So now we’re going to open it up to some of the questions from our audience, and I’ll start with one from Oche Kendo of Radio Africa. And this one sounds like one that could be a good one for either Yadira or Louis, depending on who wants to take it. “How can photographers present disaster images without being accused of sensationalism?”

Louis Aguirre: I can take it, if you’d like. So the most important thing is not to hyperbolize. Just to present the images as they come and let the people tell the story. I always say that my most powerful stories come when I let the people speak, the people that I interview. And I think nothing speaks to truth more than someone who’s having an organic reaction in the moment describing what it is that they’re seeing and what they’re experiencing. And that is also how you break through that fourth wall, because the only way you’re going to get people to care, and at the bottom line, that is my mission every single day, to make people care. To realize that what is happening is happening. Yes, these stories have to be told every day, because this is a real, everyday story that is impacting every aspect of our life. My job is to get people to pay attention and to care.
So when you have people that are experiencing something, whether it be a natural disaster, the loss of a business, or the loss of fish, or the loss of natural life in their backyard, and you have someone speak from a first person experience that’s not being pushed or prodded, and to explain what it is that they’re going through, that is how you break through that wall and how you get more people to care.

Everybody thinks of Miami that we’re all living on the beach 365 days a year walking around in bikinis and Speedos. No, a great portion of our population of 3 million people doesn’t live on the coast. They live inland. Why should they care if the coral reefs die? Why should they care if sea level rises? They’re all the way west. You have to make them realize that what’s happening in one part of South Florida impacts all of our lives. And it’s only when you share those human stories when people can see themselves in that story and make that human connection, that these stories actually, they vibrate and they engage us into caring more, and to doing more, and to asking ourselves, “What can I do to make the situation better?” It’s so important that you don’t, as a journalist, hyperbolize, that you don’t color it. The images are powerful enough that they’ll speak for themselves.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Thank you. Yadira, did you want to add anything to that from your experiences? No? Okay. I’ll move on to the next question from Liz Addison. And maybe one for you, Mette. “What’s the best way to connect the dots so that more people realize the main cause of climate change is the burning of fossil fuels? So many people don’t realize the connection.”

Mette Lampcov: For me, going out to photograph something, that’s going to be hard unless I go and do oil derricks. Methane is invisible, all these things. That’s up to the reporter. And the responsibility, it’s my responsibility too to obviously make sure it happens, and I’ve had to do that on many stories where I read what’s been written and I go, “Climate change isn’t even mentioned in here. Fossil fuel isn’t even mentioned in here.” And I have to tell reporters I work with, “What are you doing? You need to add this.” But that’s out of my hands as a photographer. If I’m doing a story about forest ecology or climate justice, it has to be in the writing. I can mention it, and I possibly can’t. It’s even hard to mention it in the captions, because it’s not what’s happening in the picture.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Is that a challenge that you’ve faced a lot? Stories that are climate stories not being acknowledged as such, and your input not being listened to?

Mette Lampcov: Constantly. I would say I’m a picture story. I have to nudge the writers to make sure certain things are in there, mostly because I spend a lot of time in the field. And I would say a lot of time, often go out before the story. I go back, I try to go back numerous times, connect with people, show this stuff and go through crazy experiences seeing what I do. And the writer might be there half a day or never go. So they rely on me getting back to them. And often, I think they’re very busy writing a story that’s been researched from a sitting room, and they haven’t had the experience I have had. And I think that’s a major, major problem.

And I think that’s probably, again, I’ve become more outspoken, and that is, “Talk to me.” The editor should talk to me. They should ask me. If I’ve spent 10 days going in and out of a wildfire or documenting certain issues, I should be asked what it was like. The reporter never went. So I think there’s a major disconnect and a major problem when reporters, or if my aspects and knowledge of the story isn’t being acknowledged. And I actually think it’s a bizarre thing in our job that there can be a little difference in ego thing in there. And I think this is a collaboration. I see this as a collaboration. It’s between the editor, work with the reporter, work with me, and it’s about creating a really honest, real journalistic piece. It’s our collaboration, our responsibility to listen to one another.

