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The evening of November 22nd saw the opening of the first public print display of ‘China’s Threatened Waters’, as part of the Greening the Beige annual party. We had a great attendance with a few hundred people attending the events and it really was a wonderful evening. Please find above a small selection of photographs from the evening, taken by myself, volunteers and GtB’s event photographer Jordan Thomas Mitchell.

Next week, I shall be heading back to western China again to visit the province of Qinghai (hopefully some very exciting developments will be announced after, and as a result of, this trip — please stay tuned!). I won’t be posting as much, so I shall leave you with these photos for the time being. There have been plenty of posts this week, so if you missed them , please go back and check them out. To help point you in the right direction, I have added a new plug-in which will recommends other blog posts to you that you might be interested in, depending on which you are reading at that time. You can find this at the bottom of each post. Happy reading and exploring!

Invite - Page 1

Dear All…Quick update today to let you know about a special event that we (myself and Greening the Beige) would like to invite you to on the evening of December 10th at the Hutong in Beijing.

As the exhibition of Threatened Waters finishes at Yugong Yishan, we wanted to do something productive with the prints, so in collaboration with Red Gate Gallery, we shall be having an evening of wine and Asian tapas, culminating in an auction of fifteen, signed prints of mine, ten from the exhibition and a further five from my China’s Growing Sands Series.

The proceeds of the auction will go to covering the costs of the exhibition, with all other proceeds going to the Mangrove Action Project. I chose this organization because they are actively involved in environmental education in China are on the forefront of trying to change perceptions of wetlands and their importance. I documented the work of this NGO this summer and you can see the great work they do by watching this multimedia piece.

I really hope to see some of the regular visitors to this blog there. Whether you are interested in purchasing a print for yourself or for a loved one or friend in the run up to Christmas, we hope that the added knowledge that your money is going help create positive environmental change in China, will make it an even better Christmas purchase.

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<<Return to the Learning Zone Last weekend, I was invited by Beijing based eco-group Greening the Beige to give a workshop at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. We had a great turnout, with many students and photography enthusiasts all keen to see images from my environmental work in China over the past few years and learn about some of the thought processes that go into tackling these realtively large issues. We had such a great discussion, so I thought I would post my presentation here on my blog and highlight/elaborate on a couple of the key talking points. I hope this might prove useful for anyone who wasn’t able to make the event.

The aim of the workshop was to help people understand how I approach taking on large scale subjects, aiming this message at many of the students, from both the fields of photography and journalism, who were in attendance. The first question we tackled was: How do you find story ideas?

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Exhibition Flyer

Two weeks from today will see the first print exhibition of China’s Threatened Waters, at the Yugong Yishan venue in central Beijing. If you are free on the night of Monday 22nd November from 7:00p.m. till late.

The event is being organized with the help of Greening the Beige, a Beijing-based organization promoting green issues throughout China. As you can see from the flyer (above) there will be host of artists and performers there on the night, all promoting green initiatives and ideas.

Entry is free for the opening night party and the exhibition will run for three weeks after the opening night.

Hope to see you there!

[vimeo width="570" height="320"]http://vimeo.com/16018786[/vimeo]

This is the second in my series of Multimedia pieces for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, produced from the body of work I created this summer on China’s current wetlands crisis. These pieces take a lot longer to produce than your average photo essay but I feel they add a whole lot more to the general understanding of the issue. Hope you agree. Please find the synopsis of this piece below:

“Since the end of World War 2, the world has lost approximately 50% of its mangroves, mainly as a result of destruction by humans for coastal developments.

Found mainly in the tropics and subtropics, mangroves are a unique species of trees and shrubs that thrive in saltwater. They are valued for their ability to protect coastlines, harbor wildlife and have a nutrient base on a par with the rainforests.

Photographer and videographer Sean Gallagher, travels to South-East China to report on a project aiming to save the remaining pockets of mangroves in China, on assignment for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

To learn more, visit http://www.threatenedwaters.com “

John MacKinnon, of the EU-China Biodiversity Programme

SEAN GALLAGHER, FOR THE PULITZER CENTER, BEIJING, CHINA

John MacKinnon, of the EU-China Biodiversity Program, is one the world’s leading experts on biodiversity and the environment in China. He began his career in 1965 working with Jane Goodall in the famed study of the chimpanzees of Gombe. In 1968, he moved to Southeast Asia to study orangutans under the supervision of Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen.

