Last month I was commissioned by Undark to make 8 portraits, via Zoom, of US scientists who have been pushed out of Federal Government by the Trump administration.
It’s so great when the pandemic actually opens up a new opportunity, rather than closes it down. Zoom photography has allowed me to meet people far and wide, across the globe. In this case, it gave me the chance to get a job that I would not have even been considered for in normal times.
I was both fascinated and horrified by the stories of the people who I had to photograph. It was shocking to hear of the apparent disregard of the Trump administration for climate science. One woman coughed through our virtual photo session because of the smoke from the wild fires outside her home, while she told me about how her bosses at the National Parks Service had insisted on removing references to human-caused climate change from a major report she wrote about the country’s national parks. Another explained how senior administration officials were working to back track on emission standards for vehicles. Yet another told how the EPA’s peer review system for scientific papers was being unravelled.
I hope that these rather unusual portraits of highly skilled individuals, mostly isolated in their homes because of a global pandemic, will have helped to draw attention to their important stories. The loss of critical scientific knowledge from a government which we really need to take action to resolve the global climate crisis, is of great concern.