THT: “Today, the greatest driving force in my work is humanity’s fraught, intimate and ultimately unbreakable connection to the natural world,” photographer Nichole Sobecki tells NPR. She says that, too often, coverage of climate change is politicized or it’s portrayed as something happening to the planet, polar bears or glaciers — neglecting that we’re all a part of the same ecosphere. We don’t exist apart from our environment, nor will we survive its destruction, Sobecki says, and she believes that storytelling has a role to play in cultivating the new ideas that are necessary to building a more sustainable future for the human race on Earth.
‘A Climate for Conflict’ is a project Nichole Sobecki undertook with her reporting partner, Laura Heaton, that explores the relationship between the environment and security in Somalia, one of the countries that’s been hardest hit by climate change. Sobecki says she feels a sense of responsibility to highlight one of the places that has contributed the least to global carbon dioxide emissions, and yet its environment is among the most severely impacted, in irreversible ways.
Nichole Sobecki
After years of covering conflicts and terrorism in the Middle East and Africa, Sobecki began to worry that she was focusing on the most dramatic — but perhaps least vital — element of these clashes. The contact — but not the connection. What was happening below the surface of these crises, and how would those currents shape the future?
Read more about the 5 women documenting effects of climate around the world