A glaciol­o­gy in pic­tures, the book, While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey, pub­lished in 2017, is the Daniel Schwartz’s jour­ney along humanity’s sui­ci­dal path of progress, lead­ing from the relics of Holocene glacia­tion in the Swiss Alps into the milieu of the Anthropocene, to col­laps­ing glac­i­ers on three con­ti­nents. This book club also includes a dis­cus­sion of Tales from a Globalizing World, a col­lec­tive project curat­ed and pro­duced by Schwartz in 2003. It sheds light on the accel­er­at­ing phe­nom­e­non that con­nects peo­ple and places that are geo­graph­i­cal­ly remote but also frag­ments local con­nec­tions. Today, the book that includes sto­ries by Philip Jones Griffiths, Tim Hetherington, and Ziyah Gafic, among oth­ers, is a time­ly reminder of our world the fragili­ty of which has been mer­ci­less­ly exposed by the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic.

This lec­ture was orig­i­nal­ly host­ed at VII Interactive, a new resource for shar­ing insights and infor­ma­tion on the craft of visu­al sto­ry­telling. We are build­ing dif­fer­ent plat­forms with­in the VII ecosys­tem, where the pub­lic can engage direct­ly, online with a live instruc­tor. VII Interactive offers pro­gram­ming that is free and avail­able to every­one, in addi­tion to paid class­es and indi­vid­ual men­tor­ing that can be fash­ioned to your needs.