The Power of Storytelling: Michael O. Snyder and 'The Coming Coast'

In this episode, I revisit an episode of the podcast from 2022 with filmmaker and photographer Michael O. Snyder. Our conversation delves into the pressing issue of climate change, its multifaceted impacts on communities, and the power of creative communication to inspire hope and drive solutions.

Michael O. Snyder, a filmmaker, photographer, and educator focused on environmental and social justice stories. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, Snyder runs Interdependent Pictures and collaborates with nonprofits to leverage storytelling in promoting meaningful change.

Featured Topics:

• "Into the Dark" Film: Snyder's film, exploring ecological impacts in the Arctic during the polar night, premiered at the Tromso International Film Festival and DC Environmental Film Festival in 2020. It's available on Kanopy, distributed by New Day Films.
• The Coming Coast Project: A pivotal project highlighting the impact of sea level rise on the Chesapeake Bay, focusing on the causes of rising seas and future mass migration challenges.
• Climate Impact on Migration: Discussion on how climate change contributes to forced migration, particularly in regions like Central America and the implications for displacement in areas like California.
• Environmental Storytelling: Snyder emphasizes the value action gap, using storytelling to emotionally engage audiences and foster meaningful responses to climate issues.
• Community Engagement: The episode touches on Snyder's oral history interviews with diverse communities affected by sea level rise, emphasizing the need for inclusive climate solutions.

Key Insights:

• Scientific Understanding: Michael stresses the importance of approaching climate change with robust scientific understanding and collective global action to address these issues at scale.
• Hope and Solutions: Despite disappointments on international climate action, Snyder remains hopeful, highlighting local and regional advancements as well as innovative business leadership in sustainable practices.
• Meaningful Migration: Exploration of 'meaningful migration,' which focuses on maintaining cultural connections and community resilience in face of climate-induced relocation.

Resources:

• Contact Michael O. Snyder: Visit his website at michaelosnyder.com or follow him on Instagram @MichaelOSnyder for more information.
• Host & Podcast Info: Pam Uzzell, host of Art Heals All Wounds, invites listeners to explore more episodes and sign up for her newsletter via her website.
• Production Team: Episode edited by iva Kristova with music by Ketsa and Lobo Loco.

Join us as they explore the intersection of art, storytelling, and climate action in this compelling discussion that showcases the transformative power of creativity in addressing one of the most critical issues of our time.

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Transcript

Pam Uzzell [00:00:12]:
Do you believe art can change the world? So do I! On this show, we meet artists whose work is doing just that. Welcome to Art Heals All Wounds. I'm your host, Pam Uzzell. I'm resharing this episode from way back in 2022, back when this podcast was still quite young. It's with Michael O. Snyder, a photographer and filmmaker I first met when he shot an interview for one of my documentary films. I've been so inspired by Michael's career path.

Pam Uzzell [00:00:57]:
One of my favorite works of his is called The Coming Coast. In this photography project, Michael explores the impact of rising seas and how it will affect the Chesapeake Bay in the mid Atlantic region of the United States. In this conversation over 2 years ago, Michael said that he felt hopeful about how climate change is being addressed. Before re releasing this, I asked him if he was still hopeful. This is what he answered, "I am still hopeful, because there are lots of reasons to be hopeful, and because hope itself has utility. That said, the climate costs related to the outcome of the election are likely to be significant. And it's also clear that climate change, while understood by the majority to be an issue of concern, it clearly is not high enough on the priority list for most Americans. So we have a long, long way to go.

Pam Uzzell [00:01:59]:
The results are disappointing, but the fight goes on. Hope will be the last thing that they'll take from me."You wanna know how you can really help me keep this show going? Follow me on your favorite listening app. So easy. Right? And if you really wanna give the show a boost, leave me a 5 star rating or review. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for being on this episode of Art Heals All Wounds. Can you start by introducing yourself by telling us who you are and what you do?

Michael O. Snyder [00:02:34]:
Yeah. Great. Well, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. My name is Mike Snyder. I'm a photographer. I'm a filmmaker. I'm an educator.

Michael O. Snyder [00:02:42]:
I do a little bit of work called Impact Production as well, and I'm based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and I mostly work on social justice and environmental related stories, and that's lived in a lot of different capacities over the years and a lot in a lot of different ways. But today I principally make short documentary films, and I do photojournalism is the primary work that I do.