Louis Aguirre: I love that you said that Mette, because I always see my work as a collaboration as well. I work with my editor. Not the same editor that you have is in control of the editorial content, but obviously when it comes to producing these pieces, I rely heavily on his aesthetic and his creativity. And also, my photographer is also an integral part to lend the story. I can’t tell my stories without those powerful images.

But I want to push back on something, because the pushback isn’t just from other reporters. I think the pushback is from the outlets themselves. We have other outlets here in South Florida that don’t tell the climate story, that tell these weather stories or these natural disaster stories without mentioning climate. And that’s because they lack the courage to do so. We’re living in a hyper-politicized time right now, especially here in Florida. And I think there are very few outlets out there, I’m talking about print and visual and electronic medium, that still will not mention the word climate change, because they’re afraid of the pushback and alienating a great portion of the audience. That’s not our job as journalists. Our job as journalists is to tell the truth and to engage, educate, and inform the audience. And I still think there’s a lot of outlets out here, I’m not going to mention any names, that are afraid to take that step.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: I think as well, I think there’s a lot of anxiety around getting things wrong. Obviously in each country, the context is different in terms of the political landscape and all of these elements. But I feel like in my experience, there are a lot of people who want to tell the story, who want to talk about climate, but maybe they don’t feel like they have the knowledge and the grounding, and don’t always feel like they know the best place to start, where to get that.

Louis Aguirre: I’m not a scientist, Gabrielle. I’m learning as I go. I’m going to make mistakes. It’s okay, I’m human. I will own up to my mistakes, and I’ll have a scientist explain the science to me. It’s not my job to be a scientist. My job is to tell a story and let the scientist give it. Give the scientists a platform to tell the story, to explain the science. My job as a journalist is to tell these stories, and engage and educate the audience, and have them care more and do more and be part of the process to make our world better. My job is not a scientist. I’m going to get things wrong. I’m a human. I’m a journalist. I’ll own up to my mistakes. I definitely will. But I have to take those risks, because we’re at a time in our life right now that this is important. There’s not a more important story to be told right now in this moment of time than this story.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: But I think that-

Mette Lampcov: And I think-

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Sorry, please go ahead.

Mette Lampcov: I’ll just go really fast. I think there’s a thing in the world once we publish or say things publicly. We see that in politics, we can see it everywhere. And there’s this slight fear of telling things as they really are, the truth, but we are here to tell the truth. It’s our job. So surely, that’s what we should be doing. And so to me, yes, neither Louis, Yadira, and I are scientists, but we are communicators. I’m hoping to elevate the science, because that is what helps us. And science is fluid in the sense that you get a new report and you learn new things. So that’s part of our job is to move with that and foresee it, but also to just tell the truth. Because the CO2 levels that are heating up our planet, that’s nothing none of us made up. It’s there and it’s happening.

So to me, it’s just going out telling the truth, and we should do it. We should just do it and not be worried about the repercussions, because if you just tell the basic truth that’s scientifically backed up by the majority of scientists, we’re not in muddy water. It’s pretty easy, in my opinion.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: And I think actually that what both of you have said about speaking to science is exactly it. We might not be the experts, but there are lots of people who are, and they’re a huge resource that we can draw upon and let them speak in the same way that letting the people who are being affected by climate change, which is everyone around us, speak to those effects.

So to go back to heat, we have a question from Elena Gonzalez, which is, and open this up to whoever would like to take it. “What kind of difficulties have you found in visually covering a climate story like heat, and how do you troubleshoot those?”

Louis Aguirre: I think I’ve already answered that, but I’m happy to defer to Mette and then pick up whatever thought she leaves off and add to her response to that. That was the first question I think you posed to me, Gabrielle, so I’ll give you a different take. Someone else take that question.

