JIM RICHARDSONPublished By Jonah Sherman-Waterman

National Geographic Photographer

Jim Richardson is a photojournalist, writer and educator devoted to environmental and resource issues. From his background as an internationally recognized social documentary photographer of rural life, Richardson has developed a wide ranging body of work covering water and food issues, the impacts of growth and devel-opment on human habitat, and complex cultural stories of our rich human heri-

tage. His work for National Geographic is marked by rigorous research and deep personal involvement. “Photography and the camera are the tools of my trade, my pictures are the way that I try to speak out on issues that might otherwise fall through the cracks of our modern world. I like to take on the unsung stories, where public attention and knowledge lag behind emerging problems, and where I can make

a real contribution. When I turn my life over to some as-yet obscure issue for a couple of year while working on a story, it’s never a sacrifice for me. It’s just how I relish encountering the world.”

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About Jim

Richardson has researched and photo-graphed a combined 40 stories for National Geographic Magazine and for National Geographic TRAVELER, where he is a contributing editor. Among his recognized areas of expertise are the British Isles and Celtic culture, as well as a range of scientific and conservation subjects such as endangered grasslands,

food productihon and threats to the earth’s soil, and global water issues. ABC News Nightline profiled his work in the field while photographing the Columbia River. And CBS News Sunday Morning has twice returned with him to Cuba, Kansas where he has been documenting small town midwestern life for nearly four decades. His audio-visual presentation

based on Cuba, Notes from a “Wide Spot in the Road,”won the international Crystal AMI Award for excellence. Richardson documented adolescence in a small-town high school in his first book, “High School USA,” published in 1979. His book on the water issues of the Colorado River, “The Colorado: A River at Risk” is a recognized standard in the coverage of water issues.

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Arctic Polar Bear

Contributing editor Jim Richardson is a photojournalist recognized for his explorations of small-town life. His photos appear frequently in National Geographic magazine. Some days I think too much and see too little. Other days, despite myself, I think I get it right. One of the

most recent examples of this balance came in a strangely calm sea of ice floes off the coast of Greenland. I was in a Zo-diac with other passenger-photographers from the National Geographic Explorer. Poking around the pack ice and alert for the odd seal basking in the frozen splen-

dor, we were in a wonderland. All around us, the ice stretched off to the horizon, a seascape relieved only by the distant pro-file of the Explorer awaiting our return. All was calm—no wind, no waves, just water and ice.

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More than 500 islands and islets make up the Inner and Outer Hebrides. Often cloaked in mist and rain and nearly always wind-scoured, they're surrounded by waters temperamental enough to test the most skilled captain, seas that can vary in a day from a silken ripple of improbably

tropical blue to a roiling assault of gun-metal and spume. For thousands of years humans have struggled to survive here. Even so, Celts and Vikings, then Scots and English, fought to rule these shores. Today only a few dozen of the Hebrides are inhabited. "The islands are a challenge,"

Robson says. "Some visitors call them bleak, but that just means they're not really paying attention."

Fingal’s Cave The Isle of Skye

Richardson followed his passion early on, abandoning his psychology major at Kansas State University to take on a photographic internship at the Topeka Capital-Journal. It proved to be a wise choicefor the next 15 years he traveled the world publishing stories for all of the major publications including Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times. He published his first story for

National Geographic in 1984, and shortly thereafter launched his freelance career. He has since published multiple books and shot over 40 stories for National Geographic, several of which caught the eye of the networks, including ABC, who sentNightline along with Richardson for a behind-the-scenes documentary called Yellow Journalism: The Making of a Na-tional Geographic Story,providing a rare

glimpse inside the intricate story develop-ment process at the magazine celebrated for bringing the world home.Through the years Richardson has emerged as one of the top social documentarians in his field. He has become an expert in numerous topics, including agriculture, rivers and aquifers, and volcanoes but his most reso-nant voice stems from his keen eye on the human experience. Two unique storylines

best reveal this gift—his Great Plains retrospective, chronicling 30 years in the life of Cuba, Kansas, including his seminal book High School USA, a three-year examination of the emotional roller coaster ride that is adolescence; and his extensive coverage of the cultures and topography of his family’s native Scotland and the surrounding Celtic realms. Most recently he published National Geograph-

ic cover stories “Our Vanishing Night: Light Pollution,” documenting the impact civilization is having on our natural world, and “Our Good Earth: Soil,” exploring the fragile shell upon which 70–80% of our food source depends. Also a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler, Richardson lectures worldwide, sharing his award-winning images and the stories behind them.