Pam Uzzell [00:03:04]:
Right. And I, of course, was looking at your website and reading your bio. Can you talk about where you're from and how that's affected your career trajectory and your subject matter?

Michael O. Snyder [00:03:18]:
Yeah. So I grew up on, you know, as as a kid, it felt like a very large plot of land. I think in reality, it was just a few acres, but in rural Appalachia, right near the border of Western Maryland and West Virginia, and it was a place that I just I just fell in love with as as a kid. We we had a big family. I'm the eldest of 5. And so, you know, I very quickly was was put to the woods because, you know, I was capable of fending for myself. There were younger kids to look after and, you know, and so I just I just really fell in love with being in outdoor spaces. Know, I think it was probably my first love affair, and I I was very committed from a young age to finding a way in my early adult years and later adult years to having a career that allowed me to to be outside.

Michael O. Snyder [00:03:59]:
So that was a big part of my drive towards environmental work and towards, you know, a photography and filmmaking career that would allow me to travel. But the other side of that is it was also land that had been disfigured by a 100 years of industrial extraction. And so, you know, I grew up very close to what the costs are of, of that both, socially and environmentally. And so I, I became very passionate about environmental issues, both what they do to the ecology, but also what they do to the populations that live nearby to those places. So I studied, environmental science and geology at the undergrad level. And then at the graduate level at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, I did a degree in environmental sustainability. And, afterwards, I worked as a as a as a consultant. I worked for for nonprofits.

Michael O. Snyder [00:04:49]:
But I as as time went on, I came to two realizations that have really led me to the work that I that I do today and and and sort of moved me in this transition towards visual storytelling. And the first is that, you know, I believe that climate change is just fundamentally the call of our generation. I think almost no matter how you cut it, if we don't get it right on climate change, we get it wrong on everything else and the reason for that is climate change has has the potential to impact every other, you know, part of our lives. So if there's an issue you care about, whether it's national defense or food security or whatever it may be, you should also care about climate change because it's going to reach out and touch those things. So, you know, I started feeling more and more that if I want to have a career that is meaningful, that's the area that I want to work in principally. And and second and the thing that I think I was just most flabbergasted about in my graduate studies was despite what we know of 50 years and more of environmental science and and indeed climate science despite what we know. We just really have not moved the needle nearly enough in terms of public understanding of the issue and and more importantly, action on this issue. And the truth is we already have a lot of the tools that we need to make the transition towards a more sustainable world.

Michael O. Snyder [00:06:04]:
We've got a lot of the science, the policy and technology, you know, not all of it. There is there are things that are coming online every day, but the truth is we're just not doing nearly enough with it. And this question, which is the the gap between what we know and what we value and what we do about it, it's called the value action gap. I got very interested from a research perspective and how do we narrow that? You know, how do we how do we really move us to a place where we're actually doing something about this? And it's it's sort of too big of a research question to unpack here, but where I landed is storytelling. And in particular, visual storytelling is an incredibly, incredibly powerful tool, particularly when it's yoked to science on on one end, emotional sort of character driven stories on the other, and finally connected to impact organizations to to make use of that content when when you create it. If if you if you build those partnerships and you design stories in the right way, they have a lot of a lot of potential to make a difference. So the end result of that is 10 years ago when I when I moved back to the US 11 years ago now, I started a a production company called Interdependent Pictures, and I started partnering with nonprofit organizations to help them tell their stories. You know, that's a long way of saying that there's a thread that's kind of run through my whole life that I certainly feel connected to, but sort of how I deliver that has changed over the years.

Pam Uzzell [00:07:26]:
That's interesting. I wanna talk about one of your projects specifically, but I want you to just go into a little bit more detail about this idea of value action.

