Gary Braasch is a Nikon Legend Behind the Lens

The world is catching up to Gary Braasch. "This was not a very well covered issue when I started six years ago," he says. The issue is global warming, and what Gary started was an ongoing project to document the results of climate change. His efforts have resulted in convincing images, among them a powerful series of before-and-after pictures that show, among other things, receding glaciers, rising sea levels and thawing areas of the Arctic. "Even for people who believed in global warming and understood how bad it was," Gary says, "the pictures were a compelling message that it was really happening, not in the future, but right now."

The project, he adds, is really a story of how powerful photography is. The pictures have been used in magazines and brochures, on websites, even in Congressional hearings. Soon they'll appear in his book, Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World, to be published this fall by University of California Press. In the book, eight scientists contribute short essays reflecting their areas of expertise and expressing their points of view. The bulk of the text, though, is written by Gary, whose first career was journalism. "I first began taking pictures to illustrate my nature articles," he has said. When he found that "editors were more interested in the pictures than the words," he changed direction. His early photo career was marked by beautiful nature pictures, but that, too, changed. In 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted, and that event, coupled with his awareness of scientific research going on in old growth forests, made him realize that "as a journalist and someone who loved nature, I should be reporting on nature rather than just making beautiful pictures." For over 25 years the pictures he's taken for assignments and stock have frequently been both a reflection of his concern with environmental issues and a chronicle of the efforts of scientists and researchers to protect and preserve the environment. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications, including Time, Discover, Audubon, National Wildlife, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Natural History and National Geographic.

"A lot of nature pictures inspire people to be more interested in nature," Gary has said. "I try to bring people to the significance of an issue. It's very common that I make and get published pictures that are of environmental destruction rather than beauty, and these pictures carry a different kind of emotional weight than a pretty picture of the environment. Making a picture that shows scientists or researchers doing something adds another element. The picture says, okay, something's happening here to preserve or restore this place. This person is doing something. And people are drawn into reading the caption and the story and learning more."