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Milky Way Desert

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Americans have always lived in a land of possibility—a place where the grass is “hopeful green stuff,” as the poet Walt Whitman put it. Our habit is to wonder what we can make of a place, to gaze at the future instead of the present. As a result, nature often lies hidden beneath our expectations. That’s why the Flint Hills of Kansas—the last great swath of tall-grass prairie in the nation—can be so hard

to grasp. The Flint Hills are no longer hard to get to, no longer a matter of ox train and overland trail from somewhere east of the Missouri River. They’re transected by roads of every description now. But when you get to the hills, when you rise onto the low shield of flint and limestone that defines them and walk up onto the highest brow and stand into the wind that’s trying to pry your ears apart, what

do you see? Open sky, open land, unend-ing horizon, the “limitless and lonesome prairie,” to quote Whitman again. But the word that also springs to mind may be “nothing.” A glorious nothing, but nothing nonetheless. That too is an American word, full of the conviction that nothing much stands between herds of bison and herds of cattle, between the millions of acres of tallgrass prairie that once

stretched across the plains and the millions of acres of corn and soybeans growing there now. Historically, we have valued the prairie grasses mainly as cattle fodder or as placeholders till the sod could be broken and crops planted, crops that are themselves just placeholders until the houses eventually come. The prairie topography is almost too subtle for us, which may be one reason the National

Park System contains only a single unit dedicated to grassland—the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Chase County, Kansas, the heart of the Flint Hills.

Wisconsin Farm

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Driving across the dusty Kansas plains, down ever narrowing roads, past dere-lict towns and forsaken farms, I feared that Cuba might have gone the way of so many other once vital places on the Great Plains, drained of people, businesses, and hope. Like others whose heartstrings are tethered to a small-town past, I wanted to believe that our rural towns and villages—

places we cloak in myths of goodness and simplicity—could somehow survive. All of us have a place we think of as "our town." Cuba, Kansas—15 miles from the farm near Belleville where I grew up—is mine. As far as I can tell, the town, found-ed in 1868 by farmers moving westward after the Civil War, was named Cuba after a visitor who'd traveled to the Caribbean

island passed through the area. He appar-ently entranced the settlers with tales of Cubans fighting the Spanish for freedom, a story that must have resonated with the early townspeople, including Czech-speak-ing immigrants from Bohemia—a region then under Austria's thumb—who came here in the 1870s.

Some of the lowlands in the Flint Hills are planted to corn and milo, and the creek bottoms are full of oaks and an occasional white-limbed sycamore. Along the gravel roads you come across old limestone fences and Osage orange trees, or bois d’arc, planted by the settlers as hedge and windbreak. But on the uplands—and the Flint Hills are mostly upland, stretching

from northern Kansas down into Oklaho-ma—the prairie still holds its own. The soils are too thin, too rock-strewn to make good farmland. Wherever you walk, you find drifts of limestone, like fallen grave markers, grass pushing through the holes that time has made in that soluble stone.

Mary Jane & Nick Wheat Harvest

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If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapt-ed to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings any more than we think of ourselves as primates or mammals or Earthlings. Yet

it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.This kind of engineering is no different than dam-ming a river. Its benefits come with con-sequences—called light pollution—whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and up-ward into the sky, where it’s not wanted,

instead of focusing it downward, where it is. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and radically alters the light levels—and light rhythms—to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life—migration, reproduction, feed-ing—is affected.

Death of Night

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House on the North CoastFundamentally travel photography has changed. It used to show us places that we were never going to see in person ourselves. We kind of assumed back in the 1950’s that very few people were going to actually get to Paris and see the Eiffel Tower. Now everyone travels and travel

photography is about being there, what’s it like to be there? Your pictures have to provide that visceral sense of what it’s like to be in the middle of a place. My eyes glaze over when I start to see yet another picture of a Tibetan monk in the saffron robes. I’ve seen enough of that. But if you

bring me a picture that makes me feel like I can plop myself down in the middle of a place and get the feeling of what it’s really like to be there, that’s a winning photo. That’s what travel photography is all about.

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Americans have always lived in a land of possibility—a place where the grass is “hopeful green stuff,” as the poet Walt Whitman put it. Our habit is to wonder what we can make of a place, to gaze at the future instead of the present. As a result, nature often lies hidden beneath our expectations. That’s why the Flint Hills of Kansas—the last great swath of tall-grass prairie in the nation—can be so hard

to grasp. The Flint Hills are no longer hard to get to, no longer a matter of ox train and overland trail from somewhere east of the Missouri River. They’re transected by roads of every description now. But when you get to the hills, when you rise onto the low shield of flint and limestone that defines them and walk up onto the highest brow and stand into the wind that’s trying to pry your ears apart, what

do you see? Open sky, open land, unending horizon, the “limitless and lonesome prairie,” to quote Whitman again. But the word that also springs to mind may be “nothing.” A glorious nothing, but nothing nonetheless.That too is an American word, full of the conviction that nothing much stands between herds of bison and herds of cattle, between the millions of acres of tallgrass praries that

once stretched across the plains and the millions of acres of corn and soybeans growing there now. Historically, we have valued the prairie grasses mainly as cattle fodder or as placeholders till the sod could be broken and crops planted, crops that are themselves just placeholders until the houses eventually come. The prairie topography is almost too subtle for us, which may be one reason the National

Park System contains only a single unit dedicated to grassland—the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Chase County, Kansas, the heart of the Flint Hills.

Patterns of the Spring Burn