Michael O. Snyder [00:07:37]:
Well, again, so the value action gap is a separation between what what we know and what we ostensibly value and what we actually do to, you know, protect those things. And, you know, the idea here is, and this is an idea that has been rooted in in media for environmental issues for for 50 years and certainly, for the last 30 years has been if people just knew if people just knew and they just understood what the problems were, by gum, they'd do something about it, you know? And so a lot of the work that was done was very information heavy, very science heavy, and I don't mean to say that those aren't really important efforts. I mean, certainly raising scientific literacy is is absolutely essential, but it turns out when you take a deeper dive into individual psychology, and indeed into collective psychology that information alone is not it turns out it's not really how we make the decisions we make about our lives. We're much more complicated creatures than that. We're we're just not machines and that's that's a wonderful thing about humans, and it's also occasionally a very terrifying thing about about humans, but we're we're wrapped up in these narratives. And these narratives are held individually and they're strongly based on personal experience. They're strongly based on emotional connection. They're also strongly based on tribalism.

Michael O. Snyder [00:08:53]:
We tend to adopt the stories and perspective of people that are around us. So we're extremely normative creatures, you know, and so it's not enough to reach individuals. We have to reach groups. It's not enough to just give information about the stories. We've gotta connect it to, you know, meaningful emotional experiences, and it's certainly not enough to just present the problem. And that's one of the critical pieces. We can't just say, okay. Here's climate change.

Michael O. Snyder [00:09:17]:
Here's how it works. We have to do a few more things. One, we've gotta we gotta look critically about these issues. We gotta say, why does this exist? We gotta think about the broader social context that gave rise to this in the 1st place. But what we really have to do, and we so often don't, is we have to talk about how do we solve this issue. And that's one of the critical pieces. If people look at a piece of environmental media and it just leaves them with this very dire outlook, and it is a lot of time it is bad news, then people tend to retract actually. There's a feeling of hopelessness.

Michael O. Snyder [00:09:43]:
It's like, oh my gosh. I'm gonna go do something more fun and entertaining than this because this is horrible. But if we give people a sense for hope and a sense for solutions and look. There's lots of reasons to be hopeful and there are lots of solutions, then all of a sudden it feels much more manageable. And so it's not even just about the, you know, giving people knowledge is the kinds of knowledge that we we're giving people and hopefully this multi dimensional approach to knowledge will put people in a position where they think, okay, hey, you know, I care about this. There's something I can do about this and here's an action that I'm going to go and take.

Pam Uzzell [00:10:16]:
Wow. Thank you for that. That really was a great way to focus your work and a great way to understand how we achieve some change. I wanna talk about this project you've had that you've been working on called the coming coast, because I think this idea of water and how the oceans are going to rise is a very abstract one for most people, because it seems like it's happening at a pace that maybe is not understandable to people and it's also seems like it's very far in the future. So can you talk about this project, the coming coast?

Michael O. Snyder [00:10:57]:
Yeah. Great. Well, let me just set the scene just a little bit first on what the issue is that gives rise to the project. So with climate change, we know that sea level rise is going to be one of the outcomes. And the reason why we're gonna have rising seas is it's really down to 3 things. The first is that we're melting a lot of ice and particularly at the at at either end of the planet. And so that addition of water in the ocean is gonna is gonna rise, is is gonna rise the ocean just like filling up a bathtub. But also there's there's the the issue of thermal expansion.

Michael O. Snyder [00:11:27]:
You know, as you heat up water, like, you heat up almost anything else, it expands. We're expanding water. And and the 3rd part and this is a little bit more on unseen, but, you know, as you throw more heat energy into our ocean systems, you you increase the likelihood of storms. So it's not even that seas are rising, but but being nearer to the seas is dangerous. So it's the combination of all of those things. So that's the issue. Now the impact that it's gonna have is that most people around the planet are relatively close to the ocean, and a lot of our infrastructure is very close to the ocean as well. So what what this means is that by the end of the century, we anticipate in in North America alone, there could be somewhere between 413,000,000 migrants that'll have to move back from where they are to be able to get away from from rising seas.

Michael O. Snyder [00:12:10]:
So we're talking about truly mass human migration, and that's not even to speak of all the infrastructure that will be lost. So it's an enormous issue. Right now, it's already happening. There's plenty of places around the planet that are already being deeply impacted by this. There are people that are already on the move. But the big thing is here, we're just starting into this issue. Right? So we've gotta be looking at these frontline communities now and saying, okay. How is this playing out? What are the solutions here? If we can't adapt, how do we meaningfully migrate? Okay.

