News

In the past few weeks, our work has been profiled in two different publications. Most recently, The Wall Street Journal Photo Journal posted a small gallery of our work featuring TEAM’s global camera trap study. A big thanks to photo editor Rebecca Horne for working with us on this post. (Learn more about our work in Tanzania here.)

And our local paper, the Methow Valley News, did a very nice profile of us the last week of January. They only kept the article online for a week, but you can read the text of Ann McCreary’s article after the jump.

Filmmakers explore climate change and more through personal stories

Methow Valley News – January 25, 2012

By Ann McCreary

Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele travel the world to produce documentaries that connect people and nature, giving a personal face to issues that often seem too big to grasp.

When they are not traveling in Scandinavia, Africa, South America, or around the Northwest, they make their home in the Methow Valley.

Drummond and Steele are storytellers with a particular interest in the issue of climate change. Rather than trying to explain this complex phenomenon with facts and figures, they seek out people around the world to tell the story in very personal ways.

They describe their work as “character-driven narratives” that combine powerful photography and video by Drummond with audio engineering, writing and production by Steele.

“We’re trying to tell personal stories of individuals, community and life,” said Steele. “We’re not just talking science.” Drummond and Steele began collaborating a decade ago when they were students at Carleton College in Minnesota. They took a three-month trip to the Peruvian Andes, capturing images and stories to create a multimedia production about the people and landscapes of that rugged country.

Realizing they worked well as a team, they launched a personal project that has become an ongoing focus for several years – telling the story of global climate change through people and communities. The story for them began with a trip to Norway where they told the story of Sami reindeer herders, and how a warming environment is threatening their traditional way of life.

Having moved to Seattle, Drummond’s hometown, after college, Drummond and Steele began an examination of the impacts of climate change in the Northwest, launching a long-term documentary project that they call “FacingClimate Change.” Their multimedia stories explore the impact of global climate change here in our backyard through the personal stories of people who live and work in the region.

They have filmed and interviewed wildfire fighters, potato farmers and snow makers at Snoqualmie Pass to make an abstract issue understandable on an individual level.

“The thinking behind that (approach) was that so much of climate change is about whether scientists were right or not right. There is a huge disconnect with people who were living with it on the front lines,” Steele said. She and Drummond strive to create that connection between science and people through their multimedia productions.

Their work has been presented in a variety of venues, including Confluence Gallery in Twisp, environmental conferences, Mother Jones magazine, and the Houston Center for Photography.

The couple moved a little over a year ago to the Methow Valley, renting a house on Beaver Creek. They realized they could continue their work anywhere, and came to the valley to escape the city and enjoy the recreational opportunities. Continuing their work in climate change, Drummond and Steele have begun a new project with the working title, “The Northwest Project.” They are focusing on impacts of a changing environment on individuals and communities in the Columbia River Basin in an eight-part series to be completed this spring.

The project uses a study called the Washington Climate Change Impacts Assessment as a foundation to examine how climate change affects eight aspects of the environment: water resources, coasts, forests, oceans, energy supply, storm water, health and agriculture.

Field work on four of the stories is completed. One segment, for example, focuses on the Umatilla Tribe in northeastern Oregon, and the tribe’s use of roots and salmon as traditional foods.

“Those traditional gathering practices are inextricably linked to cultural continuity. They are using traditional foods as a way to prioritize and manage natural resources,” Drummond said.

“We’re looking for examples where people are expressing what they’re facing on a day-to-day basis. No one can argue with someone’s hopes, dreams and fears,” Drummond said.

When completed this year, the series will be published online with a summary of relevant science and resources. Working with Department of Ecology, Drummond and Steele will present the series at a number of events in the communities that are featured, to promote discussion between scientists and community members.

“Our goal is to really increase the diversity of people engaged in this issue, to ground the science through personal examples,” Drummond said.

Partners in the project are the Washington Department of Ecology, the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group – a research group studying climate change in the Northwest – and Cascadia Consulting, an environmental consulting group. Drummond and Steele have received funding for the project from NAU, an outdoor clothing company in Portland. In addition to their work related to climate change, Steele and Drummond work with nonprofit organizations and other clients. Last summer they traveled to Mozambique to produce a documentary about the first optometrists to work in that country for an organization called the Mozambique Eye Care Project.

“It was our first foray into the health care world,” Steele said.

The couple has also produced a video about the Sustainable Prisons Project, a partnership of the Washington State Department of Corrections and The Evergreen State College. The project trains offenders and correctional staff in sustainable practices.

Last year they traveled to Tanzania to photograph and interview researchers working in a Conservation International project called Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring, designed to provide an early warning system on the status of biodiversity in the tropics. The project places field stations in tropical locations around the world.

The researchers shared stories of elephant encounters, harrowing boat trips and their dedication to the work of monitoring remote field stations in countries including Peru, Malaysia and the Congo.

Gathering and retelling people’s stories is a “lifelong project – you never feel like your work is done,” Steele said. “Its so much fun,” she added. “Whether it’s a community in Pendleton, Oregon, or a city in Mozambique, we get to meet people we wouldn’t meet any other way.”