Into Thin Ice
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC | Earth cools when sunlight reflects off Arctic sea ice—which is melting away. Where does that leave us?
To track changes in sea ice, the Norwegian research vessel Lance drifted along with it for five months in 2015, on a rare voyage from Arctic winter into spring. Photo: Andy Isaacson
FIRST PUBLISHED IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, JANUARY 2016
THE SEA ICE THAT BLANKETS THE ARCTIC OCEAN isn’t the unbroken white mantle depicted in maps. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of restless floes that are constantly colliding, deforming, and fracturing from the force of wind and ocean currents. Last February I stood shivering on the deck of the Lance, an old Norwegian research vessel, as it picked a path through a labyrinth of navigable fractures. A barren white plain of ice and snow extended to the horizon in every direction. The ship’s steel hull shuddered and screeched as it plowed through floating chunks of jagged ice. The Lance was seeking a solid patch of ice to attach to—the last one had shattered—so that it could resume its erratic drift across the frozen sea, charting the fate of Arctic sea ice by going with the floe.
The Norwegians have done this before, more than a century ago, when polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen and the Fram were locked in pack ice for nearly three years during a vain attempt to drift across the North Pole. But the Arctic is a different ocean now. The air above it has warmed on average about 5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century, more than twice the global average. Much less of the ocean is covered by ice, and much more of that ice is thinner, seasonal ice rather than thick, old floes. A feedback loop with far-reaching consequences has taken effect: As white ice is replaced in summer by dark ocean water, which absorbs more sunlight, the water and air heat further—amplifying the ongoing thaw.
“The Arctic warms first, most, and fastest,” explains Kim Holmén, the long-bearded international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI), which operates theLance. Climate models predict that by as early as 2040 it will be possible in summer to sail across open water to the North Pole.
Arctic sea ice helps cool the whole planet by reflecting sunlight back into space. So its loss inevitably will affect the climate and weather beyond the Arctic, but precisely how remains unclear. Better forecasts require better data on sea ice and its shifting, uneven distribution. “Most scientific cruises to the Arctic are conducted in summer, and this is where we have the most field data,” says Gunnar Spreen, an NPI sea-ice physicist I met on board the Lance. “The continuous changes that occur from winter into spring are a huge gap in our understanding.”
On the Lance’s five-month mission its rotating crew of international scientists would investigate the causes and effects of ice loss by monitoring the ice across its entire seasonal life cycle—from the time when it formed in winter until it melted in summer.
A few days after photographer Nick Cobbing and I joined the ship by icebreaker and helicopter from Longyearbyen, on the island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago—the base for NPI’s Arctic operations—the Lance steamed to 83 degrees north, just west of Russian territory. The scientists singled out a half-mile-wide floe of predominantly seasonal ice that they hoped to study. The crew tethered the vessel to the floe with nylon ropes attached to thick metal poles driven into the ice. They shut off the main engine. Isolated and in near darkness, we began our wayward drift and our month-long shift in the ice desert.
Like homesteaders, the scientists established camps on the floe, pitching tents and laying electric cables. Physicists like Spreen mapped the ice topography with lasers and recorded the thickness and temperature of the snow on top. Oceanographers bored a hole through the ice to gather data about the water and the currents. Meteorologists erected masts carrying instruments to collect weather data and measure greenhouse gases. Biologists searched for ice algae, which look like dirt and live on the underside of the ice and in the channels of trapped brine left after newly formed sea ice expels salt. In a few weeks, after the returning sun cast aside the cloak of polar night and began filtering through the melting floe, the scientists would watch the ecosystem awaken.
Temperatures regularly plunged to 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Scientists had to contend with numb fingers, snapped cables, and crippled electronic instruments, along with the danger of roving polar bears. “This is really extreme science,” one researcher said.
Photo: Andy Isaacson
IN 2007 THE UN INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) warned that the impacts of climate change in the Arctic over the next century “will exceed the impacts forecast for many other regions and will produce feedbacks that will have globally significant consequences.” Nearly a decade later this grim forecast is already being borne out. Probably no region has been more affected by climate change than the Arctic. Permafrost is thawing, and the land is greening, as tree lines creep north and shrubs and grasses invade the tundra. Certain populations of polar bears, walruses, and caribou have suffered significant declines. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) oceanographer James Overland says, “The Arctic really is the canary showing that climate change is real.”
