James Balog was initially skeptical about global warming. An experienced and enthusiastic mountaineer with a master’s degree in geomorphology (the study of the earth’s crust and the evolution of its landforms), Balog is more qualified than most photographers to understand any big story about changes in the earth’s environment.

“I was certainly aware of the story going through the 1990s,” he explains. “But there was always the thought in the back of my mind that this might be something a few paranoid scientists had cooked up to generate endless research projects.”

Balog’s nearly 30 years as a photographer have seen him covering hundreds of eco-related news stories. His credits include both work for magazines such as Outside, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Audubon, Time and LIFE, as well as authorship of a half-dozen full-color photographic books on animals and nature.

But after a climbing trip to the Himalayas in early 2000, his perceptions about global warming began to change. “It was very striking how much the ice had retreated out of some of the valleys,” he says. “You could see it very plainly, in the gap between where the ice was versus the moraine deposits,” the lines of rocks and debris that a glacier throws up as it moves along its course. Balog’s inner scientist kicked in, and he began researching the subject, finally becoming convinced that data from Greenland and Antarctic ice core samples indicated beyond a reasonable doubt that the earth’s atmosphere was indeed heating up and that the issue was indeed very serious.

Balog knew he wanted to portray what was happening photographically and do so in a way that made the immediacy of the problem irrefutable. “It kept coming back to the ice,” he explains. “I knew the evidence was all in the ice, but I couldn’t see how to photograph it.” There are, of course, thousands of photographs of beautiful sunsets on gorgeous ice-capped mountain peaks and picturesque glaciers. Yet Balog notes that “even going back to the 1970s and 1980s, I’d thought mountain photography was already done. I didn’t think there was anything new to say photographically with the genre. I couldn’t think of any way to shoot a mountain peak or a glacier that would look any different from the thousands of other beautiful photographs that were already out there.” And there the idea sat for a couple of years.

But the problem kept nagging at him, with the answer on how to picture it finally presenting itself during a shoot for The New Yorker magazine. Assigned to provide photographs for Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part article on global warming, Balog was photographing a glacier, “not up in the beautiful pristine mountains where it begins but down at the terminus where it was dying. And all of a sudden, I realized this was the part you have to photograph if you’re going to show what’s happening, that these were the spots to photograph to really show how the glaciers were retreating.” And thus the Extreme Ice Project was born.

Beginning in December 2006, Balog and a group of scientists, photographers and cinematographers positioned a total of 27 Nikon D-200 cameras at 18 locations in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia. Carefully boxed and sealed to withstand the elements, the cameras are powered by a combination of solar panels, batteries and other forms of electronics and are programmed to photograph once an hour as long as there is available daylight.

The conditions under which the cameras have to function are among the worst the planet has to offer. Even with a warming climate, the equipment has to last two years in the field, withstanding winds that can howl up to 170 mph and temperatures that can reach -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Cameras in the more desolate areas are monitored daily via an Iridium satellite uplink system designed and built by the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California.

Once the images are retrieved, they’re assembled into video animations designed to demonstrate and document the glaciers’ rapid decay. Balog and his group plan to use the images for scientific evidence and as part of a global outreach campaign aimed at educating the public about the overall effects of global warming. The images, along with other of Balog’s photographic works, will also be part of a Nova documentary, airing March 24, 2009.

A committed social conscience is nothing new for Balog, particularly when it comes to concerns about the planet. Largely self-taught as a photographer, he began by documenting his climbing trips, with his first published story a spec piece on ice climbing that outdoor magazine Mariah—which later became Outside—ran in 1981 as a six-page spread.

Balog provided both text and photographs for many of his earliest published stories, and he recommends that young photographers develop skill sets to cross between disciplines. “The more skills you have, the easier it is to get published, if you’re someone trying to break in,” he says. “Even back then, when the magazine economy was good, they weren’t going to spend money sending out an untried newcomer.” By offering a full package of both text and photographs, Balog said it was easier to get a publisher’s attention and to get work accepted.

While he initially found magazine photography to be a lot of fun, Balog eventually tired of the pace, the nonstop travel and the less-than-princely sums often garnered from the assignments. “It’s great when you’re young and your needs aren’t all that great. But as you get older, you don’t want to keep on living like a 25-year-old, or at least I didn’t,” Balog admits. “I didn’t just want to be a hired gun all my life. I wanted to produce ideas, to make statements about the world. To try to influence the world,” he adds. “There were more radical ideas I had that I knew would probably never get assigned because they were outside the editorial boundaries of most magazines.”

Balog then began the project that would eventually end up as his first published book, Wildlife Requiem, which grew out of an interest in the ways human beings are impacting nature. “I had this ill-formed sense that there was a lot of photographically unexplored territory,” although he didn’t have a strong sense of exactly what to photograph. “I shot gravel quarries, power lines, buildings being put up in the Colorado mountains, and strip mines.” A sustained series on loggers in California’s redwood country led to an idea to photograph sport hunters back in Colorado, where he had taken up permanent residence.

“I got some pretty amazing pictures rather quickly and decided to drill down further,” he recalls. The project took three years, and the book was published in 1984 by the International Center for Photography. “I didn’t want to do an anti-hunting polemic,” says Balog. “It would have been easy and obvious to do that, but I thought there was much more to it. There were things to understand about the human race and things to understand about the male psyche.” There was also a personal side to the project. “I had been a hunter as a kid,” he says, “and I realize now it was my own attempt to understand why I’d killed a lot of mammals and birds for no good reason.”

Balog’s other book projects include Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife, James Balog’s Animals A to Z, and Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest. A book from his current project, Extreme Ice Now: Vanishing Glaciers and Climate Change: A Progress Report, is set to be released in March 2009.

In the introduction to that book, Balog writes about what all of us can do to confront the problems of man-made climate change. In a short essay entitled “Your Voice Is Your Legacy,” he challenges us all to reshape our lives, calling it “the essence of personal empowerment,” particularly when “improving the carbon footprint of an individual life may seem insignificant.”

He counsels instead that “great journeys have always required a sequence of single steps.” Individual actions such as buying a hybrid car, using energy-saving lightbulbs and outfitting a home with photovoltaic cells can make a huge difference when done in large numbers.

And let your voice be heard—let your employer, the policymakers in government, the companies that sell you the things you use every day, know that you’re concerned about the earth’s future. There are, Balog writes, “no other people to fix climate change except us.” And despair, he says, is not an option.

TECH BOX

Camera Nikon D3 Nikon D200’s Lenses AF-S NIKKOR 14–24mm f/2.8G ED zoom lens AF-S NIKKOR 24–70mm f/2.8G ED zoom lens AF-S VR Zoom-NIKKOR 70–200mm f/2.8 G IF-ED zoom lens with teleconverter Flash Nikon Speedlights SB-800 Computers MacBook Software Adobe Create Suite Photo Mechanic Waterproof Housing EWA Marine underwater camera housing GPS Equipment Red Hen GPS that attaches to Nikon D3 Clothing North Face clothing and, for extreme cold conditions, a one-piece suit from Wild Things, a down parka by Canada Goose and Steger mukluks.

Sponsors of the Extreme Ice Survey include the National Geographic Society, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, Nikon, the North Face and photographic equipment makers Bogen and Pelican.