"What's it take for a celebrity to make a successful book?" Stephen Colbert asked Maurice Sendak during his two-part interview this week with the author of Where the Wild Things Are and other beloved children's books. "What do I have to do?"

"Well, you've started already by being an idiot," Sendak responded.

Sendak's advice for aspiring writers was hilarious, and spot on, during his appearance on The Colbert Report, and it was for me as well during an afternoon that I spent at his house nearly 20 years ago. I was shooting photographs of the children's author for a collection of portraits of Connecticut writers I was making for Northeast magazine. I didn't get to draw or sniff markers with him like Colbert did (make sure and watch to the end of the second part of the interview), but he definitely inspired my creativity. As during his appearance on The Colbert Report, Sendak was both brusque and warm, charming and bombastic. He worked hard to seem curmudgeonly, and that made him incredibly fun to photograph. As I was leaving, he put a leash on his dog and headed out for a walk before dark. Somewhere, I have one last photograph I made of him, standing with his dog in the woods with a crimson sunset behind him. That photograph didn't fit with the project, so the clip I dug out today has another of the portraits I made. But the photograph that remains in my mind's eye is the one of him with his dog in the woods filled with alpenglow. Someday I'll have to dig that one out too.

"You don't have to rely on a healthy body image or self respect anymore. Now that's the power of Fotoshop."

So states filmmaker Jesse Rosten's terrific parody of digital beauty, and the computer programming on which it relies. It's a fabulous sendup of a topic that's been scrutinized for years - the mythology of feminine beauty that's promoted on magazine covers and in television advertisements.

"Why eat healthy and exercise when you can just look like you do?"

Naomi Wolf's groundbreaking book, The Beauty Myth, which looked past the advertisements and movie posters to reveal how women are manipulated by unattainable ideals of feminine beauty, is now 20 years old - her updated version of the book turns 10 this year.

Photoshop was only a year old when Wolf first published The Beauty Myth. Few photographers used the program, and it hadn't developed its most powerful tools to manipulate images. In the years since, however, it has become the standard imaging program used by virtually every photographer, designer and publisher in the world. It can liquify body parts to change their shape or size, clear up skin, and change the color of individual strands of hair. What's more, manipulating images in Photoshop is far cheaper than investing in the photojournalism that filled most magazine covers 20 years ago, so on today's newstand readers are confronted by a crowd of pretty faces and perfect bodies that spent more time on computer screens than they did in front of the camera. The images of beauty for both men and women presented by the media today are far less grounded in reality – and in greater need of mythbusting – than when Wolf wrote her groundbreaking book.

Rosten's satire kicks off what promises to be big year for coverage, and uncoverage, of the female body. Wolf has a new book coming out in May – Vagina: A Cultural History. My friend, science writer Florence Williams, also has book arriving in May that's certain to, um, pique a lot of interest – Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.

But, while I find Rosten's video hillarious and accurate, I've also been troubled by the way Photoshop has become a verb meaning to manipulate images with the intent of misleading viewers. Almost every published photograph is processed through Photoshop and the vast majority of them are honest depictions of the scenes and people the photographer was recording. Subjects shown in an unfavorable light in photographs routinely claim that the images were "Photoshopped," and that's probably true - the image was almost certainly processed through the standard imaging program. But that doesn't mean it was manipulated with the intent of bamboozling its viewers. Certainly the advent of digital photography has made it more common for images presented as honest records of what was before the lens turning out to be fabrications created in computers. But, while the digital age's tools to manipulate images are far more powerful than the ones used before pixels replaced grains of silver, photographs have been altered to mislead since the invention of the Daguerreotype. So perhaps, rather than saying dishonest images are "Photoshopped," we should just call them what they are - visual lies.

For those interested in the manipulation of women's images, I find this short video by JAGORI powerful and to the point. You can make dishonest images with Photoshop's fancy electronic tools, or you can just pick up a pencil and an eraser.

Alicia Christopoulos dives from a sailboat into the Aegean Sea.