Michael O. Snyder [00:12:35]:
So that's that's the issue that underlies the coming coast. And for the last 7 years, I've been documenting, sea level rise issues through another project called eroding edges, and that's, you know, all about going into these communities, seeing what they're doing, trying to understand their perspectives and and experiences and changing identities in light of this issue. But then in 2020, I ended up getting a fellowship from the Bertha Foundation. It's a climate journalism fellowship, and I was so excited because it was finally gonna fund me to be able to, you know, expand eroding edges to where I wanted it to be. But, of course, COVID came in, and everything got turned upside down. So I suddenly had to think very creatively about how to do this project in a way that fit within the boundaries that COVID was setting. And and in some ways, I think it's it's an interesting story about, you know, how you know, when you're limited, you know, that there's there's a potential for for creativity within that and I think this project wouldn't have happened haven't hadn't it have been for for for COVID. So that's what gave rise to the project.

Michael O. Snyder [00:13:34]:
Here's what the project is. My observation was that in documenting sea level rise in these communities for the last 7 years, sea level rise is one of these issues that is everywhere, you know, at once. If you if you're close to the water, it's happening. It's happening all around you all the time, and, yeah, it's it's mostly invisible because the rise is only happening at 3 millimeters on average per year. Right? So just changing a little bit every single year. Some days you can walk out to the land. The land feels very, very dry. You know, you you don't you don't get a sense on a day to day basis this is changing.

Michael O. Snyder [00:14:04]:
You need to be able to take a view of time. Right? In a sense of time, it's happening very, very quickly. I mean, if you take a view over 30 years, which is a very short period of time, it's just part of one person's life, then you can see that change. So we're, you know, we're just not hardwired to be able to see to be able to think in 30 year time scales, we're definitely not hardwired to be able to think in 1,000 year time scales, which is how most things most geophysics on the planet operate is 1,000 to tens of 1,000 or or 1,000,000. But even 30 year timescales, we don't we're not very capable of understanding. So it's at on one hand, it's omnipresence. On the other hand, it's invisible. So the question is, how do we make the invisible problem more visible? And I was gonna have to do that in a creative way.

Michael O. Snyder [00:14:44]:
So I did I did 4 things for this project. The first is I did quite a bit of mapping. I took data from Climate Central, which is a which is a wonderful mapping organization, and I, built high resolution, maps of the Chesapeake Bay. So that's the area that I decided to work in. And the reason I was working in the Chesapeake Bay, that's in between Maryland and Virginia for for folks that don't know it, is it's basically ground 0 when when it comes to climate change, sea level rise. It will be one of the most highly impacted places in in the US among a few others, including places like Louisiana and parts of Alaska, Florida certainly as well.

Pam Uzzell [00:15:17]:
And then also just to be more specific, that's where our capital is. Correct?

Michael O. Snyder [00:15:23]:
Well, that's right. Not only is it a place that is has enormous ecological value. I mean, this is one of the it's the 3rd largest estuary on the planet, home to thousands of endemic species. I mean, it's basically a filter for the whole of the Central East Coast, but it's incredibly important because 18,000,000 people live there. And the nation's capital is there. You know, we've got the big portion of our fleet, naval fleet centered in the in the Chesapeake Bay. So it's important strategically. It's important infrastructurally.

Michael O. Snyder [00:15:50]:
It's a it's a really, really critical space. And, of course, there's some wonderful cultures that have come out of there that have been there. I mean, this is where settlers from Europe first landed, English speaking settlers, I I should say. And then, of course, before that for 10000 years or longer, there's been people living on on the East Coast of the US. So it's got enormous significance in a lot of different dimensions, and it's also gonna go underwater. So that's where I decided to work. So I mapped the bay, and then once I had mapped the bay and I I wanted to map to forecast what 6 feet of sea level rise would look like by the year 21100. That's the the bar that I set.

Michael O. Snyder [00:16:23]:
And the reason I chose 6 feet is 6 feet is roughly where we're heading if we if we do nothing, right, and I don't think we're going to do nothing, but I wanted to show us, you know, this this is where we are heading within a, you know, a a range of uncertainty, but, you know, generally speaking this is this is where most experts would agree we're heading if if we don't act now. So I created that map, and then the goal was to travel this new coastline, the coming coast as it were, all the way around the bay. And as I would go around, I would take blue tape and mark along the ground to show where this coastline would be. And and and the idea is to be able to say, hey. Look. You know, in, you know, quite possibly my children's lifetime, we're gonna have water here. And sometimes the the here might be right in the middle of a town. It could be in a backyard.

