JAMES BALOG: THE ARTIST AS ENVIRONMENTAL VISIONARY
/James Balog takes pause from scorching flames and thick smoke, as he documents firefighters during California’s devastating Soberanes fire in California in 2016. Balog photographed this event as a facet of his recent feature documentary, The Human Element, which follows his visual journey through some of the most pressing environmental issues faced in the United States.
Interview by Barbara S. Moffet
Photographs by James Balog
Say “James Balog” and you might think of ice, melting ice to be precise. His groundbreaking Extreme Ice Survey positioned time-lapse cameras around the globe to document the disappearance of glaciers caused by climate change; the resulting feature documentary, Chasing Ice, made the Academy Awards nomination shortlist and was screened at the White House.
But Balog has always been about innovation—and documenting nature in its most dramatic and poignant moments.
Early in his photography career he drew attention to the plight of endangered species by posing the animals one by one in studio contexts, far from their native habitats, a technique hailed as a conceptual breakthrough in wildlife photography. He followed up by capturing trees—immense portraits of sequoias and redwoods as no human had ever viewed them, often made up of thousands of tiny frames shot as he rappelled down a neighboring tree and then stitched together to form the whole.
Balog is the author of eight books, recipient of numerous awards and recently was named an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. He is a photographer, a scientist, an explorer and an artist. Photographer James Nachtwey once wrote of Balog, “He is a visionary, and his works are like sacred objects.”
Balog is working on a new book at his Colorado home these days. He responded to some questions for Exploration Connections, and we are also delighted to provide you with some excerpts from his large-format, retrospective volume due out in 2021.
—Barbara S. Moffet
Balog’s stylized studio portraits of threatened wildlife (here, an Asian elephant) featured in his book, Survivors (1990)—and in National Geographic magazine at the time—introduced a new genre of nature photography: One that has been adopted by other prominent photographers to bring attention to the beauty—and the plight—of Earth’s creatures.
Barbara Moffet: How are you faring in the pandemic? How has your daily life changed?
James Balog: It’s much more peaceful and I’m able to work on long-term editing projects that had been shuffled to the sidelines for decades. I have more focus, so I’m able to write better than before. It’s one thing to write a journal and another thing to try to find symbolic threads, metaphorical threads, energetic allusions. These will be part of a new book, The Human Element: A Time Capsule from the Anthropocene 1980-2020. I’m working on it with curator Anne Tucker from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
BSM: Do you think the changes in human behavior forced by the pandemic will affect the global environment in the long run? Do you see any positive benefits?
JB: I feel lots of turbulence in lots of sectors—policing, racial justice, and the environment. The really big question is whether any changes hoped for will stick. I’m afraid I feel more pessimistic than optimistic. We know what we have to do, can see where big systemic flaws are. We have seen over and over again the entrenched financial, political, social structures that squelch change on all fronts. Embedded structures are so deep and resistant to change… I say that having been to so many meetings and conferences where so many solutions were offered, and yet I have seen none of the solutions happen. The passions that infuse groups like that could/should infuse us, but “us” is really tired. A lot of people have seen all the good ideas drain into the sand.
BSM: Where do you think your love of nature and concern for the environment came from? Did either of your parents have that focus?
James Balog in the field on his Extreme Ice Survey, a climate-based initiative that has spanned nearly 15 years.
JB: My love of nature started when my parents would take us on camping and hiking trips. I loved to find trees and sit in them. We lived in a semi-rural area, and I spent a lot of time running around in forests, climbing trees. I became really interested in animals and how they talked to each other and I was amazed, at age 7 or 8, that animals went about their lives in their own private universes. I was drawn to them. The great irony was that the only adults who cared about them were hunters—the only way I got close to animals was when they were dead on the ground and I could put hands on them. I became an avid hunter but soon realized it was a waste. The Vietnam War was happening and I had to decide whether to go to the draft board or become a conscientious objector. It was then I decided I couldn’t kill or cause animals pain, so I decided not to kill them anymore. I did become an objector to the war but was willing to become a medic. I drew draft number 88 but for some reason didn’t get called.
BSM: When you studied communications and secondary education in college at Boston College, what did you see yourself doing with it?
JB: Education was a typical undergraduate distraction. But it’s turned out that I have been an educator a lot of my adult life in different ways. I immersed myself in geology senior year of college because I was fascinated by the landscape of mountains and how it came to be. When I went on to graduate school in Colorado, I studied geography and geomorphology. Also oceanography, which gave me the chance to spread my wings— past rocks.
I would certainly say that the Extreme Ice Survey has played a very important part in persuading the public in Europe, Asia and the U.S. of the immediacy and reality of climate change… [it] changed the thinking of moderates and progressives.
BSM: Your Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) uses dozens of cameras to document vanishing glaciers and icy landscapes around the globe. Does the project continue today? Update us.