In any new endeavor, there is a point of no-turning-back. It's the moment when we commit to trying to fly, or we fall. Regardless of the outcome, at that second, we no longer have the option of keeping our feet on the familiar ground where moments before we stood, stable and secure. For me, that moment of commitment - in my career, in my sports, in my relationships - has always been the most difficult. In the past three years I've left the job I held for 21 years, moved out of the community I was in for 25, sold my home of 12 years, and started a new stage of my work as a writer and photographer - one in which I have all the freedom and fear of being my own boss. I struggled to commit to each of those changes, and continue to find running my own show a daily challenge of uncertainty and hesitation.

January 1st, with it's resolutions, year-end-lists, and personal, professional and government deadlines, leads most of us to challenge our resistance to commitment. For a few days we dedicate ourselves to new diets, financial plans, adventures, and relationships. But, while I have plenty of big goals and dreams that I need to throw myself at, last weekend I found myself thinking of the dozens of small moments each day when I fail to commit to everything from workouts, to typing words onto my laptop screen. And I remembered a photo I have of Alicia Christopoulos.

For a week during the summer of 2010, Carolyn and I sailed through Greece's Aegean Sea with several friends, Alicia and her husband, Thanos, the captain of our sailboat. Every morning I watched Alicia, who is originally from Poland, leave the boat, sometimes with a dive, sometimes just stepping out onto a dock. She would return with a fish - I remember one particularly delicious barracuda - and the rest of the makings for our lunch. Alicia's meals were so consistently delicious and her management of the vessel so fluid and natural, I assumed that she had grown up sailing. But over drinks with the couple, I learned that she had neither sailed nor cooked before answering a help-wanted ad that Thanos placed looking for a cook on his sailboat just a few years ago. Today's she's married to the captain.

After our lunches all the boat's passengers would take a dip in the sea that was luxuriously warm and as blue as any we had ever seen. Alicia would start our swims with a dive that was as delicious as her cooking. Most of us would wait to get into the water ourselves until we had watched her graceful entrance, and eventually I made a series of photographers of her dive.

As is often the case with writing and photography, the editing was a challenge. I narrowed the sequence down to two favorite but very different frames. One showed Alicia in a perfect airborn arc - full of grace and expectation of the splash and submersion in the luscious water. But I found I kept coming back to a frame taken a split second earlier. That picture showed Alicia with her arms outstretched like a bird, her legs coiled like thunderbolts, but her toes still on the boat's railing. That photo doesn't show expectation of hitting the water, but of flying through the air. It's the moment of commitment to the change inherent in the dive - of embracing the airborn second of transition between standing dry on something solid and familiar, and being wet and in over her head in an alien and dangerous place.

For the first few days of the trip, after watching Alicia dive in, the rest of us would test the water with our toes and slowly lower ourselves into the sea. But you can't make a splash like that. By the end of the trip, most of us were making our own, far less elegant leaps into the sea. And I remember the water always feeling better when I was completely airborn the second before I was in it.

This year I hope we can all find the courage to dive into our lives and embrace those heart-in-our-throats seconds when we're airborn, about to splash into the adventures of our future.

 

Greece--05-13-2010--Fresh-caught barracuda and potatoes by Alicia Christopoulos.

 

Greece--05-13-2010--Feta, sun-dried tomatoes, and capers crostini.

One year ago, on the first day of Hanukkah, a teenager smoking a hookah tossed the charcoal from the pipe into an illegal garbage dump outside Isfiya, Israel. Later that morning the adjacent forests of Mount Carmel, Israel's largest national park, exploded with the worst wildfire in the nation's history. By 4 p.m. that afternoon, the blaze had killed or mortally wounded three of the nation's top police officials - including the highest ranking woman ever in the Israeli police - along with two firemen, 37 prison-office cadets, their driver, and a 16-year-old fire scout. The fire destroyed nearly a third of the houses in Kibbutz Beit Oren, forced the evacuation of 17.000 people, and burned 10,500 acres, destroying five million trees. Firefighters and pilots from nineteen nations came to Israel to assist putting out the blaze.

