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Thomas Friedman lives in a world he describes as hot, flat and crowded. The issues he writes about are massive; the space he writes in is limited to about a column. And so it was that Friedman began a recent opinion piece with the line, "Sometimes you just wish you were a photographer."
Friedman -- writer, climate advocate, concerned father -- has done much to promote the cause of climate awareness as any writer. And yet, the title of his opinion piece was called "Learning to Speak Climate."
Why? Because the image of a collapsing glacier, witnessed on a trip he took recently, left Friedman speechless. "I simply do not have the words to describe the awesome majesty of Greenland’s Kangia Glacier," Friedman second sentence read, "shedding massive icebergs the size of skyscrapers and slowly pushing them down the Ilulissat Fjord until they crash into the ocean off the west coast of Greenland."
False modesty? Sure; Friedman here is at the top of his game. His point was simple: Words alone strain to convey the threat of climate change. This is true, in part, because climate change is not a single issue, but the umbrella term for a series of complex, deeply connected issues.
Many have said that writing about climate change is one of the greatest challenges presented to journalists. Global in cause and consequence, accurate and fair coverage of climate issues requires knowledge across disciplines, and cooperation across countries.
Andy Revkin at the NY Times Dot Earth blog has discussed this with great insight many times, as has Max Boykoff in a well-known article he recently updated.
In writing about the issues, I too have been frustrated by the limits of my own descriptions. Climate change, after all, is a moral issue. It is an agricultural, political, and scientific issue. It is about our health, and the world of our grandchildren. It is about issues we can't see, either because they're too far in the future, or because we don't yet understand them.
But given our training as writers, we -- journalists, bloggers -- often stick with words. And, like Friedman, we often fear they're not quite up to the task.
But in reading Friedman's piece, a thought occurred to me. It's something I've discussed with our crackerjack web team here a number of times.
The resources of the web -- video, image, text and even social networks -- make this as exciting a time as there ever has been to cover climate change. It is rich in new possibility.
You would be right to expect that response from me. My job depends upon this kind of media. But hear me out.
For too long, in the pages of print media, climate change was a long-term, diffuse and complex threat. Given the nature of journalistic and scientific norms, scientists would not talk beyond their data and journalists would create the impression of debate where there was none. The issues had no face, no image.
That now has changed. Writers on the web have a wealth of interactive resources available to them.
Photography: You don't need to be a photographer to use photographs. Through the Creative Commons license, for instance, writers have access to thousands of high-quality images to choose from. An informal search of Flickr yields 4.7 million images tagged "nature," 725,000 for use under Creative Commons.
Video: Similarly, through YouTube, blip.tv, and others, you can embed video of events in your work. And not merely speeches, or rallies, but natural events from far away places, like the collapsing edges of glaciers.
Social Networks. I know, I know -- you may think facebook a waste of time. Or that following your friend's tweets on Twitter is embarrassing to say and emasculating in practice. But the truth is that they offer powerful means of sharing information and that, for people who care about issues, means more information of the kind they care about more of the time.
Together, these three tools have already changed the manner in which we discuss climate change. You may think that I'm woozy on web tech, but I mean simply this.
When I write about collapsing salmon stocks, for instance, the picture I embed from flickr transforms the story. It's not me, really -- the image provokes associations, and memories, only images can provoke.
Or when people write about bees, they can embed images of bees, glaciers of glaciers, mountains of mountains. These technologies mean that the effects of climate change are not always abstract and distant -- they are as immediate, and as engaging, as the images on your screen.
Words don't have to strain; images, and video, can tell a thousand stories, while you only tell one.
(Photo shout out: Photo by *hiro008, used under the Creative Commons license.)
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