Rich Beckman

About

Rich Beckman

After more than four decades as a full-time academic and practitioner in journalism, education and documentary production, Rich Beckman retired from academe in 2021and now works as an academic consultant on issues of curriculum development, degree program design and recruitment and admissions.

In 2021 he was awarded the Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award by the National Press Photographers Association (https://nppa.org/awards/joseph-sprague-memorial-award). This award, established in 1949, is the highest honor in the field of photojournalism. He was also awarded the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Crystal Globe Lifetime Achievement Award by Special Olympics, where he worked for more than four decades. He is currently President of the Natural Arch and Bridge Society, where he leads hiking tours to remote natural arches, and edits and designs the Association’s quarterly magazine

I had barely started my career as an environmental reporter and photojournalist, when I became an accidental academic. I accepted a one-semester appointment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill while the School of Journalism conducted a national search to replace the venerable Stuart Sechrist, my predecessor. Long story short, my one-semester lasted 30 years after which I retired in 2008 and accepted the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the University of Miami. I retired from the University of Miami in 2018 and moved to Tucson, AZ where I worked on a project at Arizona State University for 18 months and retired for a third time in 2021. I remain “temporarily unemployed.”

I worked as a journalist, administrator and educator on five continents and was a Fulbright Senior Scholar on three. I held three endowed faculty appointments, won two teaching awards, dozens of industry awards and directed undergraduate and graduate programs as a tenured full professor at two major universities. In 2021, The National Press Photographers Association awarded me its highest honor, the Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award, for my “commitment to the craft of visual journalism and to education that advances the profession.”

I am often asked how I developed a love for all things wild as the son of a civil engineer, born into a crowded run-down Flushing, NY neighborhood who spent his youth in the city and suburbs of Chicago. In those days, the suburb of Morton Grove was not what it is today or even half a century ago. It was a place of open fields where we would catch lightening bugs and chase after what we called “flying grasshoppers.” I guess we didn’t know that all grasshoppers could “fly.” However, soon our favorite field became the extension of Lillibet Terrace and by the sixth grade, we had our own grade school a few blocks from home, so wildness had given way to pavement with small houses separated by only the walkways to the small backyard where we regularly tore up the grass playing “running bases” and crawled through the bushes into the neighbor’s yards to retrieve errant balls of all sizes and shapes.

We did have parks, Austin, Harrer and Lockwood and the Cook County Forest Preserves, among the first and still the largest in the nation, but those were really just bigger places to play ball and where the annual holiday picnics and fireworks displays were held. The only wildlife I recall from my childhood was at the Lincoln Park or Brookfield Zoos, the latter of which had the dishonor of building the nation’s first indoor dolphin habitat. They had other ignominious acclaims, such as imprisoning Ziggy, the elephant, for nearly 30 years after he attacked his trainer and the lifelong captivity of Bushman, a silverback gorilla that Lincoln Park bought from a missionary and an animal trader for $3,500 in 1930. I only knew him from his stuffed remains as he died of a heart attack on New Year’s morning in 1951.

We were a family of seven, four boys, my widowed grandmother and my parents. My mother only finished high school, but she had plenty of smarts and my father went to graduate school on the G.I. Bill and was a civil engineer whose new job put us onto a train from New York to the south side of Chicago. His job defined most of our vacations, which were actually business trips in the family station wagon to wherever he was designing a sewage treatment plant. Flint, Michigan was the most common of these destinations and we went there so often that I still recall that we stayed in the Pick Durant Hotel and that its restaurant was named the Purple Cow. I remember our last trip, around 1969 or 70. The hotel had just put color televisions in every room. That was before we had a color television at home, so it really was a vacation.

I never set foot in a National Park and never saw a truly wild animal until I was in college and had my own car, a white 1967 Chevy Impala, that had been retired from the car pool at Consoer, Townsend and Associates, the engineering firm where my father worked. He was an amateur photographer and one of his favorite annual events was to take pictures at the annual Modern Living Home and Flower Show at Chicago’s McCormick Place. This was as close as he ever got to wildness. At a certain age, I was allowed to go along and take pictures with my Kodak Instamatic 104, my first camera, complete with flashcubes.

In addition to my highly regulated, but loving childhood, I lived a secret life in the Morton Grove Public Library. Not when Mark, Charles or Louis and I went there to study as an excuse to talk to the girls in our class, but when I would go and memorize every detail of Eliot Porter’s photographs in the glorious coffee table books that you couldn’t even check out. (You probably could if you were an adult.)

That is where I learned about The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado and where I learned that In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World. Porter grew up a mere 13 miles from the Morton Grove Public Library in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, so his books were quite popular in our little library.

The title of Porter’s book, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World comes from a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Walking” in which he writes, “The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”

I went to colleges in Columbus and Athens, Ohio and Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was during these years that I formulated my life-long appreciation for the natural world and, in addition to journalism, I studied ethology, environmental law and zoology. With great support from the ten deans I worked with, I focused my research and creative work on documenting endangered species and habitats while working as a visual journalist, in addition to producing dozens of documentaries focusing on social change and the human condition.

Edward Abbey, another of my literary mentors, closed Desert Solitaire with these words: “It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. … I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators.” The vernacular is outdated, but the sentiment is not.

When you reach a certain age and a certain level of accomplishment, if you are lucky, you have a second chance to live your dreams and follow your passions. Friends I Have Made, Places That I Love is the online home for my photographs that focus on flora and fauna as I return to reporting on the environmental issues that affect all of our lives. I built the site to share the beauty that surrounds us and to motivate others to get involved in preserving it. Each gallery is a small sample of my favorite and my client's favorite images.

Experts estimate that the loss of species is now between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rate. That means between 200 and 2,000 extinctions occur every year. Global warming due to increased greenhouse gas emissions is causing land ice to melt at an unprecedented rate and seawater to expand as it warms. It threatens communities throughout the world.

All environmental issues are political and climate change deniers, those politicians who reject climate science, refuse to work on legislation addressing the issue. Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere will continue to cause the earth to warm for another 40-50 years before stabilizing at a temperature higher than what was normal for previous generations or safe for ours.

Global warming, combined with population growth, habitat destruction, deforestation, the degradation of water quality, water scarcity, air pollution and increased food demand all affect or inconvenience the human condition, but spell disaster for flora and fauna, the friends I have made and the places that I love. This site will continue to evolve as I focus the remainder of my time fighting the injustices of climate change, environmental degradation and climate refugees.

All images are copyrighted, so using them elsewhere without permission and compensation is a criminal offense. I have made an honest attempt to correctly identify all of the content, but it is impossible to know every species and I welcome corrections to material in the captions. I welcome questions, comments and requests via email addressed to rbeckman@miami.edu.

Special thanks to my family, Cynny and Emmie, for their enduring patience and understanding when accompanying me to icy climes and infested jungles, to my many friends, assistants and guides for putting up with my often ridiculous needs, to my late parents Kathryn and Wallace for their never-ending support, to Pete Devaris for sharing Alaska, Walker Golder for sharing his colonial wading birds, Paco Zegers for sharing his students and his homeland of Chile, Shailendra and Indrajit Ghorpade for sharing their tigers and to my friends, former students and colleagues who have inspired me for decades.