A series of domes containing pollution from cities around the world was placed in the Norwegian city of Trondheim and London earlier this year as part of an investigation by psychologists to ascertain whether art can change people’s perception of climate change.

The idea is the brainchild of British artist Michael Pinsky’s, who created the Pollution Pods installations — a series of five connecting domes that recreates the pollution from London, Beijing, São Paulo, New Delhi and Tautra in Norway. He decided that “smelling is believing,” and set out to give visitors an experience they would never forget.

Pinsky filled five interconnected geodesic domes with carefully mixed recipes that emulated ozone, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide — found in the air in some of the world’s major cities. Entering a first plastic-domed pod, visitors then passed through increasingly polluted cells, from dry and cold locations to hot and humid, giving them a firsthand experience of the air quality of that city.

The UK installation formed a circle in the center of Somerset House courtyard, one of London’s most renowned art centers. Visitors passed through the climatically controlled pods to compare the quality of different polluted global environments. The five Pollution Pods were linked, so that visitors were forced to pass through all of them to exit the installation. This visceral experience encapsulated the sense that the world – and our own impact on it – is interconnected.

The release of toxic gases from domestic and industrial sources increase the rate of global warming and have a direct effect on our health. In the West, in cities such as London, one in five children suffer from asthma, while in developing countries such as Delhi, over half the children have stunted lung development and will never completely recover.

Those living in the developed world have environments with relatively clean air, while people in countries such as China and India are being poisoned by airborne toxins created from industries that fulfill orders from the West. The experience of walking through the pollution pods demonstrates that these worlds are interconnected and interdependent. The desire for ever-cheaper goods is reflected in the ill-health of many people in the world and in the ill-health of our planet as a whole. “Within this installation people will be able to feel, taste and smell the toxic environments that are the norm for a huge swathe of the world’s population,” says Pinsky.

Agriculture faces considerable challenges: population growth, soil pollution, and heavy use of water reserves. To overcome this, we need to rethink the current yield-based model used by the agricultural sector. Aeroponics may offer a solution.

The agricultural sector today faces the huge challenge of feeding an ever-growing world population. Exposed to pests and weather hazards, outdoor crops face many odds. Using arable land to push for the best possible yields, and using artificial fertilizers and pesticides can be as problematic for the soil as they are for consumers. Agricultural experts also estimate that 70% of drinking water is used to irrigate fields worldwide. In countries such as Switzerland, the cold season stops agricultural activity and it’s necessary to import food from distant countries by truck, ship, or plane for much of the year. Creating a sustainable approach to agriculture is a real challenge.

CombaGroup, a company located in the Swiss municipality of Molondin, plans to reinvent agriculture — by growing lettuce and other leafy vegetables locally all year round, but without any fields, pesticides or chemical fertilizers. Their method saves 97% of water compared to traditional outdoor methods. This is thanks to a meticulous application of aeroponics — a technique of growing vegetables above the ground, using supports under which the roots spread freely in the air. A system sprays a mist of water mixed with nutrients directly onto roots and excess water is reused. The plants receive exactly the right amount of nutrients they need to grow, in protected greenhouses that don’t need any artificial fertilizers and pesticides to fight pests. The plants can be grown all year round, and have a lower carbon footprint, resulting in less pollution from imported products during off-season.

“We currently operate a 250 square meter pilot production facility that can supply the equivalent of around 500 fresh salads per week, says CombaGroup CEO, Serge Gander. This facility has allowed us to test our system on an industrial scale. We have already sold the first systems to France, and we’re in discussions with industries in Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada, Russia, China, and the Middle East. In fact, any region where weather conditions, lack of water, or soil pollution represent real problems for the agricultural and retail sectors.”

Compared to conventional farming methods, the CombaGroup aeroponics system is impressive in its yield. Based on current production, it will be able to produce 800 tons of lettuce and more than 300 tons of leafy vegetables per hectare per year when deployed on an industrial scale. In a field with soil, current farms can produce around 25 to 30 tons of lettuce per hectare per year. Aeroponics can grow one kilogram of lettuce with only six liters of water, compared to 250 liters in conventional farming.