Since 1979, when satellite records began, the Arctic has lost more than half its volume of ice, which has diminished in both overall area and thickness. The frozen area shrinks to its annual minimum in September, at summer’s end. In September 2012 its extent was just half the average during the 1980s and ’90s. The maximum ice extent in winter, usually reached in March, also is declining, though at a slower rate; its average thickness has decreased by half. What was once mostly a layer of 10- to 13-foot-thick ice floes that lingered for years—perennial ice—has given way to large tracts of thinner, less reflective ice that forms and melts during a single year. Sea-ice coverage has always fluctuated naturally, but there’s little doubt among scientists that man-made greenhouse gases are now accelerating its decline. “Old, thick sea ice was a global reservoir for cold, but that is now changing,” Overland says.
An entire ecosystem is melting away. The loss of sea ice may take a toll on some of the photosynthesizing organisms that fuel the marine food chain—single-celled algae that live under the ice and bloom in the spring when the light returns. Changes in the magnitude and timing of these blooms, as winter ice retreats faster and earlier, may throw off the life cycle of tiny, fatty zooplankton called copepods, which eat the algae and are in turn eaten by arctic cod, seabirds, and bowhead whales. For marine mammals such as the polar bear, Pacific walrus, and ringed seal, the loss of hundreds of thousands of square miles of sea ice has already been devastating. “It’s like someone took the floor out from under you,” says Kristin Laidre, a polar scientist at the University of Washington.
The assumption is that later this century, without a home field, these animals will simply lose all competitive advantage. Killer whales, for example, are likely to replace polar bears as the top marine predators, as bears retreat to the dwindling remnants of summer sea ice. Though polar bears sometimes spend time on land, where lately a few have been hybridizing with grizzlies, Ian Stirling of the University of Alberta, a leading polar bear expert, dismisses any notion that they could survive long-term on land as “wishful thinking.” Ice-free conditions are likely to draw in other competitors—zooplankton (maybe less fatty and nutritious ones), fish, seals—from more temperate waters.
Ice loss is also making the Arctic even more vulnerable to ocean acidification, another effect of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide. Cold water absorbs more CO₂ than warm water does, and more cold water is now open to the air. As the water acidifies, it loses carbonate. Within the next 15 years it may no longer contain enough for animals such as sea snails and Alaska king crabs to construct and maintain their calcium-carbonate shells.
The upshot of all this, as Stirling bluntly puts it: “The Arctic marine ecosystem as we know it now will no longer exist.”
Photo: Andy Isaacson
WARMER AIR ABOVE THE OCEAN BASIN IS PROJECTED TO SPILL DOWN over the surrounding coasts of Russia, Alaska, and Canada, causing feedback effects as far as 900 miles inland, including accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and large emissions of carbon dioxide and methane from thawing tundra. IPCC models forecast that the total loss of summer sea ice may in itself cause one-third of the warming of the Northern Hemisphere and 14 percent of total global warming by the end of the century.
How a rapidly warming Arctic will influence weather across the hemisphere is a bit hazier. Atmospheric scientists Jennifer Francis at Rutgers University and Steve Vavrus at the University of Wisconsin have suggested that people in the continental United States already may be feeling the effects of melting Arctic sea ice—especially in the past two winters in the east, which made “polar vortex” household words.
The polar vortex is the mass of cold air that’s normally confined over the Pole by the polar jet stream—the high-altitude, fast-moving torrent of air that snakes around the Pole from west to east. The jet stream draws most of its energy from the contrast in temperature and pressure between the frigid air to its north and the warmer air to the south. As sea-ice loss amplifies the warming in the Arctic, the Francis theory goes, that contrast is reduced, weakening the jet stream’s westerly winds. It becomes a lazier, more sinuous river, with large meanders that extend far to the south and north. Because the meanders advance slowly across the map, whatever weather they enfold persists for a long time. During the past two winters the wavier pattern allowed Arctic air and extreme snow to beset New England and drought to linger over California. The melting Arctic may be affecting weather elsewhere too. Korean researchers have linked extreme winters in East Asia to air-circulation changes caused specifically by ice loss in the Barents-Kara Sea.
It’s a neat theory, but parts of it remain “fuzzy,” Francis admits. Also, many researchers who study atmospheric dynamics aren’t buying it. A more plausible explanation for the wavier jet stream and the southward excursions of the polar vortex, some of them argue, is the influence of the tropical Pacific, which is a far more powerful source of heat than the Arctic. It will take years of data gathering and modeling to settle the debate.