JB: It continues in lesser form. We had 43 cameras in the field in 2008. Now we have a core of about 10 to 12 cameras plus more in Antarctica. Some sites are not time lapse; instead, I go back and shoot in the same place every few years. In fact, we wanted to get back to a glacier in France this year but couldn’t because of the pandemic.
Through scores of trips to Iceland, Greenland and other points globally, James Balog has endeavored to create a visual record of the hastening pace of glacial melt from a changing climate. The geologist-turned-photographer captured this luminescent slab of ice being subsumed into the glacial sea at Jökulsárión, Iceland.
BSM: Has the Extreme Ice Survey sparked concrete changes?
JB: It’s an additive thing, all of the voices, energies, brains, hearts and minds add up to something. I would certainly say that EIS has played a very important part in persuading the public in Europe and Asia and the U.S. of the immediacy and reality of climate change…at least changed the thinking of moderates and progressives.
BSM: Your latest film, The Human Element, depicts humans’ impacts on the basic elements of life—earth, air, water, and fire—and introduces humans as a significant fifth element. What specifically were you trying to say with it?
JB: It’s a matter of trying to change perceptions. A weird thing about films that tackle issues is that because we’re all so desperate to effect change, people think filmmakers need to be out there talking about it all the time. I think that’s misguided. I think the key thing arts should do is dig into the world, make you look at things, illuminate them and make connections. I realized with increasing clarity over the past 15 years that environmental issues are triggered by a host of interconnected relationships.
BSM: You had a close call yourself with wildfire near your home in the mountains near Boulder. How have these more frequent and larger fires affected the Colorado skies and landscape?
JB: Yes, in 2010 I watched a huge fire burn out neighbors’ homes, we watched the flames from our deck. There’s no question the air isn’t as clean in the summer as it used to be. These days, starting in late May and going well into September, smoke from fires in the West and even Canada often turns the color of the sky an oppressive orange-brown, a putrid sludgy tan, or a pale hazy gray, all of it coming as courtesy of a hotter, drier climate.
An alternative emerged: The cocky brashness of youth filled me with the idea that I was a good photographer—I wasn’t—and that I could continue to express my interest in the natural world through photography—and go on grand adventures besides.
James Balog has generously shared some of the essays he has written for his upcoming book, The Human Element. Here he talks about his early days as a photographer:
When I first started working with that machine called a camera, I was a typical environmental romantic, enraptured by the natural world and wanting to celebrate its beauty and attraction, grandeur and drama. The same impulse inspired writers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir in the 19th century, photographers like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter in the 20th, and practically every nature photographer, professional or recreational, today. I aspired to enter the Edenic place—beautiful, untrammeled, serene, spiritual, and, for me, filled with adventures of mountaineering and technical rock and ice climbing—and put a reflection of those experiences on film.
In a photomosaic of more than a thousand images, Balog captured the majesty of the Giant Sequoia tree in Camp Nelson, California. Logistically complex, this mosaic technique would be employed by others to convey the immensity of some of the world’s biggest trees.
I first started carrying a camera—a Pentax 35 mm—as a way of recording mountain trips. Scenics and “hero” shots were the standard images. I began wanting to understand what forces and processes had caused the stupendous mountain landscapes to be. That impulse led to undergraduate, then graduate, studies in earth science. By age twenty-five, as I was wrapping up my master’s degree, I was on track to be a professional earth scientist. Yet the thought of spending my life writing esoteric science papers left me cold. An alternative emerged: the cocky brashness of youth filled me with the idea that I was a good photographer—I wasn’t —and that I could continue to express my interest in the natural world through photography—and go on grand adventures besides.
As Balog delved more deeply into photography, he began to encounter the two faces of nature:
Scenic beauty and the like were all well and good. Earth science brought me into a fascination with the epic natural events — earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, landslides, and avalanches — that shape the world we see. As life went on, and this book shows, I got way more drama than I had originally bargained for. Five hurricanes. Four erupting volcanoes. The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004. Fourteen wildfires. Countless floods and avalanches.
Nature, I realized, was a creature of two faces.
Nature, I realized, was a creature of two faces. Yes, it was beautiful and beneficent, just as the Thoreau-Ansel Adams tradition told us. But it was also violent, brutal, and destructive, at least to a human-centered perspective. If I were to be an honest witness to nature, I could hardly just go on indulging in the beautiful reverie, while ignoring the rest.
A large-format book, Tree: A Vision of the American Forest, was Balog’s imaginative tribute to America’s grandest trees. While shooting this Texas live oak—believed to be more than 900 years old—he realized the giant form was more evocative as a silhouette from behind the scrim.
Lessons in the school of nature:
Fast forward to today. By now, I have covered well over a million miles as a photographer, filmmaker, writer, earth scientist, mountaineer, river runner, scuba diver, and a generally enthusiastic traveler. To the Arctic and Antarctic. Alaska. The Americas, North and South. Russia and Siberia. Africa and Asia. The Alps, Andes, and Himalaya. The North Pole, Greenland, and Iceland. Photographing mountains showed me the meaning of endurance. Animals opened my mind to non-human forms of perception. Trees taught me humility. Ice revealed what it means to be mortal. Wildfires showed the metamorphosis of physical matter from one form to another.