This month, family members of the victims of the Mount Carmel fire, residents of the burned communities, firefighters, police officers, prison officials, foresters, scientists and government leaders have marked the anniversary of the fire that darkened Israel's "Festival of Light."

It used to be so easy. You just threw a couple of cameras and lenses, a bag of film, and few notebooks into a bag and got on a plane. But the digital age's myriad of new storytelling methods, and the increasing requirement of journalists to work and collaborate in a variety of media, means that traveling "backpack" journalists often have little space in their bags for anything other than electronics. Here's a photo of the gear Carolyn and I packed for a two-week reporting trip to Mt. Carmel, Israel. Fortunately, we learned long ago to carry a minimum of clothes so we could fit the gear we bring on overseas assignments. As the demands of our book/photo/video projects increase, we'll soon be traveling with just the clothes on our backs and our bathing suits.

Tel Aviv, Israel.

 

In a single day last week I saw the stacks of the San Juan Generating Station and the Four Corners Power Plant belching steam and coal smoke into the atmosphere above New Mexico, and then met a Navajo family who live below a power line fed below those plants, but have no access to it.

The Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources' Energy Country Institute flew with EcoFlight over the coal-fired power plants (San Juan Generating Station is operated by PNM, New Mexico's largest energy provider and the Four Corners plaant is operated by the Arizona Public Service Company) near Farmington, New Mexico. Later that day we met with energy company representatives and environmentalists, and then sought out the Johnson family in the backcountry of New Mexico.

To be fair, Monica Johnson and her husband, Nathan, chose to build their house out in the countryside, far from town and distant from the grid, and they say they wouldn't dream of living anywhere else. They relish their life amid the red, sandstone mesas of the New Mexico highlands, and the connection with nature it provides. That's common in Navajo culture. Since building their house, Monica, Nathan, and their daughters, Maria, 9, and Erika, 6, have visited family to shower and carried water from relatives back to their house, as they didn't have electricity to pump from a well. But recently their situation has improved. The solar panel and single wind turbine they purchased earlier this year now allow them, for the first time, to have a refrigerator and a television. It often takes them more than one sitting to get through a movie, as they often run out of juice before the film ends, but they don't have to worry about their food spoiling anymore. 

In a few months, the Johnsons hope to be connected to the grid, which, for now, passes high above their house in a high-voltage line. But, until then, having just a bit of electricity keeps them a little better fed and bit more tightly connected to the rest of the world.

The side of our bus is painted with a command to "Follow the Sun," and we tried to heed its instructions. Really, we did. But at midnight, when a dozen of us were pushing the bus through a blizzard up highway 550 in northern New Mexico, it didn't seem like we'd done very well sticking to the plan. As we attempted to "man haul," (and woman haul) our 55-seat bus up the snow slicked highway, I thought of the coming 100-year-anniversary of Robert Falcon Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole, Raold Amunsdsen's successful round trip to the pole, and of the tourists who are making their own trips to the bottom of the planet to commemorate the centennial. Despite repeated trips off the bus to chain up, push the vehicle, or throw snowballs, none of the travelers on our expedition ever feared losing their lives during our ordeal, just a few hours of sleep.

 The Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources has brought together 14 journalists for its Energy Country Institute led by Frank and Maggie Allen. We're traveling through southern Colorado and northern New Mexico in a bus driven by Dick Sandlin, who's vast knowledge of the turf helps fill in the knowledge gaps of the energy wonks and regional journalists who make up our crew. When he's not busing tour groups through the fickle weather of the southern Rocky Mountains, he leads tours of Spaceport America, but despite his interest in the stars, most of the fellows have come to see as our own polar explorer - something of an Ernest Shackleton of the Greyhound class.

