Cafe Scientifique – Images from a Warming Plant
Images from a Warming Planet – an exploration of causes, impacts and solutions
Synopsis: Ash has spent 17 years documenting the causes, impacts and solutions to climate change on all 7 continents and has self-published this art photographic book depicting the best 500 images from his climate change project. The book illustrates the causes of climate change, its impacts and finishes with solutions, mainly around renewable energy.
Biography.
Born in Sheffield 1962. After gaining an Honours Degree in Geography from Aberystwyth University Ash spent three months travelling through East Africa and saw at first hand the work being undertaken by the British Leprosy Relief Association (LEPRA). In 1986 he returned to the UK and spent six months planning a fundraising expedition to raise funds for LEPRA. Over 111 days in 1986 (91 of them through snow and rain) he raised £14K by walking to and climbing all 313 Monroes (3000’) peaks in GB and Eire. In 1987 he returned to Malawi to meet leprosy sufferers being treated with this money.
In 1988 he was appointed as community fundraising manager for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in Cumbria, a job he proudly held for the next twenty years. When he first started Cumbria had one Child Protection Team based in Carlisle and thanks to the £4M raised through his efforts NSPCC Cumbria now runs an additional three Child Protection Teams.
Since 2010 Ash has pursued a full time career as a professional photographer. In 1994 he travelled to Alaska to do his first dedicated climate change photo shoot. What he saw was a complete shock and he vowed to photograph the impacts of climate change around the planet. By 2015 he had documented the impacts of climate change and renewable energy on every continent, the only living photographer to have done so. This endeavour was self-funded through image sales into newspapers and magazines and he has amassed the world’s single largest collection of climate change/ renewable energy imagery. In 2016 he crowd-funded ‘Images From a Warming Planet’, an art photographic book depicting the best 500 images from his climate change project which can be viewed at www.globalwarmingimages.net.
Jonathon Porritt wrote the foreword to the book, calling it “An extraordinary collection of images and a powerful call to action”. The book has received favourable reviews from Sir Tim Smit, Sir Chris Bonington, Mark Lynas, Mark Edwards, Emma Thompson, Bill McKibbon and others: the Pope, King Charles and Al Gore all have copies. It has featured in The Guardian, BBC North West News and ITV border News and it won the Gold Award for Media and Communication in the annual Green Apple Awards for sustainability. In 2010 Ash won the climate change category of the Environmental Photographer of the Year competition and he served as the lead judge for five years.
Over the last 33 years Ash has been a member of the Langdale/Ambleside Mountain Rescue Team, the busiest mountain rescue team in the UK, with spells as both Team Secretary and Team Chairman. His next project is to photograph all the species of British Birds, which he hopes to publish as an e-book.
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