Event Recording: 'Telling the Story of the Global Climate Crisis' by James Whitlow Delano

The College of William & Mary's Charles Center and the school's Reves Center for International Studies presented Pulitzer Center grantee and photojournalist James Whitlow Delano for a discussion about climate change. Delano's lecture and visit to the campus were funded by the Sharp Seminar, an initiative at the Charles Center established with a generous gift from Anne and Barry Sharp. The Sharp Seminar is a joint initiative between the Pulitzer Center and William & Mary.

Delano is a street photographer and documentary storyteller. He has made Tokyo his home for over two decades while pursuing his passion for the environment, human rights, and Indigenous cultures. In 2015, Delano founded the @EverydayClimateChange Instagram feed, where photographers document climate change on all seven continents. The project has been exhibited around the world.

Everyday Climate Change presents “visual evidence that climate change doesn't just happen ‘over there’ but that climate change is also happening ‘right here,’” it says.  

“The lesson from my own travels is just how sensitive the environment is and just how close in many places we are to these tipping points, that there’s no return,” Delano said in his talk on October 24, 2022.

Delano’s award-winning work has been featured in numerous publications, including National Geographic and National Geographic Traveler magazines, The New York Times Magazine, TIME, The New Yorker, and Foreign Policy. 

Delano has worked with the Pulitzer Center since 2011, reporting from Malaysia, Suriname, the U.S./Mexico border, the Philippines, and Peru. His most recent reporting for the Center is Plastic Recycling in Manila’s Happyland Slum, which documents the stories of one of the poorest slums in the Philippines, a community called “Happyland,” in the Tondo port district of Manila, where family-run, community-based plastic recycling businesses are thriving. Also, the project explores how the Happyland residents are also living in flooded conditions due to sea level rise and sinking coastal land.

“The Pulitzer Center has ... supported many of my most important projects over the last decade, decade and a half,” Delano said. “They make it possible to logistically do things that are not always easy to do.”