Fellows in the Energy Country Institute are spending eight days visiting sites in New Mexico and southern Colorado to learn how the region will keep the lights on in the coming century. On Sunday we drove from Santa Fe to Colorado's San Luis Valley, a magical and fragile plain sandwiched between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan mountains. The valley is one of Colorado's most important and tradition-bound agricultural areas, but a diminishing and over-allocated water supply, and an abundant solar resource, are bringing change

 

The following morning we rejoined them along with representatives from Sun Power, a company that recently brought a 17-megawatt plant online, and Iberdrola, the Spanish solar power company that this week will begin testing a 30-megawatt solar facility it just completed installing in the valley. We heard from representatives from the solar-power companies, officials involved in the plan to conserve the valley's water by taking 40,000 acres of agricultural land out of production, the Chairman of the Alamosa County Commissioners, and representatives of environmental organizations concerned with both the water and energy issues affecting the valley. While virtually everyone we've met is excited by the development of solar power in the valley, in an environment where water and energy are tightly linked, utility scale solar projects are also causes for concern. Some types of solar projects, particularly those that involve turning a steam turbine, use a lot of water.

From the San Luis Valley, we planned to head to the Southern Ute Reservation via Wolf Creek Pass, but by the time we left Alamosa, an early-season snowstorm had made that route unsafe. Plan B was to take Route 17 over Cumbres Pass, but the bus lost traction in the heavy snow on the pass, even after stopping to put chains on, leaving us stranded. Two Colorado Department of Transportation snowplows cleared the road so we could turn around, then escorted us back down the pass. We finally took a route back into New Mexico and up Route 550, but even in the foothills of the Four Corners, the bus got mired in the snow, so the fellows piled out of the bus to push it though the steepest section. For at least one of the fellows, freelance writer Lindsey Hoshaw, the announcement of the detours were a shock - she was hoping to get to a hotel room desk to continue working on a story for the Boston Globe. 

She's adapted well to writing on the bus. And, although a trip that was planned at 2 1/2 hours ended up taking more than 12, at least nobody had to eat any dogs on our way to the Southern Ute Reservation in Ignacio.

Walking dead on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, CO on Halloween, 2011

So what's brought all these walking dead to Colorado?

Last night in Durango, CO, zombies behaved like, well, zombies. The unsanctioned walk of the dead (good zombies always apply for the proper permits) drew 1,500 undead who got into an altercation with police. No officials' brains were eaten, but they were pelted with rocks and bottles. Denver's 6th Annual Zombie Crawl last week drew a world-record crowd, attracting between 14,000 and 16,000 brain-hungry participants.

Perhaps, like Denver's bike-sharing program, which last year's Republican gubenatorial candidate Dan Maes criticized as an effort to make Colorado's capitol city into a "United Nation's community," the increase in undead in Colorado is a U.N. plot - specifically a result of someone at the United Nations Population Fund's head for marketing. The organization estimates that October 31st - Halloween - was the day when the global population reached seven billion. There's no way they can know for sure what day the world will first hold seven billion living people - the hundreds of thousands of births and deaths each day present far too much variability to precisely calculate the world's population to the day, so the selection of Halloween by the UN was as much a symbol as anything. Other organizations, including the U.S. Census Bureau predict world population will reach the seven billion mark in about four months, around the time of another appropriate holiday for the milestone - April Fools Day. But by picking Halloween as the day that we reached the 7Bn number, the U.N. is making statement, intentional or not, that the growing horde is something to fear.

The report shows the world was first inhabited by one billion humans in 1804. From that date, it took 123 years to reach two billion. By contrast, global population hit six billion in 1999, just 12 years ago, and passed the five billion mark 12 years before that, in 1987. According to the Population Reference Bureau, in 2010 there were, on average, 384,146 births every day, and 155,885 deaths daily, leading to the addition of about 159 people to planet Earth every minute. Models predict another two billion people living on the planet by 2050.

The rapidly increasing population brings a lot of worries, if not outright terrors. Paul Ehrlich, author of  the 1968 bestseller "The Population Bomb," President of the Center for Conservation Biology and Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University, was one of seven luminaries who commented on the challenges presented by the 7Bn in an article by James Eng at MSNBC.