While these performances are particularly impressive and promising in terms of productivity and yield, they are also remarkable in terms of quality and taste. Naturally grown without being boosted, these vegetables have won over many great chefs at several Swiss gastronomic establishments. During the coronavirus crisis, the company donated part of its output to support these local establishments.

“Without claiming to be able to revolutionize the agri-food sector with a single solution, we are, regardless, wanting to question the foundations of the current paradigm,” continues Gander. “The idea is to innovate, open up the debate, confront new ideas, and propose alternatives as part of a complementary approach to the different types of agriculture and supply chains available today. As an entrepreneur at the crossroads, I believe it’s essential to have a thoughtful and committed approach. Making money is one thing, but to do so while trying to improve the common lot becomes a necessity — especially when considering the environmental issues that face humanity.”

With the pandemic still working its way through our healthcare, social, and economic systems, many have asked me whether business has come to a screeching halt. As the founder of a growing but still fairly small reforestation nonprofit, I can see why this is a sensible question. The economic pressure is real. 

But the answer might be surprising: businesses are more dedicated than ever to addressing the climate crisis, and now is actually the perfect time for a company to start or develop a sustainability program. 

Now is the Time.

Climate change isn’t taking a break, even if nature has had a reprieve in carbon emissions the past few months. The truth is that this issue is the most important thing our generation, and upcoming generations, need to address. It’s our air and water, food, climate, health, and just about everything else we need to survive on the planet. 

And while understandably some businesses are struggling, others are weathering this storm and have more time on their hands to actually plan for the future, to reflect on what matters to the business and employees, and to implement a solid CSR program they can be proud of. Just starting with the simple act of planting trees is a great first step. 

Think about the next 50 years. 

As we come off of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day recently, it’s important to reflect on how the businesses of today can influence the next 50 years. Humans are responsible for the state of the earth, and businesses are equipped to make a big impact, quickly. Also, from our experience we know corporate sustainability programs help build team morale internally. They give employees a common and positive goal outside of their everyday workflow. Now, probably more than ever, your team is likely looking for something to rally behind – even if they rally remotely.

While committed, forward-thinking businesses continue to prioritize sustainability programs, we need everyone to participate. And you might just find that it’s even good for the bottom line. Most surveys show that upwards of 80% of consumers want sustainable products and packaging. 

And while coronavirus is still in the headlines, consider this: restoring healthy environments can help prevent future disease outbreaks. Climate change, environmental destruction, and encroachment on wildlife habitats are all factors in the potential spread of zoonotic diseases. Trees are an important part of addressing this to not only reduce deforestation but to actively restore the millions of acres of forests that have already been damaged. Governments drag their feet when it comes to real change and nature-based solutions, but you know who’s quick and nimble and actually helps us get trees in the ground? Business partners who are committed to making a positive impact. 

The hunger for images that show new and existing solutions to the climate crisis continues to grow exponentially as our collective awareness deepens.  But relevant and engaging imagery is hard, or even impossible, to source.

As a career photojournalist focused on environmental stories – researching, finding, chasing and shooting climate solutions is a provocation and frustration I have wrestled with personally for over a decade. Since August, I have also been consulting and editing professionally as I head-up the Climate Visuals programme (part of the non-profit Climate Outreach) that researches, advises and curates climate photography. Working with news editors and journalists on a topic that is under-reported at best has helped me better understand why climate solutions imagery is so stubbornly absent from the news stream.

The dominance of negative and even distressing content, which makes for popular and powerful news, can leave audiences with a sense of hopelessness. The stubborn dominance of clickbait and disaster coverage of climate is not a new observation. However, social science has long purported that promoting actionable solutions, particularly coupling them with these emotionally arresting stories of negative impact, helps promote a more effective and lasting positive reaction in readers.

