About Jerry Wright
I've enjoyed taking photographs since the 1980s. More off than on, because of my career as a scientist, and for many years while I was living in the U.S. I didn't have time for photography at all. But now in semi-retirement and back in Britain I can pick up a camera once more.
Many years ago I used film and a chemical darkroom. The earlier images on this site are scanned from slides and negatives, in particular, all those in the Asia section. My selection of images is based more on the memories they invoke than on any photographic merit. Many more images need to be captioned, bear with me!
I mainly concentrate on landscape. I enjoy the spectrum of timescales captured in landscape, from the slow evolution of landforms to the transient stir of a wave on a shore.
I've done quite a lot of travelling for photography, but now we have a problem...
The Climate/Biodiversity Emergency
We are destabilising the Earth's climate and the impact is now visible within a fraction of a human lifetime. Fossil fuels are both unsustainable and unsafe, and must be phased out in transition to renewable sources. Because carbon dioxide is a long-lived heat-trapping gas which (unlike water) doesn't condense out, it has acted as the Earth's thermostat for billions of years, and oxidising so much carbon is turning up the heat. The dangerous consequences of this are now obvious across the world. Having seen for myself the glacial retreat in visits to Svalbard 24 years apart, and having been watching since the start of this century (with increasing frustration) the lack of concerted action, I welcome the growing awareness that this is the most important challenge the human race has ever faced. It didn't have to be this way: we have known this was coming since the nineteenth century and warning after warning has been ignored. It's been galling to watch the human race blunder knowingly into a trap of its own making, just because prople didn't want to look --- this is not intelligent. The tragedy is that we have now left ourselves so little time.
On top of the destabilising climate, habitat destruction is accelerating and together they are bringing on a serious depletion of biodiversity, a mass extinction. Now Mother Nature is tapping us on the shoulder and we must attend. Continuing to bake the biosphere and treat the natural world as a plunder-and-dump plaything are not compatible with our continued success as a species. That success has totally depended on the unusual stability of the post-glacial climate. But the planet can go from the self-cooling and self-moderating system that it has been since the mesolithic to a self-warming system involving an irreversible cascade of tipping points. We are now on a slippery slope down towards a cliff-edge, and future generations have not given their consent to the immense risks to which we are exposing them. I have worked part-time on climate models and analysis for many years, and as Emeritus Professor of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol I involve students in climate-related projects to further their understanding. I'm one of over 21,000 scientists in 180 countries who have added our signatures to a series of papers published in Bioscience declaring a climate emergency:
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biae087/7808595
The Central England Temperature (CET) data is the longest series of direct regular temperature readings in the world, which commenced in 1659 when Isaac Newton was still a teenager. I use this data in a smoothing algorithm which extracts the slowly-changing mean from the seasonal cycle and residual short-term variations. Below is a plot showing the CET mean, with two standard deviations of that mean on either side (shaded) to show uncertainty. Values are anomalies relative to pre-1750 level. For comparison is a predicted anomaly using a simple energy balance climate model based on the laws of physics, forced with the atmospheric CO2 concentration measured at Mauna Loa up until 2020, extended and assumed to level off around 2050 at 500 ppmv (which may be optimistic). Anyone could do this --- no large resources are needed, I just use an ancient linux laptop, all software is my own. The results are clear enough: the actual climate is doing exactly as expected, indeed inevitable. It's going to be difficult to keep the temperature rise below two degrees C, but we have to try.
SARS-CoV-2, added May 2020
SARS-CoV-2 was also predicted, from what we know about the hundreds of coronaviruses in Asian wildlife and the ease with which they can jump between species. Now it has happened and is testing our fitness. Scientifically we have proved to be largely fit: multidisciplinary teams have spontaneously formed across the globe to do in weeks what would normally take years, and are gradually developing the understanding needed to get on top of this challenge. The speed with which vaccines have been developed contrasts sharply with the sluggush governmental response in many countries. Politically we have proved to be largely unfit: in recent years we have seen vain self-serving populists prosper by stoking division and a rogues' gallery of mindless tribalisms, all amplified by social media. They have championed ignorance and xenophobia, scorned expertise and compassion, and undermind truth and trust. But no more than climate change can an epidemic be managed through bluster, deception and cronyism. Expertise and compassion are not only back in fashion, they are the only qualities that matter. Global problems need global cooperation to solve them, not nationalistic zero-sum games. And we are more aware than ever of what can go wrong when natural ecosystems get cornered and stressed because of human pressures.
Despite this tragedy the pandemic will fade, but climate change will affect every human being on Earth for centuries to come. Coronavirus has exposed the febrile triviality of so much of public life, and proved again the importance of society's ability to filter out science from quackery and facts from fabrications. We are all Earthlings --- the rest is small print. These lessons need to be permanently learned. Covid-19 isn't just a tap on the shoulder it's an abrupt slap in the face. If in the post-Covid world we just return to unsustainable and unsafe carbon-fueled consumption then this hard lesson from Mother Nature will have been in vain.
Personally Carbon Negative from 2022
Scientists (who travel to conferences) and photographers (who image the world, and I have done both) are becoming aware of our own responsibility. We cannot change atmospheric physics so we have to change ourselves. Figuring out how to reform the global economic system into a growth engine that's 100% sustainable and fairer will win the future. This is a major challenge but it is also the greatest opportunity of our era. Politicians who remain devoted to fossil fuels and ecology destruction, notably in the United States, Russia, Brazil and Australia, are a danger to all of humanity and to every living thing. Ignoring the world's fire alarm going off, bent only on short-term power and money, they would lock in failure and lead us off a cliff. In contrast, the recent mobilisation of young people around the world is the most encouraging sign I've seen --- they are right to be angry. We need to learn from science, history and the humanities, and shape an inclusive future that's in harmony with the natural world instead of in conflict with it.
Given the lack of urgency and leadership from so many governments, it's up to organisations, businesses, communities and individuals to act. I am pleased that my University (Bristol) was the first in Britain to declare a climate emergency and set a target for carbon neutrality. I want to make my own contribution, however tiny, and I intend to live personally carbon negative from 2022. I don't have a car, don't eat meat, hardly ever fly (and then only short-hall), and live in a well-insulated apartment. My remaining carbon budget, the biggest part of which is a share in the carbon cost of developed-country infrastructure, I will need to offset. At the moment this basically means sponsoring the planting of trees largely in re-wilding projects, although I hope in the future there will be other options such as direct air capture as well. But it has to be the right trees in the right places --- a mix of native species which is also good for biodiversity, rather than a sterile monoculture of poor-quality conifers. I'm still doing my homework on this, but have taken my first steps into offsetting. I will still be able to enjoy photography but mostly refrain from long-haul flying until renewable fuel sources are used.
Jerry Wright
P h o t o g r a p h y
© 2017 Jerry Wright