The Places We Save

There’s a lot of bad climate news

Burning forests, acidifying oceans, rising sea levels, missed targets, empty words, and above all else, the relentless growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide baking the world; it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of bad climate news out there.

And yet, the bad news only tells part of the story. Slowly but surely, we’re making progress. Conservationists are moving to preserve huge tracts of land, and are doing so sustainably, by factoring in the interests and knowledge of local communities and indigenous groups. Activists are using an ever wider and more creative set of techniques to block exploitative projects or push for climate justice. Researchers are expanding the arsenal of tools at our disposal to reverse the damage we’ve done and mitigate its effects.

Even on our most seemingly intractable challenge - global warming - the picture today is far more nuanced than I’d expected it would look like 10 years ago. Back then, projections regularly estimated that carbon emissions would warm the earth by more than four degrees Celsius by 2100, yielding an almost unthinkably apocalyptic world. Today, on the heels of faster than expected progress on renewables deployment and more accurate modeling, scientists expect that we’ll land somewhere between two and three degrees (we’ve already hit 1.2 degrees of warming).1

Stories of progress

To be clear, our current path is still inexcusable. Even two degrees of warming will destroy the world as we know it, and fundamentally reshape the lives of billions of people. But, at the same time, we need a better language to talk about climate change - one that recognizes both the danger we’re in and the progress we’re making.

Climate change is not a cliff. Humanity is not saved at 1.9 degrees and doomed at 2.0. Every project that puts a dent in our emissions, that redirects funding towards adaptation, or that protects our ecosystems from slaughter, is valuable and will likely save lives. As such, we need to raise awareness of what’s working and drive more resources towards problems that are slowly becoming more and more tractable.

My hope is to tell some of these stories. I’ll be interviewing and photographing conservationists, researchers, and activists fighting environmental destruction and climate change, and collecting these chapters into a photo book. In posts on this substack, I’ll share essays in progress and process notes. Our way of life will drastically change in the coming decades, but even as we prepare for what’s ahead, we should celebrate what we do protect, and document the places we save.