Michael O. Snyder [00:17:03]:
It could be a playground, it could be cutting through the parking lot of a shopping mall, but places that might look relatively dry are not going to be if we don't do something about it now. So that was the first component of it And the second component and and just as important is I reached out through networks, spent a lot of time about a year making connections to find 31 individuals all around the all around the bay. And my goal was to find as diverse of a set of people as I possibly could. And then to ask them, you know, why and and the the criteria underneath that, they had to be individuals that were being impacted by sea level rise and also cared about this issue. But once I had established that criteria, I wanted to get as diverse of a group as possible. And And the reason is because I think there's thousands of different reasons to care about climate change. As I said at the beginning of this session, it's something properly stood understood everyone should care about. You know, there's there's so many different reasons regardless of what politics you hold or religious perspective you may hold or age that you are, there's a lot of different reasons and so I wanted to have a diverse group of people and speak to them about their reasons for caring about climate change to show this is normal, this really can and should be normal regardless of of your background or your identity.

Michael O. Snyder [00:18:16]:
So I did an oral history with each one of them about a 3 hour interview asking them those questions, really trying to get to the heart of their beliefs and their experiences, and then I had them hold a depth stick, showing at at a place that they chose what 6 6 feet of sea level rise would would look like. So I packaged that all up together, and this was published in BuzzFeed News, to coincide with the climate conference, in November of 2020, and there will be a show of the images and the work that's rolling out in the Chesapeake Bay. Two shows, actually. 1 in March of 20 22, 1 in July of 2022, and another magazine publication that's coming out. So it's very fresh, and I'm excited about what this does with, to support the conversation that's ongoing in the Bay.

Pam Uzzell [00:18:59]:
Of course, the first thing that pops into my head is how did you feel going to the climate summit that you attended? I know from social media that you were there. A lot of people were angry. A lot of people felt like there's a lot of lip service. What did you walk away feeling?

Michael O. Snyder [00:19:15]:
So I was, yeah, I was a, an observer delegate, in the blue zone of the UN Climate Conference several months ago. Again, this is November of 2021 and that means I got to be in the space where the rest of the international delegation was. And and I was there because I was, presenting a film, that I had made about climate change in the Arctic and that's what got me into the blue zone, but I was also in several other spaces showing photographic work and talking about the role that visual storytelling plays in driving impact around these issues. So that's how I got there. You know, I think personally you go to those places, you say your piece, and you hope in some small way it makes a difference just like you do in any other line of work, you know, you plant your seeds, you stake your flag and, you know, you hope that it might add up in a small way. So, you know, I think I I left feeling like I'm doing what I can do and I'm saying what I feel like needs to be said, but it is true that when you look at the trajectory of the international conversation over the last 30 years, it is it's certainly disappointing. I mean, it's not where we need to be. We're not heading in the right direction.

Michael O. Snyder [00:20:22]:
We are making lots of progress, but it's it isn't enough. And most people that understand this issue know that it isn't enough. That said, there are certain areas we are making quite a bit of progress, and there actually is plenty to be hopeful for. And we while we do need international agreements, we're not gonna get there without international agreements. We we need that piece of the puzzle. There's still a lot that's really exciting that's happening around the planet on regional levels, on local levels, on individual levels. There's businesses that are taking that are that are they're becoming leaders as well. So, you know, there's it's a mixed bag.

Michael O. Snyder [00:20:53]:
But at the end of the day, there is plenty of reasons to be hopeful for it, but also a lot more we need to fight and we need to push on.

Pam Uzzell [00:21:01]:
You talk about this term that I'd love for you to talk about here on the show. I believe it's meaningful migration.

Michael O. Snyder [00:21:09]:
Yep. Mhmm.

Pam Uzzell [00:21:10]:
Can you talk about that? Because you you put out some numbers earlier about the number of migrants just within this country alone. So talk about meaningful migration. What do you mean when you say that?

