Many of the 50,000 passengers passing through Reagan National airport in Washington DC daily will now see a different kind of advertisement in the concourse: a new public education initiative has installed a photographic billboard of ongoing climate change today.
This Is Climate Change, an educational project of the Del Mar Global Trust, put up the first of a series of large backlighted photographs yesterday, featuring my time series view of the shrinking Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska. As part of World View of Global Warming, I rephotographed a 1894 image in 2008 to show the visible effect of global warming on the glacier near Juneau.
This Is Climate Change project will place photographs and other strong visuals in public locations to show that climate change is real and is currently impacting the United States. Despite the overwhelming scientific findings on the reality of man-made climate change, a 2010 Pew Research Center poll found that only 59% of Americans believed that there was solid evidence that the earth was getting warmer. “The numerous scientific reports and publications affirming that climate change is real and human induced have not seemed to sway public opinion” explains project director, Elena Marszalek, in a press release. “We thought an approach that focuses on changes which are already affecting the U.S. would make climate change a more relevant issue to the American public.”
The Del Mar Global Trust chose to collaborate with me because of my celebrated series of views of affected landscapes, part of my 11-year photojournalistic project to increase climate science literacy. The 'This Is Climate Change' educational project will be synergistic with other programs to re-emphasize the science of climate change and the implications of the rising amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The backlighted photographic billboard will be in Reagan National airport for a year; other displays of global warming in other public locations, and further collaborations, are planned.
"Gary Braasch has been one of the most devoted artists... and his epic global treks to ravaged coastlines, sinking islands, and dwindling ice sheets give us some of our most powerful images of our new reality," wrote Bill McKibben in The Global Warming Reader (Bill is not affiliated with this project but is now in Washington leading civil protests against a proposed tar sands oil pipeline from Canada)
For more information, please see the "Climate Photo of the Week"
http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org and http://www.ThisIsClimateChange.org
http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org and http://www.ThisIsClimateChange.org
