James Balog Quotes

The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that's not conditioned to think in terms of symbol.

Glacial pace is actually an incorrect concept. The glaciers move a lot faster and they react a lot faster than people imagine.

The cumulative effect of each person making a change in his or her own life will make a difference.

I've got at least two major project ideas that I've been chewing on for several years in my head and I've been trying to resist them both. But I have learned over the years that when they don't go away and they're still in there, you probably have to resign yourself to the fact that you're going to do something about them.

We still carry this old caveman-imprint idea that we're small, nature's big, and it's everything we can manage to hang on and survive. When big geophysical events happen - a huge earthquake, tsunami, or volcanic eruption - we're reminded of that.

Climate change is a really abstract thing in most of the world.

I personally spend the majority of my time by far on outreach and education and fundraising and administration.

Climate change is real. Climate change is being substantially increased by humans and the carbon we put into the atmosphere. And it appears to be speeding up. If science has made any mistakes, science has been underestimating it.

I was raised a Catholic as a boy and went to a Catholic boys' high school, a private school, and kind of drifted away, candidly, in my latter teen years. I consider myself deeply spiritual but not in an institutional, religious kind of a way. In Catholicism, we're surrounded by these images of martyrdom and doing penance and doing some suffering to achieve what you're trying to achieve. And I certainly embedded that in my psyche and I have lived that very effectively.

There is a glacier in Iceland, Solheimar, which has retreated a great deal, and every time I go back there and see what's not there any more, it does something to the heart. It makes you realise it's possible for a gigantic natural element to just disappear.

Once upon a time, I was a climate-change skeptic.

You know, I've read Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' about fifteen times.

Science by itself is about numbers, and it's about measuring things. It's very important but it's very dry.

In some cases, I allow the edge of the set, the edge of my own artificial, artistic imposition, to show up because I don't want to hide from that. I want to acknowledge that there is a living human and a living eye and a living mind and a living heart responding to what's going on out there.

Each of us can and must shift our behavior according to our ability. For some, that means changing diet, shopping locally, or putting solar panels on their house. For others, it means using their voice to inspire transformative change.

I've been to the Himalayas a half a dozen times and I love it. I'm just kind of tired of going literally twelve time zones around the world. I would rather go six time zones and get to Iceland or whatever it is.

It's important to recognise that humans are not the measure of all things ... The Earth is the measure of all things.

Ultimately, we have to ask ourselves an essential spiritual and ethical question: Are we the kind of people who take everything for ourselves and leave nothing for others, or do the angels of our better nature still live? I believe the angels are still alive.

We as a culture are forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very, very deep connection and contact with nature. You can't divorce civilization from nature - we totally depend on it.

We are now beyond nature's normal variation in terms of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a million years. It actually goes back a lot further than that, but the ice core records show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone.

This air we breathe is precious, and the glaciers helped me understand that and stay focused on that.

I'm quite fond of Switzerland. I love Switzerland.

I've always believed that photography is a way to shape human perception.