Collaborators in the Chronicling of Destruction and Hope Between the Lines


For the latest installment of Between the Lines, an author


Q & A, SEJournal book editor Tom Henry interviewed award-win- ning children’s nature book author Lynne Cherry, best known for “The Great Kapok Tree,” which sold more than a million copies and became a staple in elementary schools. Cherry speaks about her career, as well as her longstanding collaboration with the late Gary Braasch, a renowned photojournalist and past SEJ member who passed away March 7 while snorkeling and photographing coral bleaching on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Cherry de- scribed Braasch, a charter member of the International League of Conservation Photographers and a founder of the North American Nature Photography Association, as a great “chronicler of the world’s beauty and its destruction” who “wanted desperately to move the world’s leaders to take climate change seriously.” Ex- cerpts of the email interview follow.


SEJournal: What inspires you about children and about writ- ing in general? How do you see your role as an environmental com- municator? Lynne Cherry: I love the honesty, innocence and sensitivity of children. I can remember my own deep attachment to my own childhood woods, which I saw bulldozed before my eyes. Loss and emotional pain can motivate us to try and change things. Also, I re- member how books I read as a child were a gift of enlightenment and “time travel,” influencing my worldview. I’ve heard from thou- sands of children about how my books and films have made them look at the world differently, with more empathy for other living beings and the realization that they can change the world. I love writing for its own sake but I also know that our books, films and


I teach children love of nature and how to protect our world.


photographs are making a difference. I teach children love of nature and how to protect our world. I teach educators and scientists the psychology of climate communication emphasizing how solutions and action are essential. SEJournal: The world has embraced visual communication a great deal because of advances in digital journalism, video, still pho- tography and multimedia. How has this carried over to you as a chil- dren’s book author specializing in environmental communications? Cherry: In 2009, Gary Braasch and I concluded that in order


to reach a large segment of the public we needed to engage millions of young people; and, to reach them, we had to employ electronic media. As a children’s book author, I understood the power of sto- ries. And from Gary’s long-time partner, Joan Rothlein, I know that he was motivated in his love for the Earth by his love for his son, Cedar, and wanted to protect the world for him and all children. So we created the “Young Voices for the Planet” films to showcase true stories of youth speaking out, taking action on climate change and reducing CO2, thereby empowering and inspiring other young


people. Grown men weep when they hear 11-year-old Felix Finkbeiner in “Plant for the Planet” say, “If the adults won’t do something, we have to do it because we will live on Earth for an- other 80 years and our children even longer.” On March 5 [two days before Braasch’s death], I spoke to Gary


in Australia to tell him the good news: Our “Young Voices for the Planet” films [that] were being distributed by American Public Tel- evision and 56 public broadcasting stations would be airing our two half-hour shows (“Kids Lead the Way” and “Cool Kids vs. Warm Planet”) and the 10 short interstitials. This had been our dream. The films would be viewed by nearly 12 million people. A team of edu- cators was creating curriculum for all the films for PBS Learning Media to teach about self-efficacy, civic engagement, democracy and how youth, even though they can’t vote, can have a voice in local government. This curriculum could reach one-third of U.S. schools. SEJournal: Backtracking a bit, how did you first meet Gary? Cherry: Twenty-two years ago, biologist Nalini Nadkarni brought me into the ethereal, holy and transcendent ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest. Cutting down these ancient giants was sacrilege and I was writing a children’s book to protect them. I needed reference photos. Then I saw “Secrets of the Old Growth” by Gary, with photographs that captured these forests in a deeply emotional way — green darkness broken by God-like rays of light in vaulting natural cathedrals. Serendipitously, the next week I met Gary at a conference. I was struck by this pure soul, so grounded in his commitment to a higher good that he would not accept as- signments from any entities causing harm to our planet. We bonded over our mutual despair at the juggernaut that was destroying so many places sacred and beautiful and our determination to change that. Educating children, he agreed, might help save the forests. Gary’s help with my research for my illustrations for “The Dragon and the Unicorn” was the beginning of a deep friendship and an extraordinary multi-decade professional collaboration. Our interests and our work, like a braided stream, moved apart and met in confluence, over and over again throughout our lives. SEJournal: What made him a special photographer? Cherry: He wished to affect people emotionally with his im- ages, to inspire everyone to take action. His images were evoca- tive and arresting and were featured in magazines such as Audubon, National Geographic, The New York Times and Life. Gary was indomitable — capable, fearless, tough, sensitive, funny, humble, good-natured and with a great thirst for adventure. He also had extreme patience: Waiting for the moon to rise, fog to lift, snow to melt, seasons to change, tides to rise or reindeer to begin their long migration — and hiding inside a bush as they thundered by for an hour. One day he could be photographing tiny krill at the bottom of the food chain and the next day going up in a small plane to photograph an entire ecosystem being decimated by fracked gas wells.


Gary believed that if people could see evidence of climate change they would be motivated to do something about it. Some of his most famous photos were of receding glaciers. He found old photographs from the 1800s and 1900s and photographed what they


12 SEJournal Summer 2016


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