Early in my career I discovered that there was something really special about photographing at night that places your mind on the surface of the planet. You’re no longer just a human being walking around in the regular world. You’re a human animal striding around on the surface of the planet that’s out in the middle of the galaxy. We as a culture, we’re forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very deep connection and contact with nature. You can’t divorce civilization from nature. We totally depend on it.

I was raised a Catholic as a boy and went to a Catholic boys' high school, a private school, and kind of drifted away, candidly, in my latter teen years. I consider myself deeply spiritual but not in an institutional, religious kind of a way. In Catholicism, we're surrounded by these images of martyrdom and doing penance and doing some suffering to achieve what you're trying to achieve. And I certainly embedded that in my psyche and I have lived that very effectively.

The problem is almost everybody is just recording the world with home photographic toys, not doing metaphor or ideas. We have a photographic culture that's not conditioned to think in terms of symbol.

Glacial pace is actually an incorrect concept. The glaciers move a lot faster and they react a lot faster than people imagine.

I have often thought that my work with wildlife taught me the meaning of patience, and my work with the big trees taught me the meaning of humility, and my work with the ice has taught me the meaning of mortality.

The 'New Yorker' asked me to shoot a story on climate change in 2005, and I wound up going to Iceland to shoot a glacier. The real story wasn't the beautiful white top. It ended up being at the terminus of the glacier where it's dying.

The cumulative effect of each person making a change in his or her own life will make a difference.