Michael O. Snyder [00:21:22]:
Well, climate migration is already happening again, and the numbers I was giving you, 4 to 13,000,000 by the end of this century, that's just from sea level rise, but there's lots of other reasons why people will migrate. Food security issues, desertification, you know, impact from storms, melting permafrost. There there's a lot of different ways climate change is gonna move people around, and the outcomes from that don't necessarily need to be all bad. You know, there's there's certainly there there can be some upsides to that, but it's going to be an enormous challenge. And the term meaningful migration, what it refers to is, first, is the understanding that, look, migration is going to be happening. We we would love to be able to tell ourselves a story where we can use our human ingenuity to adapt the spaces that we're in and and and find a way to stay to stay put so people that are people of place can continue to be in that place and, you know, there are some there are some places on this planet that I'm sure we will be able to adapt and there's great historical stories about that. You know, clearly places like the Netherlands that have found a way to to live with the sea, you know, give us some hope that, you know, okay. There are there are certain places that might we might be able to stay in.

Michael O. Snyder [00:22:28]:
But for many, many people, particularly people without privilege and without access to capital, that's just not gonna happen. So if you know that migration is very, very likely to happen and if and and indeed almost certain to happen in some spaces, The question is, how can we make that move, but also hold on to a sense of who we are, hold on to our relationships with the community that we have been embedded in? How do we hold on to our stories? How do we hold on to our language? How do we keep the best of who we are while also embracing the change that needs to happen? You know? And I think that that question is a question that we all need to ask ourselves because the truth is we're living in times of great, great change and, you know, we we've all gotta all be thinking about, you know, how do we, you know, know, hold on to things that are really important to us while also accepting and adapting, but it's very, very heightened for these communities that are being directly impacted by climate change. So the way that that's manifesting and the way those conversations are going, I think, differs a lot community to community. In some communities that I've I've worked in and talked to, it's been very, very intentional and community led and, you know, oftentimes I have to say in tribal communities, indigenous communities, the process has been much more intentional. And then in wider communities, less so. Now that's not universally the case. There's some places that that are white that have had strong leadership in this area, but it varies. There are plenty places that are not having the conversation at all.

Michael O. Snyder [00:23:56]:
They're just not having it. They might be having it around the dinner table, but as a community, they're not having the conversation. So there's a lot of variance on on on where communities are with us.

Pam Uzzell [00:24:06]:
Yeah. And I I just you know, I'm sorry. I'm kind of asking you to answer every single climate change question that I have. But one thing that I feel is that in terms of our own immigration system and how we view both migration to this country and also people who are essentially refugees. I'm a little bit discouraged that this issue of the impact of changing climate never really enters the conversation. Certainly I've read a lot about Central America, where, as you said earlier, desertification is a huge factor in terms of pushing people to leave. And what do you feel about how do we get that to be part of the conversation? The reason it feels I mean, it's important now, but I also feel like at some point, many of us may be forced to migrate. And if we're not if we can't get it now, how are we going to do this when it starts happening on a much larger scale?

Michael O. Snyder [00:25:08]:
Well, I'll speak to the first part of your question first and and take the example of Central America. There are a significant number of migrants that are heading northwards from from Central America into Mexico into the United States that that we can certainly say are climate migrants and comfortably say that. I think at this point in time, I have not looked at the figures. I've been much closer to, photography and filmmaking in the last couple of years than I have been to the policy and the studies on these things, but I did read a a report in the fall that was giving something like 15, 20%, we can directly say, are are moving because of directly because of the changing climate. But what the report also talked about that I think is is really important to understand about climate migration is that the reasons why people migrate are diverse, and it might be because there's increasing violence in their town. You know, for example, it could be because of economic issues, like the the the the jobs in our community are not there. But what is often unseen is what might underlie that is the changing climate. Right? So you might have a situation where fields continue to go more and more fallow in in an area because they're not getting as much rain, and that means the community can't rely on farming as much.

Michael O. Snyder [00:26:17]:
So then they have to change over to the drug trade, and then all of a sudden there's more violence. And then when you ask why people why they're fleeing they'd say well because the increase of violence, but actually climate was a was a catalyzing force. And so it's very difficult to pick apart what actually causes people to migrate. And so I think in some ways, it's it's left out of the conversation because it's not entirely clear what role climate plays, but we know it is a role, and we know that it's gonna become more and more of a role as time goes on. But oftentimes, it will be it will be hidden. So I think it gets sticky. I think it gets complicated, to be honest. I'm just not an expert in I have no idea what people are thinking about how we're gonna manage.

