For 52 years, citizen-scientists have documented Mt. Shasta’s melting glaciers as the planet warms from climate change. They’ve taken a series of photographs over decades that shows these glaciers shrinking.
These citizen-scientists say they’re hoping to reduce “environmental amnesia” by presenting this visual evidence of climate change.
Washington journalist and author of “The Earth Said Remember Me,” Jason Dove Mark, joins us to discuss his experience on Mt. Shasta, and its broader implications.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Jenn Chávez: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Jenn Chávez. “A story remains alive only so long as it’s retold,” writes environmental journalist and author Jason Dove Mark. True of so many things in this world, including the story of our changing environment. In his new book, “The Earth Said Remember Me,” he explores the different ways people can resist environmental amnesia. One example, and the focus of an excerpt recently published by High Country News, involves a decades-long rephoto project at Mt. Shasta in Northern California.
Jason Dove Mark joins us now to share more about it. Jason, welcome to Think Out Loud, and congratulations on the release of your new book.
Jason Dove Mark: Hi, Jenn. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
Chávez: The excerpt of your book that I just mentioned was recently published starts off by describing shifting baseline syndrome, particularly as it relates to climate. You wrote that it could be thought of as “the great getting used to,” which I really loved. Can you say more about what that is and why it’s an important concept to be thinking about?
Dove Mark: Shifting baseline syndrome, it can sound like a sort of clinical phrase, a little academic. But it really just describes the way that each of us in all of our lives are very adaptable, and how we grow used to things and grow accustomed to them. So the classic example comes from fisheries where each generation of fishermen set their baseline expectation of how the seas are supposed to look according to the fish they caught at the beginning of their career, not realizing that what they would consider a big catch would be considered small fry by the old timers that came before them.
The problem, of course, is that we keep getting used to things in a negative way. So in the earlier part of the segment you talked about wildfires in Oregon. So the smoke storms that have hit the East Coast, the heat waves that have hit Europe and good parts of the U.S., they used to be called extreme. They used to be called abnormal, and now they’re the new normal. The danger there is that we just get used to this stuff and we lose the urgency for action.
Chávez: So in this excerpt of your book that recently came out, you focus on Mt. Shasta’s glaciers. How have they been changing?
Dove Mark: Glaciers would be another great example. Somebody who was born 50, 60 years ago, they’re gonna remember Mt. Shasta glaciers or other glaciers in the Cascade Range as being more full and longer, broader, thicker glaciers than, say, somebody who was born in the year 2000 and is now 26 years old. They’re just going to reset their baseline expectation for what a normal Mt. Shasta looks like.
So then the question becomes, how do you reveal this? How do you make this apparent to people? One great example is through what’s called re-photography.
Chávez: So this project that you give us a look into is this re-photography/re-photo project which was started by a citizen scientist in the ‘70s and has been kept going by a string of people for over 50 years. I know you interviewed the person who started it all, Phil Rhodes, as well as a Forest Service ranger who’s keeping it going today, Forrest Coots. What did you learn from them about what inspired them to do this and what motivated them to keep doing this really long-term, dedicated work?
Dove Mark: Phil got into this and he’s now in his ‘70s. He lives in Corte Madera, California, in Marin County. He got into this in the 1970s as an undergraduate at Humboldt State, which is now called Cal Poly Humboldt. He was a mountaineer, a backpacker, and he could see from his own experiences that the glaciers on Mt. Shasta were acting strangely. At that point, they were shrinking and then expanding, and then have pretty much been shrinking most of the time.
He, just on his own dime and on his own time, set up 14 different photo stations on Mt. Shasta, and every year, diligently went back to them to take the same photo of the same glacier from the same perspective, but just a year apart. When you look through his photos, you can see that the glaciers on Mt. Shasta are clearly shrinking due largely to climate change.
As he got older, he handed it off. First to a student at Portland State who was in the geology department there, who eventually handed it off to some Forest Service rangers, who at first did it as a lark. It was a break from their normal day job rescuing mountaineers on Mt. Shasta. But then over time, [they] developed this loyalty, an affinity to the project. They felt, as Forrest told me, a real responsibility to the record. To keep it going, as if the record itself took on a geologic force.
Chávez: I know that one of the rangers took you up to Mt. Shasta to see a photo station at Whitney Glacier that Phil Rhodes began his work at, so many years ago. Can you tell us a little bit more about that experience? How did it feel to be there? What did you take away from being able to do that with him?
Dove Mark: We went to check out the Whitney Glacier, which is the longest – some say the largest, but certainly the longest – glacier in the state of California and the first glacier in California to be positively identified by western scientists in the 1860s and ‘70s. So we went up the north side of the mountain. That’s a largely trackless wilderness. Most people who summit Mt. Shasta come on the south side, so we were pretty much by ourselves.
Forrest grew up and spent his whole life in the town of Shasta. He knows the mountain arguably better than anybody else. He navigated us through this trackless wilderness until we climbed several thousand feet, and got to this bench of rock and ice. He pointed to this totally anonymous boulder, about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. He said, “well, we’re here.” I’m like, what do you mean? He’s like, “this is the spot.” It was a totally ordinary, anonymous boulder, which of course only had meaning because Phil had, at some point, put a marker on it, established this is his photo station. Later with advanced technology, Forrest and company had geolocated it with GPS technology.
