ticatfan3
March 23rd, 2007, 11:54:01 AM
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=5961259b-de08-4532-850b-09d4753bed39&k=88988
TORONTO - For Al Gore's presentation yesterday to a conference of human resources executives, his second Toronto visit in a month, the Oscar-winning envirogelical recycled just about everything from his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
From his opening line -- "I used to be the next president of the United States" -- through the Churchill quotes, the slick computer graphics and the boiling frog analogy, to his rousing finale, the presentation was a live action carbon copy of the film.
But there was one notable addition, an iconic photograph that was distributed worldwide last month by Canada's Environment Ministry, and for which the Canadian government is about to be sued by an Alaskan photographer.
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Font: ****The photo, taken in summer, shows two polar bears on a melting ice floe in the Beaufort Sea, north of Barrow, Alaska.
"Their habitat is melting... beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet," Mr. Gore said, with the photo on the screen behind him. "They're in trouble, got nowhere else to go."
Audience members let out gasps of sympathy, but there could only have been a handful who had never seen it.
On Feb. 3, the day after the United Nations issued its major climate change report, the photo was published in hundreds of newspapers.
It appeared on the front pages of The New York Times and Boston Globe, The Times and The Guardian in the U.K., the International Herald Tribune, and various others in Canada and around the world. Since then, it has been reproduced countless times, usually credited to Dan Crosbie of the Canadian Ice Service.
"It's not our picture," said Denis Simard, a spokesman for Environment Canada, who was in Paris for the UN report's release and co-ordinated the photo's distribution to news agencies.
"The pressure was a little hard on us," he said. "I had three newspapers in London asking the same questions: Is it your picture? Can we use it? Is it real? I gave them the permission because Dan said it was his picture."
The photo was taken in August, 2004, from the Louis S. St-Laurent, Canada's flagship icebreaker, and downloaded onto a shipboard shared computer. Mr. Crosbie, an ice service specialist and avid photographer, was present at the time, and had been taking pictures of his own.
Some months later, he recovered the photo from his computer files and gave it to Environment Canada to illustrate an online magazine. He thought nothing more of it until Feb. 2, when Mr. Simard e-mailed him to say that some news agencies were concerned it had been faked in some way. His response was that it had not.
"It's just too cute to be true," Mr. Simard said. "You have to keep in mind that the bears are not in danger at all. It was, if you will, their playground for 15 minutes, you know what I mean? This is a perfect picture for climate change, in a way, because you have the impression they are in the middle of the ocean and they are going to die, with a Coke in their hands. But they were not that far from the coast, and it was possible for them to swim... They are still alive and having fun."
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TORONTO - For Al Gore's presentation yesterday to a conference of human resources executives, his second Toronto visit in a month, the Oscar-winning envirogelical recycled just about everything from his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
From his opening line -- "I used to be the next president of the United States" -- through the Churchill quotes, the slick computer graphics and the boiling frog analogy, to his rousing finale, the presentation was a live action carbon copy of the film.
But there was one notable addition, an iconic photograph that was distributed worldwide last month by Canada's Environment Ministry, and for which the Canadian government is about to be sued by an Alaskan photographer.
Email to a friend
Printer friendly
Font: ****The photo, taken in summer, shows two polar bears on a melting ice floe in the Beaufort Sea, north of Barrow, Alaska.
"Their habitat is melting... beautiful animals, literally being forced off the planet," Mr. Gore said, with the photo on the screen behind him. "They're in trouble, got nowhere else to go."
Audience members let out gasps of sympathy, but there could only have been a handful who had never seen it.
On Feb. 3, the day after the United Nations issued its major climate change report, the photo was published in hundreds of newspapers.
It appeared on the front pages of The New York Times and Boston Globe, The Times and The Guardian in the U.K., the International Herald Tribune, and various others in Canada and around the world. Since then, it has been reproduced countless times, usually credited to Dan Crosbie of the Canadian Ice Service.
"It's not our picture," said Denis Simard, a spokesman for Environment Canada, who was in Paris for the UN report's release and co-ordinated the photo's distribution to news agencies.
"The pressure was a little hard on us," he said. "I had three newspapers in London asking the same questions: Is it your picture? Can we use it? Is it real? I gave them the permission because Dan said it was his picture."
The photo was taken in August, 2004, from the Louis S. St-Laurent, Canada's flagship icebreaker, and downloaded onto a shipboard shared computer. Mr. Crosbie, an ice service specialist and avid photographer, was present at the time, and had been taking pictures of his own.
Some months later, he recovered the photo from his computer files and gave it to Environment Canada to illustrate an online magazine. He thought nothing more of it until Feb. 2, when Mr. Simard e-mailed him to say that some news agencies were concerned it had been faked in some way. His response was that it had not.
"It's just too cute to be true," Mr. Simard said. "You have to keep in mind that the bears are not in danger at all. It was, if you will, their playground for 15 minutes, you know what I mean? This is a perfect picture for climate change, in a way, because you have the impression they are in the middle of the ocean and they are going to die, with a Coke in their hands. But they were not that far from the coast, and it was possible for them to swim... They are still alive and having fun."
1 2 next page
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