Michael O. Snyder [00:26:56]:
I mean, I've seen some astronomical numbers again in terms of, you know, where people be heading. And if things go really, really bad, it may be true that we could be heading north. I mean, that's real truly not impossible. You know, again, I'm in Virginia, so I'm in I'm in the South United States, and there's a lot of forecast that show in the next 70 years now we're moving, you know, probably past the end of my lifetime, but but in my children's lifetime, there could be a lot of water stress here and a lot of heat here if we don't get this right. So I have no idea how this will be be managed, but I do know there are some cities around the planet that are already identifying themselves as climate refugee hubs. I believe Buffalo, New York is 1. Toronto's got a plan in place now, to be able to accept people that are that are moving out of harm's way.

Pam Uzzell [00:27:44]:
That's fascinating. I mean, I think I mentioned in my email to you that, of course, on my mind here in California, it's always about fire, but the displacement that's happened around fire already is enormous. There are certain places where people moved there because they were much cheaper than trying to live in an urban area in California and they've been displaced. And the question is, well, where do they go? Do they become part of this very, very large number of people who are houseless in California? So I feel like now this is our time to sort of get these issues right. And so I really appreciate the work that you're doing. You mentioned a film you worked on, and I'm wondering if you can tell us where we can find your work. Is it possible to see that film that you worked on and sort of see announcements about the exhibits of your work or the publication of your work?

Michael O. Snyder [00:28:49]:
Well, let me speak to the film first. So as I said, I split my time between creating different kinds of media. I I typically say I like to make ecosystems of of media, meaning that I'll find a story and I'll build access to that story. But once that's in place and I've kind of got the ball rolling, I've built the collaborations and the partnerships. A little bit of funding is there. As as often as I can, I wanna take that story and shop it out to different ways to tell stories? So that might mean, you know, doing a a documentary film. It might mean doing an explainer video series. It might mean doing a photo piece.

Michael O. Snyder [00:29:19]:
It might mean doing a written part. It might be have a book or or might have a podcast associated with it. And so a lot of work that I do, it sort of spreads out. And there's a lot of different reasons for doing that, but the core one is that we need to reach diverse audiences. And if you can tell the same kind of story and tell it in different ways and different kinds of spaces, you you may indeed be able to reach different groups of people, and I think that's really, really important. So the this film that I recently made called Into the Dark, and I'll explain what that is, but it's one of a number of different pieces of media that I that I made around this story and I made in in collaboration with other storytellers. So it's a film about the changing arctic, and in this case, a group of climate scientists go on a 3 week expedition during the polar night, and the polar night is the time of year during winter in the Arctic where the sun doesn't rise, for 4 to 6 months out of the year. So it's it's the it's the dark time, and it's a very, very cold time, and it's quite a treacherous time.

Michael O. Snyder [00:30:12]:
Very, very few people head to the North Pole during wintertime as you can imagine. And so this is one of the teams around the planet that does. And the reason that they do is that they had this kind of rogue hypothesis a number of years ago that actually the polar night is a critical time of year ecologically. There's actually a lot that's going on up there. The belief was there's nothing going on because it's dark, so, you know, there's no primary production, meaning there's no plants growing, so nothing's eating. You can't see a mate to reproduce, so everyone just kinda goes to sleep. But what it turns out is this ecosystem, and we find this all over the planet, is just amazingly fine tuned adapt to work in the conditions that it's in. Right? So it can take tiny, tiny, tiny amounts of light, a millionth of what we can see, and use that little bit of light to do its business, whether it's finding a partner and reproducing or whether it's eating.