"Seven billion is already facing us with horrendous problems, including almost 1 billion people hungry and contributing greatly to the chances of catastrophic climate disruption.  But the next 2 billion people the demographers expect by 2050 will cause much more environmental damage than did the last 2 billion added to our population — a classic nonlinearity.  That is because human beings are smart, and picked the low-hanging fruit first. Thus each added individual, on average, must now be fed from more marginal land, supplied with water from more distant or more polluted sources, obtain the metals required to make the products he or she consumes from poorer ores, etc."

Perhaps that explains some our current obsession with zombies, which have supplanted vampires as the trendiest Halloween costumes and television horror shows. Every imaginary monster plays on a real-world fear. The Alien in James Cameron's movies with Sigourney Weaver played on our fear of cancer -  something growing, hidden inside us that would eventually kill us in a most gruesome way. Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula came at the height of the AIDS epidemic and manipulated the angst that our passions could lead to an infection in our blood that would rot not only our bodies, but our values. Godzilla was spawned by our tinkering with nukes. Most of the creatures and phantoms that inhabit our popular culture - vampires, werewolves, Godzilla, the Halloween films' Michael Myers and Friday the 13th's Jason are unique individuals or part of small minorites, often hidden from the majority they terrorize.

But zombies are different. Zombies are the majority, threatening to devour us or turn us into one of them. They are terribly obvious, making no effort to hide. You can see them coming from a mile away and with their complete lack of cunning, they are exceedingly easy to kill. But it doesn't matter. There are so many of them, you can't possible stop them all. Eventually one or a hundred of them are gnawing on you. Our terror of the undead is based in our fear of hordes. In fact, the zombie has changed to match our fears. Originally, zombies were a few cadavers brought back to life by a voodoo master to serve his evil plans. It wasn't until George Romero's night of the living dead that zombies were presented as hordes of corpses serving only their own mindless need to eat flesh or brains.

Since then "zombie" has become one of the most popular slurs of political parties, social movements, or classes of workers. You can kill Tea Party Zombies in an online game. Occupy Wall Street protesters dressed as "corporate zombies," in Zuccotti Park a few weeks before Halloween. The Occupy protesters themselves haven't been immune to necrotic namecalling. We've got conservative zombies, liberal zombies, communist, socialist, and libertarian zombies. In the coming Presidential election, virtually every Republican candidate has been marked as the walking dead, while President Obama has literally hundreds of images depicting him as a flesh eating monster. A few years ago Paul Waldman argued in the American Prospect that, while the zombie narrative might initially appeal to the libertarian streak in American politics due to its requirement of lots of firearms to defeat the throngs of flesh eating undead, in the end, it's a liberal storyline - when society breaks down, survival requires "the progressive ideals of common cause and collective action."  

The science fiction wesite io9, which is produced by the real science program NOVA, has a chart showing that the number of zombie films released - the site's definition is rather broad, including both the Frankenstein monster and the mummy - increase markedly in times of war and social upheaval.

The population boom is certain to bring social upheaval and war - with seven billion people and counting competing for food, water, energy and every other resource on the planet. That competition is made easier when we can categorize a few billion of our competitors as sub-human - the undead.

As for Colorado's zombies, the ones I encountered on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder were friendly and funny. I was happy to be out and among them, and many of the other spectacular costumes, on Halloween night.

I made the photo after jumping a few fences to get closer to the flames without realizing I had trespassed onto prison grounds. A guard came up to me screaming, knocked me down, and began dragging me out, but when he noticed me trying to photograph the exploding wildfire and the prisoner running for his life, he let go of me, pushed me towards the flames and let me do my work. The paper I worked for didn't publish in color, so we only shot on black-and-white film. I'll be forever thankful to Clyde Butcher, the Ansel Adams of the Everglades, who commented during Thursday's panel that he found the photograph more powerful in black-and-white than he would have in color. I can't claim that the lack of color was a creative decision.