Mette Lampcov: I think it’s, again, you go and photograph it if, let’s say you are dealing with a heat story. I was somewhere recently where I was in literal heat and got heat exhaustion working. It’s photographing what you’re seeing, and that’s people being very hot and how they’re acting, and then trying to visualize in new ways. In a way, again, I so badly don’t want to take a stereotypical image. I don’t want to take this like, “Oh, their dry lake bed with a boat on it.” It’s very easy to do. I try and dig a little deeper than that. And again, staying away from, “Oh, people eating ice cream, because it’s really hot,” or “Everybody’s on the beach, because it’s a hot day.” But it’s really, really, really hard unless you’re in a location that really leads to that. And it’s a struggle. But I think the only thing we can do is, I think I can work really closely if there’s a reporter in it or an editor, and really eke out together, depending on the location, what the visuals could be there as educational enough. Does that answer the question?

Louis Aguirre: And I do think, just to piggyback on what you said, Mette, is I think your job is much more challenging as a photographer. Working in the video medium, I’m able to incorporate sound with powerful images and get that scientific perspective. When we forecasted what was going to happen, I think we did our first story before the bleaching event even happened, we spoke to a coral scientist who was very worried about the temperatures that were already being recorded in the first half of July before the bleaching event even started, already predicting it was going to be one of the most devastating bleaching events that Florida has ever seen. And we went out with him to test as he took data from the ocean and took temperatures, and he put everything in perspective. So it was the visual, the powerful image of seeing the scientists wade into the ocean and then put the thermometer in the water, get the reading in real time, and then show a picture of the boiling sun. And you could almost see it didn’t really take a lot of creativity to see how abnormally warm the ocean temperatures were.
But I get the benefit of working with sound. And also, using effects like music also to help obviously create a more powerful narrative. So it’s much more different, I think much more challenging as just a still photographer, to be able to find those images and to not be cliche, which is so important. Not show the person eating ice cream or the person sweating that we see every single time we talk about a heat wave. What’s happening now is not just a normal heat wave. This is the climate. This is not weather, this is climate.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: And Mette, how do you deal with that? Because as Louis identifies, working in video where you’ve got interviews, where you’ve got sound, you’ve got more tools in your box to be able to enrich that story and add layers. How do you approach this in a purely photographic way?

Mette Lampcov: Again, I just can photograph what’s happening, the reality. And I think I often try to step back a bit, and this is where, again, I always say I’m an anti-landscape photographer. I love landscapes, but I tell them to talk about climate change. I’m not trying to make pretty landscapes. They might end up looking pretty. But it’s in the caption. A lot of it comes in the caption, because that will inform you and that’s where I think the caption is so informed. So if I can create a picture that maybe makes people look and want to read that caption, because climate change doesn’t have a color. It’s a visual that is happening in front of our eyes as we are talking. It is literally just happening all around us. So how do we tell that? So I think what I can bring to the table maybe is just a really deep understanding of it, and a deep desire to work on it, and tell the story as well as possible and as nuanced as possible. And it’s a challenge. I think it’s a major challenge, but I think the challenge also comes from what is the perceived image of climate change rather than to the reality of climate change. And I think that’s two things, as journalists and news people, we really have to think about. What are the real visuals, right?

Yadira Hernández-Picó: Yeah.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: And Yadira, what do you think about this? What’s been your experience in terms of communicating the issues of climate through photography?

Yadira Hernández-Picó: Thanks, Gabrielle. I’ve been trying to comment since the collaborators question.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: I’m sorry.

Yadira Hernández-Picó: Yes, I’ve been trying to comment. I also wanted to add about that, let’s not forget about the people. Let’s not forget about the survivors. We actually often call them subjects. So let’s try to call and treat them also like collaborators. I think that’s very, very important because that can dictate actually your narrative, the narrative of your story. So that’s very important. I’ve been seeing a lot of questions. There’s actually a question about Puerto Rico, about colonialism. I don’t know if there’s enough time that we can go to that.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Yeah, do you want to… Because I don’t have it right in front of me this second, do you want to kind of say what that is and answer it? That would be great.