By 2009 or so, I took the idea of tectonics one step further when, in lectures at various universities, I started calling the impact of people on nature, “human tectonics.”
Balog coined a phrase to reflect the impact of people on the planet—“Human Tectonics”:
The most costly conflagration in U.S. history at the time, the 2016 Soberanes fire in California was featured in Balog’s documentation of a planet—and climate—influenced by human activity. The tragic event would portend a far more bleak and devastating fire season for California and the West in 2020 and 2021.
During the 1950s and 1960s, revolutionary advances in earth science brought the term “plate tectonics” into use. These are the primal geologic forces inside the Earth, tugging at the rock crust of the planet, triggering earthquakes, thrusting up mountains and volcanoes. In my own mental shorthand, I eventually thought of all the forces of nature, from the geologic to the atmospheric, from the aqueous to the biologic, as “natural tectonics.” By 2009 or so, I took the idea of tectonics one step further when, in lectures at various universities, I started calling the impact of people on nature “human tectonics.”
Over the past 50,000 years, approximately 113 billion individual Homo sapiens are thought to have inhabited the Earth. Take our population today—as of this writing, 7.8 billion people—and multiply the impact of each person by their basic needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Multiply each person again by their desire for material affluence. Then multiply each person once more by the leverage of whatever technologies they happen to use. It equals a staggering, colossal, stupendous—no superlatives are enough to fully capture it—human impact on our lonely rock in the solar system.
Every breath you take; everything you eat; every drop of water you drink; every mile you drive or fly: they all play a part in Human Tectonics.
Stop dreaming about some impossibly faraway Eden. Be here now. In taking care of nature we are taking care of ourselves.
We’re all one:
A new concept began to dawn on me. It grew and grew during the weeks and months and years to come. It still grows to this day. Here it is:
There is no boundary, no contact zone, separating people from nature.
There is no such thing as “people” and “nature,” there is only “nature.”
Nature is composed of non-human elements and the human element.
Tied in at the edge of a moulin, Balog captures a close-up perspective of glacial melt in action, Greenland.
Classical environmentalists have long been driven by romantic reflexes and a focus on wildland preservation (still an essential cause, I should emphasize), combined with a propensity to exalt the perfection of nature and gripe about how debased humanity is. They are semi-panicked about the Anthropocene concept; to them, the idea seems to return Homo sapiens to its dominating, self-serving status, giving the “drill, baby, drill” storm troopers license to follow their most brutal instincts. I don’t see it that way. Instead, it is a way of seeing that humanity and nature are one and the same. Stop dreaming about some impossibly faraway Eden. Be here now. In taking care of nature we are taking care of ourselves.
Boiling it all down, it’s up to us:
As I said in our film, The Human Element:
“. . . the evidence shows that people are changing the world, fast. We depend on the stability of the fundamental forces of the world. An imbalance in one element leads to an imbalance in another. People are the only element that can choose to restore balance.
Our deeds are leaving their imprint in the fabric of time. The things we know we shouldn’t do, and the things we do with grace, truth, and honest commitment. As always, it’s up to us to make the right choices.”
Finally, Balog uses the medium of poetry to describe a glacier fragment he saw wash up on a beach in Iceland in this original poem, “Ice Diamonds”:
Time, pressure, atoms.
Carbon turns to diamonds below ground.
Ice turns to diamonds above.
Water and waves,
the jeweler’s carving tools,
meet the last surviving fragments
of a great glacier in Iceland.
Bergs get smaller and smaller and smaller.
Grey green sea washes broken ice
onto a midnight beach.
The tide ebbs.
Polished, no diamond like its neighbor,
they are one-of-a-kind sculptures
made by nature never to be repeated.
In six hours the tide returns.
Fingers of sea foam greedily steal the jewels.
Beneath aurora borealis,
in phosphorescent waves,
the legacy of millennia floats into the North Atlantic.
One melting drop at a time,
the diamonds add their mortal bodies
to the ever rising tide of the great global ocean.
And then, they are gone.
Glistening remnant of icemelt into a glacial lagoon, Balog captured this “ice diamond” at Jökulsárión, Iceland, on June 16, 2011.
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You can follow James Balog on Instagram and Twitter and visit his websites: TheHumanElementMovie.com, EarthVisionInstitute.org, ExtremeIceSurvey.org. GettingThePicture.info. JamesBalog.com
Balog’s large-format retrospective book published by Rizzoli, The Human Element: A Time Capsule from the Anthropocene 1980-2020, goes on sale in autumn 2021.
Barbara S. Moffet is a journalist and was a longtime Senior Director of Communications at National Geographic.