What will Cape Elizabeth look like in future decades, given predictions of substantial climate change? Greta Thunberg aside, the views of young people—who did not cause the problem yet have the most skin in the game—have been largely absent from conversations on this topic. Seeing for Ourselves, a local nonprofit worked with students at Cape Elizabeth High School to leverage the visual expression of the hopes and fears of teens about Cape in particular to amplify the views of high-
schoolers nationally.

The mission of Seeing for Ourselves lies in equipping and training marginalized individuals to take control of their own public narrative by documenting their lives photographically. Its principals ventured into New York City’s housing projects in 2010-2013, helping residents produce heartwarming imagery—leagues different from the shots of crime scenes and disrepair monopolizing media coverage of these communities for a generation. The effort led to the publication of Project Lives: New York Residents of Public Housing Photograph Their World (powerHouse, 2015), which can be found in the library’s collection and which helped restart city and state funding of the projects.

Convinced by this success, NYC asked the nonprofit to conduct a similar effort on behalf of New Yorkers serving a term of probation. Embedded in the local probation department in 2018-2021 and assisted by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Seeing for Ourselves helped the justice-involved and their neighbors produce imagery at total variance from the mug shots and orange jumpsuits dominating media portrayals for decades. Promoted by both an award-winning documentary and companion book entitled “In a Whole New Way: Undoing Mass Incarceration by a Path Untraveled,” the visuals are helping create a new public image of America’s dominant criminal justice sanction and so encourage its use as an alternative to locking people up.

Now comes “My Climate Future,” which aims to amplify the views of those not often included in the national conversation around climate change. Four local high school students—Trevor Oakley, Dora Hurt, Christopher Choi, and Dakota Fisher-La Plante—ventured out into Cape with their smartphone cameras in April, taking shots of the salt marsh behind the school, Willard Beach, Hobstone Woods, and other locales, imaging what the future holds in store. They captioned the photos accordingly and submitted them to the nonprofit. The Southern Forecaster covered the effort.

Seeing for Ourselves has leveraged this pilot project and publicity to apply for new NEA funding supporting a full-scale initiative both here in Cape and on New York’s Long Island in the 2024-25 school year. Another gallery exhibit, documentary, and publication would result.