When he’s not dangling off a cliff or rappelling into an icy crevasse, photographer, author and visionary conservationist James Balog is busy traveling the globe with his urgent message about climate change.
Balog is the founder of the Extreme Ice Survey, the most wide-ranging photographic study of glaciers ever conducted. He will speak in Ketchum on Thursday, January 19, as part of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts Lecture Series and in conjunction with The Center’s current multidisciplinary project, Thin Ice: Journeys in Polar Regions .
“The Extreme Ice Survey is one of those projects that sounds impossible to pull off—27 time-lapse cameras at 18 glaciers in some of the most difficult to reach places on the planet,” says Britt Udesen, The Center’s Director of Education and Humanities. “And yet James Balog and his team accomplished it. His absolutely dazzling multimedia presentation is a perfect companion to the artwork on view in Thin Ice .”
Throughout his long career, Balog has pushed himself to take fresh approaches to nature photography, whether in studio shots of endangered animals (Survivors , 1990) or composite photos that capture an entire redwood tree from roots to crown (Tree , 2004). The Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) brought together not only his expertise in photography and his love for mountaineering but his graduate work in geomorphology—the study of landforms. It took six months of experimenting to come up with a camera system sturdy and reliable enough to function in temperatures down to minus 40ºF, deep snow, winds to 160 miles per hour, torrential rain and rock falls. In addition to the time-lapse cameras, Balog and the EIS team shot conventional photography and video (including a jaw-dropping calving event at Greenland’s Illulissat Glacier that sent billions of tons of ice into the ocean) and conducted repeat photography at glaciers from South America to the Himalayas.
Once a climate change skeptic, Balog is convinced that humankind’s actions are dangerously accelerating climate change—“the evidence is in the ice,” he says. “Shrinking glaciers are the canary in the global coal mine. They are the most visible, tangible manifestations of climate change on the planet today.”
Balog believes people connect more easily with EIS imagery than with purely scientific statistics. “Real-world visual evidence has a unique ability to convey the reality and immediacy of global warming, as well as the otherworldly beauty of ice-cloaked landscapes.”
National Geographic has produced both a book, Extreme Ice Now , and a PBS NOVA program on EIS, and Balog has been interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air . He has presented EIS findings to the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change and to members of Congress. He represented NASA and the U.S. State Department at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009 and has given his multimedia talk at the annual invitation-only TED conference and to scientists and general audiences worldwide. His work with EIS has earned him the Heinz Award, the Aspen Institute Visual Arts & Design Award and the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Journalism from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Balog is currently finishing up a new book, ICE: Portraits of the World’s Vanishing Glaciers , to be published by Rizzoli in 2012, with a foreword by Terry Tempest Williams. The EIS project is also the subject of a feature-length documentary, Chasing Ice , premiering at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
Tickets to James Balog’s lecture are $15 Sun Valley Center members, $25 nonmembers and $10 students. The lecture begins at 6:30 pm Thursday, January 19 at the Church of the Big Wood in Ketchum. Buy tickets online at www.sunvalleycenter.org, call 726.9491 ex 10 or stop by The Center in Ketchum. While in Sun Valley, Balog will also visit local schools.
This lecture is sponsored in part by Jeanne Meyers & Richard Carr and Richard & Judy Smooke. The Center thanks Lecture Series sponsors Gail & Jack Thornton, the Castellano-Wood family and Boise State Public Radio.
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