Earlier this year, we hosted a Hackathon in conjunction with Exeter University convening a dozen academics specialising in climate change imagery, as well as industry professionals from both Getty Images and the World Press Photo Foundation. All are leading experts committed to refreshing and collating further evidence into what makes editorial climate photography not just illustrative but also impactful to viewers.

One of the key takeaways:  News and social media using high quality, relevant photography increases viewer engagement, saliency and likely its onwards sharing. However, save for the dwindling clutch of premium news titles, the ability to commission quality, new photography is made unaffordable against established and continuing cuts in publishing ad spend and funding. Lens-based reportage unequivocally requires the camera to travel to its story and has suffered disproportionately. The start of this unconcluded race to the bottom of image pricing was the debut of free online news.

Confusingly, over the same period, photography has enjoyed rising cultural importance, becoming a ubiquitous medium and universal communication tool throughout society globally. Every graphical magazine, any branded news layout and every social media author requires and will include the strongest imagery they can afford or source – but not always legitimately. Recent analysis of news illustration suggests that the most popular and effective type of illustration for climate narratives is still traditional, authentic editorial photography.

Photography as a documentary medium cannot easily travel beyond the present as literature, interviews, opinion pieces or statistics on climate change delve into predictions. In order to talk in the future tense, photographers or editors must lean on illustrative or conceptual photography, without the gravity or authenticity to convince viewers. Worse still, news teams are often forced to illustrate climate solutions with the climate causes or impacts that  the solutions are designed to counter. This clash of tone between image and their headline is proven to undermine an article.

When turning a camera backwards on science, wielding the latest digital camera technology is ironically problematic. If a company is innovative and genuine, the positive benefit of granting access to a journalist is undeniable, but a camera’s high resolution mechanical eye risks espionage. If Musk, Bezos or those based in Cupertino were designing a solution to climate change, the first visual results would inevitably be released at a highly choreographed and scripted, share price-boosting stage show. These visuals are the bland, carefully choreographed and airbrushed lifestyle scenes designed to sell us a finished technology ‘solution’ once it is available on the market. Commercial imagery can reek of constructed values and veiled attempts at authenticity that feel contrived. Without real integrity, these images rarely ascend into the journalistic domain, nor buy our long term behavioural trust. The more interesting and believable stories on the details, endeavours and failures of climate solutions and those working to develop them remain hidden in research basements or patent applications. 

Many accepted and actionable climate solutions rely on personal or societal behaviour change, much of which is reductionist or physically subtle. Photography uniquely documents only a tiny chronological slice of shutter speed selected reality, and so struggles to convey any concept expressed as a change in frequency as opposed to static volume or scale. Part explaining why cyclists have long represented sustainable behaviour, dense gridlocked traffic indicates pollution and all environmentalists eat greens when interviewed over lunch. More natural or forest solution efforts, if implemented correctly, return habitat to its original, arguably undramatic, state.  Photographers and clients alike are seduced by images of tree planting as remedy, the well worn, critical moment when a sapling is placed back into the earth with human hands.

In considering how to push past such clichéd traps, photographers need to remain patient, research more deeply and work in a manner closer to that of the written journalists they are drafted to support. As both transport and time are costly units we have all the more reason to empower local storytellers, ingrained with the values and sensitivities of their subject matter. Yet there are systemic failures of the photography industry to use local, ethnic or gender-balanced voices in reporting real global solutions. The issue is often one of connectivity and trust in the broadest sense. Localised professional news photographers in emerging economies, where many climate solutions are also emerging most organically, are often focussed on local or political reporting. We cannot assume they are free or even be able to work safely near state-controlled news agencies. The battle lines of the free press often track closely to the boundaries of the climate justice nexus.

Citizen reporting and user-generated photography has also grown globally with the proliferation of smartphones. The billions of images and climate stories that are captured, and no doubt proliferate locally on closed peer-to-peer apps, rarely make it into international publications unless they are truly exceptional. The barriers to distribution and verification are complex, and even if a story idea could be framed or connected internationally, the presentation style and resolution of smartphones rarely match the expectations required by professional news agencies. Only the most viral, and therefore most valuable content, is ever verified, with none of that value or story drivers trickling back to the original source in the field.