In any case, as the warming of the planet continues, cold spells of any kind will become less common. Even if sharp limits on greenhouse gas emissions are adopted over the next 20 years, the decline of sea ice will continue for decades. “We’re on a one-way trip and not going back,” says Overland. A further rise of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the Arctic is all but assured by mid-century, he says, enough to keep the ocean ice free for at least two months of the year, enough to change the seasons there—“enough to affect everything.”
Photo: Andy Isaacson
IN LATE JUNE, DURING THE FINAL PHASE OF THEIR EXPEDITION, the scientists aboard theLance awoke to discover that the latest ice floe they’d attached to was disintegrating too. They scrambled to salvage their gear before it became flotsam. It was time to pack up anyway. The vessel by that point had spent 111 days in the ice, tethered to different floes for several weeks at a time—logging altogether some 4,000 nautical miles across the Arctic. Polar bears had crossed its path, sometimes pausing to play with the scientists’ strange-looking electronic instruments. Storms had bulldozed huge blocks of ice high against the ship, elevating it above the surface. The Lance’s crew had bested the researchers in a soccer match on the floe. Over the next couple of years the 68 scientists involved will be hunkered in their warm labs, making sense of all the data they gathered.
One morning in March, under a dusky blue sky, I had joined Gunnar Spreen and another NPI researcher, Anja Rösel, on one of their periodic forays to measure changes in the ice floe’s thickness. We each wore insulated armor—jumpsuit, balaclava, goggles, gloves, mittens over the gloves. The scientists brought along a snow-depth probe, a GPS device, and an orange plastic sled carrying the ice-thickness instrument, which works by inducing an electric current in the seawater below. I carried a flare gun and a .30-06-caliber rifle: bear protection. Following a mile-long path staked by bamboo poles, we trudged over dunelike snowdrifts and pressure ridges—slabs of sea ice pushed up by colliding floes—that looked like crumbling stone walls. Every few feet Spreen stopped and plunged the depth gauge into the snowpack until it beeped to indicate that the measurement was complete.
Arctic warming seemed an abstract concept that day—I couldn’t really feel my toes—but across the icescape, Spreen saw evidence of change. “This is an unusual amount of snow,” he noted. Two feet of it lay beneath our moon boots, twice the amount in a typical year. One data point doesn’t make a trend, but this one was consistent with model forecasts: As sea ice shrinks, the extra heat and water vapor released from the open water into the lower atmosphere should generate more precipitation.
More snow falling on a glacier on land would be a good thing, because that’s how glaciers grow—by accumulating layers of snow so thick that the stuff at the bottom gets compressed into ice. But sea ice forms when cold air freezes seawater, and snow falling on top of it acts as an insulating blanket that slows the growth of the ice. As it happened, two weeks after my walk with Spreen, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado announced that Arctic sea ice had already reached its maximum extent for the winter in late February—much earlier than usual. It was the lowest maximum the satellites had ever recorded.
Photo: Andy Isaacson
How Humanity Is Killing The World: 'Racing Extinction'
WIRED | Attention, humanity! You are ruining the world. And The Cove’s Louis Psihoyos is back to make you confront what you’re doing.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN WIRED, SEPTEMBER 2015
AS A SEAFOOD restaurateur and founder of Sawyer Culinary Adventures, Louie Sawyer sought out exotic tastes for his intrepid Western clientele. During a scouting trip to Hong Kong in 2013, he and five associates dropped by a major shark fin processing facility, run by a short, fast-talking kingpin who goes by the name of Mr. Eddie.
All 14 of the species most prevalent in the shark fin trade are classified as threatened or nearly threatened, partly due to Chinese consumption of shark fin soup, but Hong Kong’s teeming markets are insensitive to this fact. Cluttered storefronts also openly sell endangered sea horses and hawksbill sea turtles, along with elaborate elephant tusk carvings. Mr. Eddie’s operation—“the Walmart of the endangered-species trade,” Sawyer called it—is not in the habit of welcoming camera-toting foreigners, and Mr. Eddie was initially suspicious of the group. He scrutinized their business cards and peppered them with questions. As his gruff manner grew more intimidating, one of Sawyer’s colleagues suggested they ought to leave. It wasn’t until they made for the door that Mr. Eddie relented. “No, it’s OK. Come, come. I show you around here.”