Yadira Hernández-Picó: There was… asking about Hurricane Maria recovery. Well, we haven’t recovered yet. It’s been nearly six years, and we haven’t recovered yet. That’s the truth as I’ll tell you. There are more depressed. There are more than 3000 homes with a blue tarp. Hurricane season, we had a huge hurricane, Hurricane Fiona last year. So no, we haven’t recovered. And it’s incredible. Yes, I know we are a territory, an incorporated territory of the US. So there we go, also with the political implications of our colonial status.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: And something else that I’d like to ask you is your experience covering this in your home. Obviously, covering a disaster and an ongoing disaster in your home has its own kind of implications and extra weight in terms of practicalities, and also emotionally, psychologically, because you are living this experience. You’re not bouncing in and out as some journalists are. How do you manage that? And are there any resources or tips that you could offer like the journalists who are gathered for this conversation?

Yadira Hernández-Picó: Absolutely. I don’t think there are any tips. It’s like I always hear about photographers covering war, photographers covering disasters. There were times, Gabrielle, when I was so distressed, I started helping people by bringing food and blankets. And I noticed the need for people to tell the stories to be heard. So that’s why I started documenting this catastrophe. And I wasn’t just a spectator, I was also one of them. I kept documenting in spite of the loss of my childhood home, where my mother lived for the last 40 years until destruction. So this is definitely the most excitement, if we can call it that way, I have ever had to do. But how to manage that? Wow. Community, I guess. Community, helping each other. I remember we didn’t have a generator, we didn’t have electricity for months, even years. There are sick people without electricity. So I remember I charged my camera batteries on the only store in town. It’s a very small town. That kind of store that have everything you can ask for.

So I charge my batteries there. So I guess community really help each other. And as I told you before, go back, follow up, make them your collaborators.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Thank you. And one last question for whoever would like to take it. What do you think about the issue of audience burnout from constantly looking at climate disaster aftermath visuals? What role can visuals play in stoking a sense of agency instead of a sense of doom?

Louis Aguirre: So I think that when it comes to audience burnout, the stories that are happening here in South Florida are stories that are evolving in real time. So it’s things and events that we’ve never seen before. We’ll use the word unprecedented a lot. And so it almost makes you stop dead in your tracks and pay attention. But I think it is very, very important to offer a sense of hope with each story. It can’t just be doom. You have to say that there are people that are working to fix whatever the problem is, that are working towards solutions, but also engage the audience and the viewers into making them understand their role in all of this. It can’t just be… You can’t just… What’s the word I’m searching for? … preach at the audience, but you have to have a conversation with them and make them understand that this story also includes them, and that the solution also includes them. It’s always important to show that there are people working to correct whatever the situation is and that there are solutions. It’s just, do we have the will to scale those solutions, the velocity and the speed that needs to happen right now in order for these solutions to actually happen and manifest. So it’s always very, very important to show that, yeah, we know how to fix it. Do we want to fix it? Do we have the political will and the social will to move into action?

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Thank you. And Yadira, what about you? Do you have any kind of thoughts on this?

Yadira Hernández-Picó: Yes, I know. I understand it. I don’t know. It is what it is. It is the reality. It is the truth. So what else can we do? We have to report it. We have to keep documenting it. We have to keep a call to action with our work. That’s how I see it. Of course, there are some times when we also get tired, we also get burnout. But if you’re really concerned about it, you keep doing your job. You keep doing, making changes in your life also. Every small change counts, from your diet, from whatever you can do on your daily life to change it. Every small change counts.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Thank you. And how about you, Mette? What would you like creating an idea of hope rather than just doom, given the dire situation that we’re in?