Travel 2,000 miles southwest and 25 years into the future to Bastrop, Texas, where I spent much of September documenting the worst wildfires in state history. I made this photo of a man with the cellphone photo he made of the Bastrop Fire descending  onto his home.

My, how the world has changed.

Much of the world Clyde Butcher documents has changed for the better, to some degree due to his efforts.

When he started photographing Everglades National Park and Big Cyprus National Preserve in 1984, “there was virtually nothing to photograph — it was one big ditch,” he said in a trailer for a documentary that we showed during the panel. The documentary will appear sometime in the spring. Clyde now makes his home in Big Cyprus and led about 20 lucky SEJ conference attendees on one of his famous "swamp slogs" earlier in the day of the panel. Big Cyprus is clearly no longer a ditch. Clyde saw his photographer as a way to inspire preservation. When officials expressed an interest in the photographs he was selling at art fairs and asked how much he would charge few, he told them he'd give them to them for free in hopes that they might get hung in places where they would inspire people to protect the landscape he loved. As opposed to the 35 mm cameras photojournalists hang on their shoulders, or the cell phones that many citizen journalists use to make their images, Clyde takes hulking, heavy large format cameras deep into the Everglades. He's often waste deep in the glades and has been known to wait a day or two for the right light before clicking his shutter. For that kind of dedication to a single landscape, I always figured Clyde must have grown up there, but he's originally from Kansas City - my own hometown.

Connie Bransilver, the second photographer who spoke, is one of the founding members of the International League of Conservation Photographers. She's as well has shown a long devotion to preserving Florida's most beautiful and threatened landscapes, but she's also worked extensively in places like Madagascar, where she was part of a National Geographic expedition that discovered a new sub-species of lemur. Like a number of image makers, Connie's experimenting with new ways of showing her photos, but unlike those of us who are looking for the latest digital displays for our pictures, her Guardians of the Everglades project is a show of diaphanous, eight-by-four-foot silk banners printed with her photographs of endangered orchids. The wafting silks are both a futuristic multimedia experience and a step back into an ancient art form. While Clyde wades in a swamp for his work, Connie had to stand on a chair to show us one of her stunning, orchid-printed silks.

Miami Herald photojournalist Patrick Farrell's résumé includes winning the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for his coverage of the deadly 2008 hurricane season's impacts on Haiti. He was also a part of the Miami Herald team that won the Pulitzer in 1993 for coverage of Hurricane Andrew. HIs assignments have taken him to Turkey, Cuba, and through Central and South America. His work has also been honored by Pictures of the Year International and won a National Headliners Award. Most recently he covered the earthquake that devastated Haitii. Patrick's quiet, but his photos are not. The most striking of the images he showed Thursday were what I would call horribly beautiful. Children killed in the devastation of Haiti, shown with both respect and sadness. In the most wrencing of circumstances, Patrick's images showed impecable compositon and a keen eye for telling light. Patrick's photographs brought home the idea that society's vulnerability to disasters is an increasingly important environmental story. He told of covering the earthquake in Haiti, then sleeping on the lawn of a destroyed hotel after filing his photographs. After a few days, he lost even his piece of grass when others in need of space moved into the hotel grounds.

Carlton Ward, Jr., another of the founding members of the International League of Conservation Photographers, is an eighth-generation Floridian who started working in Africa, but realized that his home state was also in need of photographs that might prompt conservation. He's published a photo book of Florida cowboys, and worked extensively with camera traps to document wildlife, as with this photo of a black bear that appeared on the cover of Audubon. He's also photographed features for Smithsonian, National Wildlife, and Outdoor Photographer magazines. Carlton's focus now is on the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition, for which he and his friend Joe Guthrie, a bear biologist, will trek the length of Florida over a 100 day period starting on January 17th of next year. They'll travel by foot, boat and horse. You can follow them at the expeditions website, or better yet, join them for a leg, so long as you don't mind getting dirty.