2. 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.”
1
About Jim
3. 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.
2 3
Arctic Polar Bear
4. 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.
4 5
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
5. 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.
6 7
Milky Way Desert
6. 8 9
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
7. 10 11
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
8. 12 13
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
9. 14 15
House on the North Coast
Fundamentally 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.
10. 16 17
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
