James Balog

“The scientist-community guy may get a $500,000 grant, and if his equipment works or doesn't work, he still gets a gold star for doing the science experiment. For me, there is no merit in anything for doing an experiment; I have to go home with pictures.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“You know, we humans are programmed to think that big changes on the Earth happened a long time ago, or will happen a long time in the future. What we don't realize is that they actually can happen right now. Right here, right now, while we're alive, in our own hours and days and months and years.”

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

“When you put the subjectivity of the art together with the context of the science, you have this very powerful conjunction of opposites and together they are greater than either one could ever be.”

“When I worked with wildlife a lot in the Eighties and Nineties, I learnt the meaning of patience. And when I worked with trees, I learned the meaning of humility.”

“I grew up in suburban New Jersey in a transitional area that was surrounded by farmland that wasn't being cultivated.”

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

“The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.”

“Hindsight can be merciless. People of any given era often look back in time and wonder how their predecessors could have been so dimwitted.”

“At the age of 60, you see how short the runway is in front of you and how long the runway is behind you, and that you don't have much time left.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Climate change should not fundamentally be seen as a political or partisan issue, but it has been turned into a political football primarily by the climate deniers who have a vested interested in maintaining the status quo. That includes certain industrial interests, financial interests and political interests.”

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

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