It is tempting, in conclusion, to suggest the need for a radical overhaul, a new way of working or a magic bullet funding model to reinvigorate or democratize  photojournalism at large. However, this would be an unrealistic goal given the rapid, unpredictable evolution of news media reporting, and how utterly fragmented, digitized and unmappable the future content creator and agency network is. However, raising resources for targeted geographic and systemic interventions –  for the current state of play – is a unique and urgent cause for optimism. Seizing a chance to build photographic capacity where it is most needed; with climate solutions in frame. These new unseen images and stories, could intrinsically possess a value, quality and uniqueness that cuts through and exploits the broken, unrepresentative visual index, and sees them easily proliferate as intelligent, fresh and inspirational metaphors. Only then can we trace the eloquent and clear theory of change shared by the solutions journalism network, offering empowerment and creating more discerning actors capable of shaping a better society.

By Toby Smith. This story originally appeared in Climate Visuals and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Pope Francis made an impassioned plea for protection of the environment on Wednesday’s 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, saying the coronavirus pandemic had shown that some challenges had to be met with a global response.

Francis praised the environmental movement, saying it was necessary for young people to “take to the streets to teach us what is obvious, that is, that there will be no future for us if we destroy the environment that sustains us”.

The pope, who wrote a major encyclical in 2015 on the defence of nature and the dangers of climate change, dedicated his general audience – broadcast from his library because of the coronavirus lockdown – to the theme.

Recounting a Spanish proverb that God always forgives, man sometimes forgives but nature never forgives, Francis said: “If we have deteriorated the Earth, the response will be very ugly.”

A landmark in the emergence of the environmental movement when it first took place in 1970, this year’s Earth Day has prompted calls from many, including U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, for governments to pursue “green recovery” in response to coronavirus

Both the pope and Guterres have made environmental protection and climate change signature themes of their offices.

“We see these natural tragedies, which are the Earth’s response to our maltreatment,” Francis said. “I think that if I ask the Lord now what he thinks about this, I don’t think he would say it is a very good thing. It is we who have ruined the work of God.”

Saying the Earth was not an endless deposit of resources to exploit, he said: “We have sinned against the Earth, against our neighbour and, in the end, against the creator.”

Last year, after a synod of bishops from the Amazon region, Francis said he was considering adding a definition of “ecological sins” in the Roman Catholic Church’s Catechism, a compendium of teachings and rules.

Francis, like Guterres, has likened the response to environmental dangers to that of the coronavirus.

“Only together, and looking after the most fragile (members of society) can we win global challenges,” the pope said.

So far, massive economic stimulus packages launched by the United States, China and European governments have focused mainly on staunching the damage to existing industries and staving off the threat of a global depression.

But ministers from Germany, France and other EU members have signalled their support for subsequent interventions to align with climate goals, a theme taken up by climate campaign groups around the world.

What if Pascal was right when he said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” If I am honest with myself, I can see that I live mostly in perpetual busyness and distraction. I don’t often pause for long enough to notice what needs improvement in my life. Course correction requires a real pause. We can not change the wheels to the car while still driving it.

Ask yourself, what is your threshold for being alone with yourself? Being witness to the inevitable fear that emerges beyond the boredom. Can we pause long enough to face our problems, those things that we can see so clearly magnified in the conditions of the world?

Many of us say we want to get back to business as usual, but let’s pause for a moment and investigate “business as usual.” A perpetual growth economy that continues to degenerate the life and biodiversity of our planet, “feeding the world” by destroying our soils, powering our grids while exacerbating global warming, expanding digital communications only to expose ourselves to increasing levels of electromagnetic radiation, prescribing a drug for almost everything while very few are genuinely well.  