Sawyer’s crew had reason to feel uneasy, considering that their identities were, in fact, a ruse. Louie Sawyer was actually Louis Psihoyos, an activist filmmaker whose first documentary, The Cove, exposed the clandestine slaughter of dolphins in a Japanese seaside town, earning an Academy Award in 2010. His second film, Racing Extinction, airing on the Discovery Channel on December 2, takes up the man-made causes behind what biologists call the sixth mass extinction—the spate of plant and animal losses that threatens to eradicate up to half of all living species on Earth within this century.
During the same week they were in town to collect their Oscar for The Cove, Psihoyos’ team conducted an undercover sting of a Santa Monica, California, restaurant that served whale meat, ultimately shaming the restaurant into closing. Among other stunts portrayed in Racing Extinction: They posed as importers of fish oil supplements to infiltrate a mainland Chinese shark dealer; captured unprecedented footage of humans swimming alongside migratory blue whales in Mexico; and, using a Tesla retrofitted with a powerful projector, blasted the sides of US corporate facilities with images of the animals that their business activities are said to endanger.
In Hong Kong, Mr. Eddie led Psihoyos and his undercover team across an alley to a building with a shark sculpture hanging off the facade. He typed a code into a keypad and slid open the front door to reveal a storage room filled with bags of dried sea creatures. On the walls hung posters that identified various shark species and the characteristics of their fins, which fetch up to $2,000 a pound on the Asian market. Psihoyos and three accomplices wore tiny pinhole cameras disguised as shirt buttons, which had been provided by a specialist who designs covert video surveillance gear for human rights groups and law enforcement agencies. In China, merely wearing such devices is grounds for imprisonment. Two others with Psihoyos, including Shawn Heinrichs, a cinematographer and marine conservationist who’d been kicked out of Mr. Eddie’s facility before for attempting to film, wore digital SLR cameras dangling around their necks, discreetly capturing video.
“It is hard to catch a shark, you know?” Mr. Eddie told the group. “If you get the shark, every part of the shark can be sold for money. So we are not going to throw away any meat from the shark. But a lot of the greenie people, they are misunderstanding our industry. They think we take the fin and let the live shark go down into the sea and die struggling like this. You know, very bad. But that is not the truth. That video is made by the greenies themselves.”
Mr. Eddie was referring to videos like the widely circulated PSA about shark fin soup, created by the environmental organization WildAid and starring Chinese basketball star Yao Ming. It showed a tawny nurse shark in Indonesia lying on the seafloor with its fins dismembered, desperately trying to swim. Heinrichs, who was standing next to Mr. Eddie, had actually shot that footage. Psihoyos and the others made a show of agreeing with Mr. Eddie’s opinion of environmentalists, and the ice was broken. They were in.
Next, Mr. Eddie brought them up to a roof. Against a scenic maritime backdrop stood rack upon rack of severed shark fins—thousands of them—laid out to dry under the sun but out of public view. “Somebody can tell you that there are 70 million sharks being killed for the fin trade every year, but when you actually see the evidence and witness this gorgeous animal being reduced to piles of appendages, there’s a horror that becomes rage,” Psihoyos says later. “Especially when you know it’s a nutritionless and tasteless fabrication from a bygone era.” Downstairs, in a small showroom off the street, wood-paneled cases displayed dried sea animals. Mr. Eddie held up a worm. “44,800 US dollars per kilo,” he boasted. “44,800. It is a wholesale price! They believe—that’s why I say, they believe—it can cure cancer.”
He grinned. “Chinese have a lot of beliefs.”
Psihoyos documents shark fins drying on a rooftop in Hong Kong. Credit: Shawn Heinrichs
This eco-vigilante approach has become Psihoyos’ signature brand of filmmaking. “The Cove was the result of watching too many James Bond movies and Jacques Cousteau specials as a kid,” he says. The film wrapped an environmental documentary around a caper flick—PBS meets Ocean’s 11. A reviewer for The New York Times called it “one of the most audacious and perilous operations in the history of the conservation movement.”
Psihoyos wears such descriptions as a badge of honor. “Most documentaries feel like you’re going to a medical lecture, where you’re just getting a lot of facts but there’s no story. The goal is to be a fly on the wall,” he tells me at a Santa Monica hotel, after a late night spent at the Port of Los Angeles projecting blue whale images from the Tesla. (Between 1988 and 2012, there were 100 reported cases of large whales struck by ships along the California coast.) “But if you can wrap that around a tale of adventure, of thrill and redemption, and tell a really goddamned good story, people will listen to almost anything. When people see our films, I want them to feel like they landed in a different world, like, this is not my beautiful life. We’re trying to wake people up to what is actually going on.”
