Keith Ladzinski: On Conservation

So Keith, how did you first become interested in conservation?

I grew up in Colorado in the US, which is a mountainous region and so I’ve always had a love for the outdoors. I’ve been shooting now for about 20 years and the more time I spent outside taking pictures, the more I fell in love with the outdoors. But I also began to see things that needed attention. I got my first climate change story for National Geographic in 2015, which was a shoot on America’s national parks. It was a real eye-opener for me because up until that point, any work I had done within conservation and climate change was kind of on the periphery of those things and I had never done a story specifically on these issues. So, when I got this story it was both beautiful and heart-breaking in a lot of ways. The locations they sent me to and the biologists they had me working with were people who really had their hands on the pulse of what’s going on. They brought me to locations where I was really exposed to the details and the nitty-gritty of how quickly we are losing our glaciers, how polluted our water systems are, how the rise of heat index is creating wildfires all across our planet. For instance, five years ago they started seeing wildfires in the Arctic, which is brand new as far as human documented history goes.

We can all make changes and the only way that things will change is if we all individually make small changes. The world population is projected to grow to 9.7 billion people and with the amount of resources that we’re using, if we all don’t make tiny contributions, it will only get worse. I hope that it promotes bigger change and the pictures that I shoot are thought-provoking and move people. That’s the hope of any picture I ever shoot within the climate change world; I hope it says something that will cause just even one person to say ‘I will make some small changes in my life’. I think we are getting more educated every year, but it is an uphill battle. I find myself scared a lot, when I hear things and when I’m hanging out with a scientist for a month and all I’m seeing is the dark side. You tend to get a little despondent when your job is to go in there and document it and a lot of times it will take me a little bit of time when I leave there to process what I’ve learned. But there is a silver lining if we can all make small changes collectively.

How are you a responsible traveller?

I try to do carbon offsetting as often as possible. I fly a lot on one specific airlines and when you book your ticket, you can actually pay right there and do carbon offsetting right off their website. I try to travel with my own water bottles so I don’t use plastic water bottles. I try to use public transportation to eliminate excess carbon dioxide. The biggest proponent of climate change in the world is carbon dioxide and so I try to eliminate that in any way I can when travelling.