Business, as usual, has led to the world’s richest 1% having more than twice as much wealth as 6.9 billion people combined while 9 million people die annually of starvation.

As far as I can tell, business as usual will take us into the 6th mass extinction. And although many of us are all racing to solve the world’s problems, something in our approach is off. 

In this time of mandatory quarantine, perhaps we are being given a gift of pause and retrospection that may have only otherwise come to us on our deathbeds. We are all being invited to look at ourselves and ask, is this the way of life I want to pass on to my children? Is this the life that fulfills my heart? 

Is there a possibility of a new normal? 

We have culturally created time to pause (weekends & holidays). Time to be still, connect with ourselves, our loved ones, and give thanks for the bounty of the Earth. Time we can utilize to re-align ourselves to our higher purpose and make course corrections to our lives and see where we may have been missing the mark. Unfortunately, these pauses haven’t been enough for us to change the trajectory we are on.

When we ignore the whispers, the communications get louder until they become a scream. STOP! Is this what we are being told directly and indirectly? 

The reality is that we have become disconnected from ourselves and our ecology. We are part of Nature, and Nature is always self-healing, balancing, and regenerating. Can we see this virus as part of Nature asking us to slow down, and to live with more reciprocity, care, and reverence for our mother earth who gives us everything? 

There is a misconception that our relationship with Nature is inherently destructive.

This is a myth that has been perpetuated for so long that it’s difficult to shift our view. Yet many indigenous cultures have known and lived in a relationship of reciprocity with the living Earth. Seeing themselves as an intricate part of the ecology, living in balance between giving and receiving.

“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the Earth, the Earth heals us.” – Robin Kimmerer (Professor of Biology and Indigenous Wisdom Keeper)

Having a symbiotic relationship with the Earth begins with that understanding of connectedness. Not just between people, or more broadly between living organisms, but with the Earth that sustains us all. It’s about going to the literal root of all life — the Earth — and starting there. That holistic approach is best embodied in Regenerative Agriculture. In the simplest of terms, Regenerative Agriculture refers to a method of agriculture that heals and regenerates our land while helping to reverse global warming. The practice sequesters carbon out of the atmosphere and safely stores it in the soil through plants — part of Nature’s naturally balancing technology. 

The current systems that produce our food break our soil systems through the saturation of harmful chemicals and a government system that subsidizes farmers to deliver grain to feed animals that we then slaughter to produce meat. This system is unsustainable, and we’re now at the breaking point. In the past 40 years, we have destroyed ⅓ of the world’s agricultural land, pushing our global civilization towards a desertified planet.   

For us to survive, this system needs to be dismantled and reversed. Regenerative agriculture is the road map, and everyone who subscribes can participate in global restoration. 

Consider the possibility of humans making it their business to regenerate the living systems of the Earth. Time magazine put a price on what it would take to halt climate change through land management and regenerating our soil. Only 300 billion Dollars. This is just 50% of the annual US military budget. 

Some business leaders have already taken on supporting regeneration. Ivon Chenard, Founder of Patagonia, declared at Expo West in 2019 that “if your business is not helping to regenerate the earth, start a new business.” They even changed their mission statement to reflect this commitment. “Patagonia is in business to save our home planet.” One of America’s largest food companies, General Mills, just committed to putting one million acres under regenerative management. My organization, Kiss The Ground, is helping to facilitate the farmers in being trained. 

Destructive acts of Nature tend to be localized — fires in Australia, hurricanes in the Gulf, a tsunami in Indonesia. This localization allows us to carry on with our lives and not see the connectedness in all beings, and in Nature. And that’s what has been so unique about the pandemic – we see the connectedness of the world. And while the pandemic has taken an incredible toll on human life, global warming promises to extract an even more significant toll.  

So the question ultimately becomes: can we act? Can we embrace this great pause and be still enough to listen to our inner voice, the one that will be speaking to us on our last days of life, in regret or gratitude for the choices we made now? Can we begin to see a relationship of reciprocity with mother earth is our only pathway to survival? Human life depends on it.