Psihoyos is 58, with silver hair and an unassuming Midwestern accent. He describes Racing Extinction as “a real-life Avengers.” In the film, he visits the scientists and activists working on the front lines of a global catastrophe: Earth, they tell us, is losing species 1,000 times faster than the natural rate of extinction. The baiji river dolphin, Western black rhino, and golden toad are among the disappeared in recent years; the population of Maui’s dolphins in New Zealand has plummeted by half since 2004—there may be as few as 43 of them left. Blue whales in the southern oceans are down to just a fraction of historical levels, and plankton production is just 40 percent of what it was a half century ago. Forty-one percent of all amphibians are considered threatened. “We’re losing species faster than we can describe them,” Psihoyos laments. “When you’re talking about losing all of nature, it’s no longer a spectator sport. Everybody has to become active somehow.”
Psihoyos came to his own activism by way of journalism. In the mid-1970s he was among a breed of so-called concerned photographers—“a highfalutin name for people who try to affect social issues with photography,” as he puts it. His early subjects included Pete Seeger, who was then campaigning to clean up chemical pollutants in the Hudson River. Psihoyos recalls sitting around a campfire with the folksinger and other musicians after a concert. “These people were trying to dream of a better world,” he says. “And they actually made it happen.”
In 1980, Psihoyos was hired by National Geographic. His first assignments for the magazine were to document the rise of recycling and the environmental fallout of Wyoming’s energy boom. He shot four stories around the world about the Mesozoic era—the age of dinosaurs—assignments where “extinction was always in the back of your mind.” He soon earned a reputation for elaborately constructed portraits and expensive conceptual projects. For a 1995 feature on the information revolution, Psihoyos had Bill Gates hoisted 55 feet above a forest floor in a sling, over a tall stack of paper, to demonstrate the volume of information that at the time could be stored on a single CD-ROM.
Psihoyos befriended Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, while shooting his cover portrait for Fortune. At the time, Clark was building a 155-foot sailing yacht namedHyperion. The two became scuba buddies. Clark took Psihoyos to some of his favorite dive spots around the world. In Papua New Guinea, they encountered a once-thriving reef in a state of ruin. During a trip to the Galápagos Islands, they watched as longline fishermen pillaged a protected marine sanctuary. “Jim turned to me and said, ‘Somebody should do something about this,’” Psihoyos recalls. “And I said, ‘We’ll use your money and my eye, and we’ll make films.’”
In 2005, Clark provided the seed money to fund the nonprofit Oceanic Preservation Society, installing Psihoyos as its executive director. Clark then built what Psihoyos calls the best underwater camera in the world, which has an 80-megapixel sensor and a custom-fitted glass dome that produces no color aberrations. “We call it the doomsday camera, because we take this camera and document the best surviving reefs in the world, in a resolution that nobody’s ever been able to see,” Psihoyos says. “My entire career is built on this notion that we can show people something they haven’t seen before in a way that they’ve never visualized—images that make it impossible for people to forget.”
The story of mass extinction is in part a story about global warming, whose main cause is ubiquitous yet mostly invisible to the human eye. So in Racing Extinction, Psihoyos employs an infrared camera fitted with a color filter that brings into stark relief the sources of carbon dioxide in our environment—the lawn blowers, smokestacks, and parades of smoldering tailpipes on a rush-hour freeway. Seen through the camera, an Airbus 380 gliding down the runway at LAX appears dragonlike, billowing gas. In a voice-over, Psihoyos reflects: “To be able to see this hidden world, it’s like you’re let in on a magic trick, but the magic trick is actually killing the planet.”
The retrofitted Tesla projects a blue whale onto a building. Credit: Andrew Eckmann
The black Tesla Model S is parked a bit too conspicuously across from the Shell oil refinery in Martinez, California, a sprawling complex of scaffold towers and gaseous plumes that resembles a launchpad. It’s late one night in March 2014, and the road is quiet. Two GoPro cameras are aimed at Leilani Münter, a dark-haired Nascar driver who races under the moniker Carbon Free Girl and who sits behind the wheel of the Tesla in black faux-leather pants and pumps. The rear seats have been stripped and replaced with a 24-volt lithium-ion battery pack and solid-state drive. The back window has been removed to install a 15,000-lumen video projector mounted on a retractable steel frame that can extend and pivot in any direction like the artillery cannon on a Batmobile.