So this one salmon-colored boulder was the anchor point to creating a record of environmental change in California and in the Cascades over time.
Chávez: Jason, what has happened to all of these photos? There must be so many from over the years. Did you get an opportunity to take a look at them for this story?
Dove Mark: Many of them for a while went to a project that is run by a former geology professor, now retired, at Portland State named Andrew Fountain. He’s got an incredible repository called “Glaciers of the American West.” Now that he’s retired, it’s a little dated, but many of the photos went there. Many of them went to another geologist named Hassan Basagic, who’s got his own site where people can see them.
I don’t want to bum people out, but unfortunately the story doesn’t exactly have a happy ending. So the year after Forrest took me up the mountain, he left his job at the Forest Service. The then-staff that was remaining has really struggled to keep it going. When Forest Service staff responded to requests from me and High Country News to update the story before publishing this excerpt, they said, “we’re doing our best with the manpower we have.” As listeners know, there’s been a lot of cuts to the federal government, to the Forest Service, and other federal agencies, other land management agencies. Basically, they’ve struggled to keep it going. They didn’t take any, really very many photos in 2025 and just a few in 2024.
So I think the takeaway for folks is that certainly, professional scientists, and federal agencies and state agencies can do a lot of amazing work to collect data about changes in the living world. But there’s no substitute for the extra muscle power that citizen scientists, community scientists bring to these efforts. There’s so many wonderful programs out there.
There’s a thing called Adventure Scientists, which basically enlists backpackers, mountaineers, and backcountry hunters and anglers to take data from remote forest places and remote wildlands. And there’s a thing called CoCoRaHS which enlists people in taking precipitation readings from their backyard, their apartment or wherever they live because weather stations can only gather so much. This gives scientists a much more fine-toothed understanding of precipitation patterns.
It’s a bummer that the federal agencies have not been able to keep it up. But hopefully some other citizen scientists will be able to pick up the baton and keep it going because there’s something that people can do, no matter where they live, to help gather this information about a changing world.
Chávez: Reading this excerpt from your piece, I was thinking about all of these figures of speech that we have, like “seeing is believing,” “I’ll believe it when I see it,” and so forth. I wonder what power do you think visual records, and photography in particular, have when it comes to preserving the historical record, versus the many types of other historical records that we have out there?
Dove Mark: We live in a visual culture, obviously. We’re awash in images and videos all the time. Books take time. When I wrote the first draft of this chapter a few years ago, it felt very real to say that there’s no arguing with the picture in front of your eyes. Photographic evidence, like the work that Phil Rhodes and others have done, provides an indelible record of how the Earth is changing, really being transformed, or if you prefer, deformed before our eyes.
There’s the very real phenomenon of AI slop. So all of us are questioning things that we see and really wondering, is that real? Is that a real photo of an elephant picking up a baby gorilla or something like this. You see [it] online and think, “that’s just AI slop.” So I think it’s a double-edged sword, right, Jenn? Photos are certainly more immediate than reading through a table of charts, numbers and graphs. Most people aren’t gonna do that. So photos are incredibly powerful in that way.
But I worry, as I think a lot of people worry, that we’re entering this post-truth era where it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not because of all the AI slop. That said, I’d rather have people take the photos than not. The photos tell an incredible story, and if people go and check out the story on High Country News, you can see some of Phil’s images. Again, they’re hard to argue with and they pack a punch, I think, much more viscerally than if you just were looking at it as numbers on a graph.
Chávez: Something that you touched on a minute ago, but I think a lot of people sometimes struggle to know what they can do in the face of climate change. It feels so huge. It’s easy to feel despair about it sometimes. But here you have examples of people doing something within the scope of their own lives. So if there are folks listening right now and thinking, “hey, I could do something like this.” What would you say to those people?
Dove Mark: I think some of the most accessible things are the Audubon Christmas Bird Count. It’s been going on for more than 100 years now. People who are birdwatchers, or even if you’re not a birdwatcher and you just want to go out and get trained, hook up with your local Audubon chapter and go out and look at the birds in your area at the end of the year. It’s usually the last couple of weeks in December. That’s one of the longest running citizen scientist projects. Portland-based organization, the Xerces Society, which works for the preservation and the conservation of insects, has got all sorts of citizen science efforts.
I already mentioned Adventure Scientists and CoCoRaHS. I mean, there’s so many programs. The California Academy of Sciences has got iNaturalists. So there’s just a wealth of opportunities out there for people to find some ways to go out, to just collect a little bit of data about the world around them. And it will then be funneled to working scientists and it will help to contribute to the larger body of knowledge that we need to, as I said at the beginning, sustain the urgency for environmental action.
Chávez: Jason, thank you so much for joining us to talk about this and for all your work around these issues.
Dove Mark: Thank you, Jenn. It was a real thrill.
Chávez: Jason Dove Mark is a Washington environmental journalist and the author of the book, “The Earth Said Remember Me.”
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