First of all there is a rule and all sensible people follow it:  don’t work with your spouse.  We are not very sensible.

I am Ed Morris, and I used to be a partner in a private investigative firm.  No, I did not carry a gun.  In fact, for the past two years I worked hard on litigation aimed at stemming the flow of illegal guns into our cities.  My client was Mayor Bloomberg's office here in New York.  I have worked on other investigations such as the impeachment hearings of former Connecticut Governor John Rowland, anti-trust lawsuits and an arson and cover up involving millions of dollars of false inventory. Now I produce artworks about climate change with my wife.  Strange how life is.

I am Susannah Sayler and I am a photographer.  Prior to starting The Canary Project I was increasingly drawn to landscape in my work.  I am interested in the ways that we invest natural scenes with human emotions and the ways that a picture can be framed to wrest particular emotions out of us-- including emotions not normally associated with natural scenes.  I am also interested in the way that a landscape can seem like a memory even if one hasn't been there.

We believe climate change is the great story and challenge of our time.  The problem is one of grappling with Fate.  Do we control our future or not?  A resounding chorus of experts is telling us we had better believe it!  And yet we find it difficult to act.  Why?  How do we counter this? 

We started with the only thing we knew how to do: collaborate on a photography project.   We had been doing it for years, mostly in clubs and other venues in New York City, with DJ Spooky and people like that.  But this issue was much bigger.  How do we reach many people, many different kinds of people?
       
Susannah has been taking photos from locations all over the world that are being impacted by climate change (she recently got back from Antarctica and Peru; see our photo albums).  She is also photographing places where we can see efforts to adapt to and/or mitigate against climate change.  The world is changing.  We are watching  it.  These landscapes are like a blank stare back at us.

                          
 
Photos are great because they are at home in so many places: in a museum, in a magazine, on the side of a bus, and now in sharable galleries on Flickr or Facebook, etc., etc.  And this is what we wanted: speak to many different kinds of people with a different sort of information about climate change.  Give the whole nebulous issue a concrete reality – a reality that only images, not numbers, can give.   

But photos alone don’t suffice.  We wanted to come up with other ways of engaging people and that is why we started working with other artists, writers, and of course scientists  (because all of this must be grounded in facts! Facts! That is a really important tenet of what we are about.)
 
These collaborations have led to the larger effort The Canary Project is now.  We have worked with artists like Jon Santos on videos and installtions. We worked with the artist Annie Murdock and fashion designer Jussara Lee on dresses made from used white dress shirts; Orlanddo Palacios, Joshua Kit Clayton, Eve Mosher, Fritz Haeg, Michael Beirut, Dmitri Seigel, Curtis Hamilton, Amanda Burr, Rey Kim.  And many others. Now we want to work with you, whether you think of yourself as an artist or not.

The challenge isn’t just moving from a crippling, mass-media induced and generalized anxiety to a real, specific fear (though that is part of the process) – it is acting to address that fear – turning fear into positive, forward-looking action.  Hey, that is how our species got this far in the first place.  So we (with your help!) are working on projects that take on that challenge too.

For example, this summer we will:

•    Shoot amazing, innovative renewable energy projects in Spain, as well as talk to artists and designers working on sustainability issues in Barcelona.

•    Launch Green Patriot Posters, an effort to create positive, strong images that urge sustainability action in the same way thatWW II imagery like the famous “We Can Do It” poster urged conversation and team spirit so many years ago.  This project starts in Cleveland with artwork designed for busses.  America the Beautiful! 

•    Hook up with fellow EarthKeepers the Big Green Bus in San Francisco.

•    Continue to urge people to increase the reflectivity of the earth by wearing white, with the Increase Your Albedo! project.  (This included an installation of 550 white shirts hanging outside in a cloud formation.  An effort to bring attention to carbon stabilization target of 550 parts per million.  See fellow EarthKeeper Agent 350’s similar project pushing for a more ambitious and safer carbon stabilization target).

•    Listen to your ideas about what we should do, and see how you think we can reach people with effective images about climate change.  Submit your own content (photos, etc. dealing with climate change).

•    Try to stay happily married despite working together EVERY DAY!

So follow our story, help us out, add your voice and make sure our marriage stays in tact!