The Tesla retrofit is the brainchild of Travis Threlkel, a former techno-psychedelic-folk rocker who cofounded Obscura Digital, a San Francisco company that has pioneered immersive-projection and object-mapping technologies, real-time holographic displays, and Minority Report-esque multitouch displays. For scenes that appear inRacing Extinction, Threlkel’s team orchestrated rogue projections of endangered species across New York City. Sharks swam across the facade of the Stock Exchange; the words “Acidifying the Oceans” ran like a news ticker along the exterior of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. During last year’s Climate Summit, with permission from the United Nations, Obscura projected a vivid short film about extinction featuring Jane Goodall onto the iconic Secretariat Building. Throngs watched from the sidewalks. “With projection you can make people see things in new ways,” says Threlkel, wearing cowboy boots and a vintage polyester shirt. “Once you break out of the rectilinear format, the observer is more open to getting a message.” The filmmakers bought the Tesla after meeting with Elon Musk himself, who appears in Racing, and Obscura embellished the exterior with a coat of electroluminescent paint, which can toggle the car’s color from black to luminous blue when a current is applied. “It’s like a modern-day Bond car,” Psihoyos says.
The crew has permission from the city of Martinez to film the Tesla “and trains,” although the part about trains was of course a feint. They are here to capture their own projections of the chemical symbols of hazardous air pollutants onto the refinery’s towers.
Within 10 minutes, a security guard appears across the road in the empty parking lot of a liquor store. Two Contra Costa County Sheriff cars arrive soon after, followed by two men in a truck with amber warning lights, who step out in red jumpsuits emblazoned with the Shell logo. Psihoyos and his coproducer, Gina Papabeis, talk to the authorities as the film crew slyly rolls the camera from a distance. Handing over the permit, they explain that they are there to film an electric car promotion.
Papabeis wears a button camera, while Psihoyos holds a plastic water bottle that conceals a tiny videocam. The Shell guard explains that the US Department of Homeland Security now regards oil refineries as critical infrastructure, and anyone caught filming them must be reported.
Psihoyos denies any such intention, but gesturing to the towers looming beyond the fence across the road, asks, “What if we photographed your smoke?” The Shell guard quickly corrects him, saying that the heaving emissions are only steam. Looking down at the phone in his hand, Psihoyos begins reading off the names of chemicals that oil refineries are known to release: “Sulfur oxide, nitrogen oxide—”
“For someone who’s not here to film a refinery, you sure seem to know a lot about them,” the guard says. (Psihoyos tells me later, “There might have been a minute of theater in there, but I just wanted to get him to think.”) It’s time to move on. The crew retracts the projector, and Psihoyos drives off with Münter in the Tesla.
A few days later, we’re sitting by the pool at a Santa Monica hotel as Psihoyos recounts a story that occurred 30 years prior but still seems to haunt him. While living as an artist in New York, he drove one weekend down to a flea market in Perkiomenville, a town outside Philadelphia, to collect found objects. A family of four walked ahead of him, past tables of antiques and junk. Psihoyos noticed a pickup truck with large side mirrors pull up behind them. “I could see from my angle that this mirror might hit the family,” Psihoyos recalls. “It’s a busy flea market, people are laughing, there’s music going. I started to scream, and I felt people looking around at me like, what are you doing?” And so Psihoyos muted himself. “Do you ever scream in public?” he asks. “No, it’s very uncomfortable.”
It was just a moment of self-conscious silence. But by the time Psihoyos gathered himself and yelled out again, the truck’s side mirror had smacked the son and daughter, knocking the children down beneath the vehicle. “They died right in front of me,” Psihoyos says. His lips are quivering. “Blue-fucking-sky day, and I realized that it was my weakness. This family was crushed; two lives were extinguished. And it was because I was too fucking embarrassed to scream in a crowd.”
Psihoyos brushes a tear with his finger, becoming more impassioned. “Now, if you believe that we’re losing half the species on the planet and it’s because of our behavior? If we’re burning oil because it’s cheap? We’re losing this world before we have a chance to understand that it’s here. I think about that family that died because I couldn’t speak up, and now I look at my whole world dying. Everything that we’ve known. I don’t mind being the guy screaming in the room at this point. If I can tell it in a beautiful, elegant way and take people on an interesting ride, I’ll scream as loud as I can.”