Why is it important to depict climate change visually?
The imagery associated with climate change often veers toward the overly dramatic. That isn’t to say climate change is not dramatic. But people get the idea that climate change is all about polar bears and hurricanes. What we tried to do was to find images that showed the relationship between climate change and people and that brought out some of the long-term nature of changes and its complexity. Small things that happen because of climate change end up having big effects. What’s a small change in nature that leads to a larger problem? Pine-bark beetles. They are a pest for lodge-pole pine trees in Colorado up through British Columbia to Alaska. They are very sensitive to cold. If it doesn’t fall below minus 20 Celsius [minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit] for a week or two during the winter, they reproduce rapidly. As the winters have gotten warmer, the range of the beetles has expanded enormously, much faster than their predators. If you visit Colorado, behind the Front Range, you’ll see who
