The veteran photographer tackles the effects of climate change in his new book and shares phone numbers of deniers, such as Vice President-elect Mike Pence

Some may know the US photographer Danny Lyon for late-1960s shots of outlaw motorcycle gangs. Others may be familiar with his photograph of Bernie Sanders as a young protester at a 1962 Chicago University sit-in, which surfaced during this presidential campaign, or Lyon’s record of the marches staged by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which remain some of the most valuable visual representations of the civil rights movement.

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This one-time Magnum Photos member has photographed John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and Bob Dylan, and documented the industrialization of peasant life in China and the lives of homeless children in Bogotá. A travelling retrospective of his work, Message to the Future, just opened at San Francisco’s de Young museum after a successful run at the Whitney earlier this year.

Other, less confrontational septuagenarians might settle for promoting a few classic images in their later years. Not only does Lyon reject this (“There is a show now of my work in a London gallery,” he says. “I have nothing to do with it and no interest in publicizing it”), but he’s applying his type of 60s-style protest tactics to what he regards as today’s most pressing issue: climate change.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The climate movement is so vast, it involves so many actions and people and is so diverse as to be, in a way, invisible.’ Photograph: Danny Lyon

Lyon’s new photobook, Burn Zone (available on his site as a free PDF and as a $25 printed book) is, in part, a record of the ecological collapse he has witnessed as an on/off resident within the New Mexico stretch of the Rio Grande valley. Lyon, a New Yorker, arrived in the region back in 1970, “with some marijuana in my pocket and $5,000 from a Guggenheim Fellowship, enough to purchase two and a half acres of irrigated valley land”, as he puts it in Burn Zone.

Living off the grid, the photographer built his own house and grew his own food, until his marriage collapsed in the late 1970s. Heading back east for the next three decades, the photographer has returned to New Mexico in recent years, to find river levels have dropped, the temperature has risen and droughts and wildfires afflict his smallholding.

“The largest fire in the history of New Mexico could be seen from my house,” he explains. “I was able to take my truck and my dog and drive right into the burn zone. It’s stunning, as if the battle of Verdun had taken place over a 40-mile stretch of national forest.”

The pictures Lyon shot of this and other aspects of local climate change are moving, yet his new book isn’t a simple ecological lament. Working with the 33-year-old climate activist Josephine Ferorelli, Lyon has also included a list of 50 “Climate Criminals” in Burn Zone, detailing not only their names and alleged actions, but also telephone numbers, postal and email addresses, and social media handles. Vice-President-elect Mike Pence and the Koch brothers make the list, as well as many lesser-known fossil fuel executives and statesmen.

“I wanted to make it clear that the forces actively trying to destroy life on Earth as we know it, and who are doing it for the basest of motives – greed – are real live humans like ourselves, with homes, addresses, phone numbers, emails and that they should be shunned,” explains Lyon. “To do this they have to be identified.”

Lyon, who was once jailed a few cells along from Martin Luther King Jr, knows he is using an old playbook to fight for his new cause. “I am a 60s person and think in terms of the civil rights movement,” he admits.

However, he also recognizes that this new threat is both graver and more diffuse. “The climate movement is global and vast,” he says. “It is so vast, it involves so many actions and people and is so diverse as to be, in a way, invisible.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I think it is extremely important for everyone to have a bit of courage.’ Photograph: Danny Lyon

The photographer feels climate change threatens both his land and his bloodline. Lyon met co-author Ferorelli via his youngest daughter, Rebecca, after she showed interest in Ferorelli’s organisation Conceivable Future. The group supports reproductive justice amid the dangers of climate change, Ferorelli says.

“As a selfish parent, hoping to spend his dotage playing with grandchildren,” says Lyon, “I was alarmed when via Facebook I learned of Conceivable Future and of my daughter Rebecca’s keen interest.”

It’s unclear whether Danny’s involvement has encouraged his daughter to rethink motherhood, yet this new cause has certainly invigorated the photographer. “I think it is extremely important for everyone to have a bit of courage,” he says, “to step up to the plate, so to speak, whatever the consequences.” And perhaps it is a tiny bit easier for Lyon to find the courage because he has stepped up before.