Mette Lampcov: Well, I think again, it’s like the nuance, right? At first, I think it’s really connecting with people, getting their story. I think also, I thought I’d bring this up sort of at the end. And it’s not because I only work on wildfire. I work on many different things. But one thing, as an example, I think that’s lacking… So we photograph wildfire. We tell the doom of wildfires. And in California… And I see wildfires often gets used as the climate image. And as an example to the shared Nevada forest, Sequoia, through Yosemite, all the shared Nevada Forest, national forest and everything, fire was always part of the landscape. And in fact, fire is an incredibly important part of the landscape. So the nuances were not often included in the stories. Actually. These fires are perfectly natural to a certain extent. With climate change and rising temperatures, they’re much bigger. They’re now obviously burning into people that have moved into the wildland, the buoy it’s called, when people move into forest areas. So I think what’s sometimes forgotten of…

And actually, that’s a positive story. Sometimes those fires are positive. If they’re in wildland areas, they often leave them because they want them to burn. And the reason these fires partly burn as bad as they do is absolutely climate change, is drought condition, and lack of moisture in your soul, and major tree mortality due to climate change. But it’s also years of fire suppression. When white settlers came to America. Suppressed fire, they put them out, didn’t let the forest burn. And if you see all photographs of Yosemite Valley, there was not a lot of trees where now you see a lot of trees and now a lot of those trees are dead and they’ve had massive wildfires.

So again, there is actually… in some of these wildfire stories. There’s something positive. That landscape actually needed to burn. Now, there was more destruction in that fire because of climate change. And of course, we don’t want that to… Yeah, and as somebody mentioned, there’s cultural burns, and the indigenous population of California always actually burned the land and we move out to the islands during big fires. Anyways, I’ll end it there. I know we’re at the end. But yes, I think positive stories are really important and solution. But again, it’s pushing those solutions and telling all the stories, I think.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Nuance and telling the story in entirety, I think that’s like what really came through. It would be really great to bring Mark back in again now to conclude the conversation.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks. Thank you, Gabrielle. And thank you panelists, and thank you everyone for being part of this. I have tried to turn my camera on, but I’m told that the hostess stopped it, so perhaps we’ll get that… But in the meantime… Not you, Gabrielle. That’s the people behind the scene. Not to worry.

Gabrielle Fonseca Johnson: Good.

Mark Hertsgaard: But here we go. All right. See, the importance of visual storytelling. I’ve been a print reporter and a book writer most of my life, but today has reminded me just how important our visual colleagues are in television. I grew up in television, and it is powerful for a reason. This is what pictures is. Let’s remember, most of the news consumers out there do not read the 2000 word stories. They maybe see a headline and they see the pictures, or they’re watching television, which still, in today’s social media culture, TV is still the largest source of news, the leading source of news, rather, for the largest number of people. So what we’re talking about today could not be more important to how journalism as a whole covers the climate story. It’s come up again and again today, also solutions. In that regard, I want to emphasize that Covering Climate Now for over a year has been prioritizing solutions coverage as part of telling the climate story. We would say that you cannot tell the entire climate story unless you’re talking about solutions.

Of course, the devastation, of course, the science behind it. But you need to tell the whole story and that also gets to how you fix it. Now, we aren’t cheerleaders, we’re not activists. We don’t sugarcoat. We interrogate potential solutions so that the public, and yes, policymakers can understand which ones are real solutions and which ones are not. In that regard, please come to the Covering Climate Now website. You’ll find all of those resource materials. They’re explaining this in much greater depth. I repeat, all bonafide working journalists and your news organizations are invited to join Covering Climate Now. It’s free. It doesn’t cost you anything. We’re building a community of colleagues who really are dedicated to telling the climate story. And one last pitch here, Covering Climate Now, and a bunch of our colleagues are co-hosting a conference in New York in September, September 21 and 22, called, wait for it, Creating a Blueprint for Media Transformation. And the title is, Climate Changes Everything. But we’re creating a blueprint for media transformation. That’s what we need to do. That’s what we’ve begun talking about here today.

I want to thank all of you for being part of it, especially to our esteemed moderator and panelists. Keep doing the great work that you’re doing all around the world. And with that, I will say, on behalf of Covering Climate Now, I’m Mark Hertsgaard, wishing you all a very pleasant day.