The deadline is fast approaching for applications to the Fulbright - National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellowship program.
Applicants may submit only one entry, addressing one of the identified topics: Biodiversity, Cities, Climate Change, Cultures, Energy, Food, Oceans, and Water.
It is pretty clear from the program description that the selection process will favor proposals that are both journalistic and personal, and which require investigation outside the US, while chronicling this quest for understanding in real time using digital tools. In other words, they want the ingredients for a good story.
I have one core point of view, which infuses all topics: Time. I ask myself, how do the various contributing factors with different rates of change interact? For which factor is time the constricting limitation? Time rules over all phenomena, from the quick to the interminable, with sweep hands of all speeds ticking simultaneously. If I can understand how time works with a given subject, I think I can understand the subject very well.
Bear with me in this post, as I open my thought processes for your examination, evaluating what my submission to the fellowship program should cover. Let's look at each of the topics in the program from the perspective of time, and then consider the appeal of each question and how credible I would be as the person to pursue it.
1) Time and biodiversity?
Species are going extinct at a faster rate than since the comet impact that killed off the dinosaurs. I want to see and record as many doomed species as possible before they are gone.
(A race against time to capture documentation of soon-to-be-lost species is poignant rather than hopeful. Such fatalism would not be favored by the selection committee.)
2) Time and Cities?
Most of the world's population lives in cities, and many large cities are at water's edge, making them vulnerable to sea level rise. Is this a design opportunity or a dystopian curse? Thinking constructively, is there enough lead time, inventiveness and public resolve to build new urban areas designed for climate change?
(A journalistic question, where experts in contention can only voice their own opinion. This could be favored.)
3) Time and Climate Change?
The perceived rate of change is the ultimate determining factor for the pace of policy adoption. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation seems on track to maintain global air temperatures at their current level for another two decades, and then boost the rise in air temperatures relentlessly for thirty years or so thereafter. Can countries make a commitment to policies before the need for them becomes frantically urgent?
(The issue is way too abstract and not photogenic, although it is the most fundamental question one could ask. It would not be favored as a subject for public consumption, even though it is about how the pace of climate change affects public attitudes.)
4) Time and Cultures?
Global commercial culture infiltrates every human niche, poured upon and seeping into all the various local cultures of the world, including indigenous cultures whose origins predate globalism. Do the "old ways" of indigenous cultures have anything to teach global modernism about sustainability?
(Really requires an anthropological point of view, but one expressed by a person who carries none of the considerable baggage from the discipline. I would not be thought the person to address it. This would not be favored coming from me.)
5) Time and Energy?
Fossil fuel dependency is thoroughly built into the modern way of life, a melding of what is demanded and how those demands are supplied. A complete transition to an industrial alternative energy system with the capacity to serve modern consumption would require considerable fossil fuel and other resources for its construction, and may not even be realistic. Is there time to grow self sufficient alternative energy production systems with a matching low consumption alternative energy usage culture? Or will a new world of energy have to grow from the ruins of the old?
(Another fundamental question, that verges on being rhetorical. Of course we can't pull this off, no one is even proposing such a course of action. As I believe the modern way of life will first have to fail utterly before it can be replaced, I would not be conducting an investigation so much as making a case for the desirability of collapse and the need to start planning now for the aftermath. This would definitely not be considered favorably by the selection committee.)
6) Time and Food?
I have begun a quest to find locations where a society is able to live comfortably from the food it produces nearby, and where both the ecology and the infrastructure will be robustly adaptive to climate change in the decades to come. Is such a place possible?
(A quest by its very nature is both highly personal and journalistic. This could be favored.)
7) Time and Oceans?
The rise of sea level, over the decades and centuries, will create a changing interface between oceans and land. One type of natural habitat will experience tremendous expansion: estuaries. Where in the world are the estuary restoration efforts conducted, that might be adapted to cultivate this highly productive habitat expansion into a food producing resource?
(Original, and thus better served by having a reputation for expertise and inventiveness in the particular field. Such a submission would not likely be favored coming from me. I can cover this topic from the quest for food perspective, when searching for innovations.)
8) Time and Water?
The availability of fresh water for all uses has always been quite variable. Modern water exploitation is based on assumptions about variability that no longer hold, if they ever did. The duration and frequency of drought, the intervals between flood extremes, the type and seasonal pattern for winter precipitation—all these have been mistakenly characterized across the globe because studies were based on short time samples and an insufficient understanding of how the global weather system works. New variability regimes are being established in a warming global climate and no one knows where they will take us. What does long term water planning and development look like in a world of climate change, when we can no longer count on the supposed regularity of the seasons, which perhaps was always a myth perpetuated to serve development of water projects?
(My background in water conservation writing lends marginal credibility to asking this question, especially as a good supply-side answer has not yet been put forth and demand-side answers have not yet been fully considered. This is a journalistic approach, and it could be favored by the selection committee.
Reviewing my chain of thought, it seems I'm talking myself into choosing between #2, #6 and #8. Perhaps some recasting of the questions will narrow the field. Or perhaps I'll go with what I most desire to do, even if it is the least likely to be favored.
Your feedback is welcome.
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