Michael O. Snyder [00:30:58]:
And so once they had discovered this, the question is then, well, wait a minute. If we have climate change and we're melting sea ice and we don't have that cover over the ocean during wintertime, then we know there's a little bit of light that's bouncing on the upper upper atmosphere, you know, coming from the sun on the other side of the planet, but also coming from stars, the northern lights. What's that doing to the ecosystem? So that's what they were up there to discover. So it's an adventure story about getting on a ship and going out to sea for for weeks in a very frozen and forbidding place. And indeed, when we were working on this film, we were the northernmost people on the planet almost certainly, and we're about 80 degrees north latitude. And the second part of it is sort of telling the story of of the science and and and really it's about how sometimes tiny changes in ecosystems can lead to surprising, impacts. You know, other times ecosystems are very robust and resilient and and you don't get these things. But there are certain times when you make a little tweak and it can change something way off over here in in left field.

Michael O. Snyder [00:31:57]:
And indeed, when we we got back and that the film came out, it premiered at the Tromso International Film Festival in 2020, and then it was, it premiered at the DC Environmental Film Festival also in in March of 2020. And at the same week, a piece came out in National Geographic, and there was a publication in Nature that confirmed, what what they had believed was happening, and that is there there's likely to be large scale impact from this change. And there's also a series, an explainer, video series that came out in Vox as well. So there's a lot of to answer your question, there's a lot of different ways people can check out this story. You can go to Vox and search for thaw. You can go to National Geographic and search for for my name and dark arctic. If you Google that, you'll probably find it. And then the film into the dark is currently being distributed by New Day Films, which is an educational distributor.

Michael O. Snyder [00:32:45]:
So they work with schools and libraries all around the country, and you can go and you can, you can stream it through New Day. And it's also on Kanopy, which which is another space where you can see a lot of different films. So there's a lot of different ways to engage with that media.

Pam Uzzell [00:33:00]:
That's wonderful. And then just to find out more about you in general, where should people look?

Michael O. Snyder [00:33:05]:
Yeah. Michaelosnyder.com. You can go to my website and check out my work there. You'll find my email there. If you have any questions, I'm always up to connect, so feel free to reach out. And I do publish on Instagram, so that's at Michael OSnyder, and you can see more of my work there as well.

Pam Uzzell [00:33:22]:
Thank you so much.

Michael O. Snyder [00:33:23]:
I

Pam Uzzell [00:33:23]:
mean, interestingly enough, it does make me feel hopeful to talk to you because I feel like with the sort of more creative thought about how to get people to care about this issue, that there is more hope than I thought before we talked. So thanks for coming on the show, Mike.

Michael O. Snyder [00:33:41]:
Yeah, it's really great to be here and, you know, I'll just close by saying, look, we live in a completely fascinating time. I mean, the fact that we're afforded this ability to be able to see these processes that are truly global in scale, you know, and are incredibly complex. The the fact that we've gotten to this space as a species to be able to understand this is phenomenal and the fact that we're responding the way we are actually is phenomenal. It's it's an incredible story what's happening. More and more people people all over the planet are coming online to caring about this issue, doing something about this issue, and the truth is science is gonna have a huge role to play. And we look at, you know, the last few years and what we were able to do, whether people understand it or not, the presence of these vaccines is a is a phenomenal science story that we're able to respond. So, you know, I think I think science is gonna make a huge difference. I think our sense of community and the sense of connection and love we have for each other and for this planet, it's gonna kick in.

Michael O. Snyder [00:34:31]:
I think we're gonna get there. I just think there's gonna be some bumps along the way and so I think we've got to do everything we we can do to to strengthen those connections as much as possible. I think that's what's gonna that's what's gonna pull us through. We're only as good as our webs that that we find ourselves in. So we've gotta we've gotta do a much better job of building those webs and telling the right story, and I think if we do that, I think not only will we avoid the worst of what may be, but there's opportunities here and there's a better planet we could be building.

Pam Uzzell [00:34:59]:
Wow. Thank you for that. You're listening to Art Heals All Wounds. I hope you enjoyed this replay and my interview with Michael O. Snyder about his work. Michael was the first artist I interviewed about climate and the environment. I'll put Michael's info in the show notes so that you can find out more about his work. I'd love for you to sign up for my newsletter.

Pam Uzzell [00:35:50]:
I'm a very infrequent newsletter writer, so if you like the idea of hearing from me occasionally but not being bombarded, then this is for you. Just go to my website and a pop up will appear asking you if you'd like to sign up. Thanks for listening. The music you've heard in this podcast is by Quetzal and loboloco. This podcast was edited by Eva Kristova.