MacKinnon first went to China in 1987 to work on the World Wildlife Fund’s Giant Panda project. He is an expert and author of 17 books on birds and mammals in China and has served for 14 years as co-chair for the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development. He was awarded the prestigious Order of Golden Ark, with highest rank of Commander by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands for his lifetime services to conservation.

I caught up with him last month in the Beijing headquarters of the EU-China Biodiversity Program where we discussed some of the issues currently facing China’s wetlands.

This is an abridged version of the interview.

What are your thoughts with regard to biodiversity affected by wetland disappearance?

Probably of all ecosystems, wetlands are the most endangered because water is just used by people everywhere. So there is hardly a stream in China that doesn’t have somebody putting [something] into it or taking water out of it.

Everything is messed up with pollution–pipes taking off water for agriculture, for industry, for household use, building weirs across rivers to divert the water into little gullies. And then it gets bigger and bigger, up to these huge dams that the government has been putting in all over the place. China has thousands of these dams now which are having a profound impact on the water system. It means that fish and frogs can no longer move up and down river systems. Some are seasonal and need to go up into the head stream in the summer and lay eggs where the young can breed. And then in the winter these are frozen up, so they have to move down to the lower waters. Can’t do it anymore. So a lot of the species, a lot of the fish are endangered. Some are extinct.

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[vimeo width="570" height="320"]http://vimeo.com/15759317[/vimeo]

Regular visitors here may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a little while. Apologies for that. I have just returned from a 2-week trip to the US, taking part in speaking engagements at high schools and universities across the country. With the help of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, I’ve been speaking about environmental issues in China, trying to get students to connect to my stories and relate them to what issues are affecting their local communities.

As I zig-zagged across America, travelling mostly by plane, my mind started to wander onto the impact our air travel has on our planet. As a working photographer and videographer, my assignments normally require me to travel quickly from place to place, mostly by plane. My work focuses mainly on issues affecting the environment, so I try to live my life with those environmental issues in mind and the impact that I, as an individual, am having. Flying however is one the issues I most struggle with, made worse by the fact I find it a very enjoyable way to travel.

When you start to delve into the latest statistics about air travel and CO2 emissions, you quickly discover some frightening numbers. Some predictions point out that by 2025, airlines worldwide could be spewing out 1.5 billion tons of CO2 per year, that’s half of the EU’s current total CO2 output. In 2009, total CO2 output from EU carriers did reportedly decline however it seems this only correlated with a decrease in the number of passengers flying. Some airlines do seem to be making active, positive steps towards change however, by testing biofuels. Airlines such as United Airlines for example, who flew the first flight by US commercial airline using natural gas synthetic jet fuel this year.

Sometimes though, you have to just sit back and just admire the marvel of flight. As I sat on my United Airlines flight from Washington DC to Beijing last week, my mind was wandering again on the above issues when I was distracted by what unfolded infront of me. Cruising half way between the US and China, we passed directly over the North Pole, just as dawn was breaking. It was one of the most spectacular and beautiful sunrises I have ever seen and I decided to try to record enough of it to show in a short video. It’s not everyday you see the sunrise over the North Pole. I hope you can enjoy reliving it with me, as I saw it.

[vimeo width="570" height="320"]http://vimeo.com/15090041[/vimeo]

I’m happy to announce that my new multimedia piece for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is now online. ‘The Chinese Alligator: Species on the Brink” is a look at the plight of China’s only crocodilian species and the effects of decades of wetlands reclamation on population numbers. By combining stills, video, interviews and time-lapse photography I hope this piece provides a visually interesting account of the current situation, as well as an informative one.

This is the first in a series of multimedia pieces that I will be producing for the Pulitzer Center over the coming weeks and months, so please do stay tuned for more.

The piece above is hosted on Vimeo where you can watch it in full HD at 1280×720. As it is HD, it may take a little time to load but I hope it’s worth the wait to get the best out of the video and stills. For all you techies out there, the whole piece was shot with a Canon 7D with 16-35mm F2.8 and 70-200 F4.0 lenses and audio was recorded on an M-Audio Microtrack II.

Once you start the piece, you will notice that there are interchanging Chinese and English subtitles. It has been one of my main aims to start reaching out to my Chinese audience more and I hope by producing these pieces in both languages that the message of the piece will reach more people. As Vimeo is blocked in China, I will be releasing this piece on Youku and Tudou soon. Please stay tuned for that.

If you have any thoughts or feelings about the piece, I am always happy to hear them!

A man walks through one of the drainage channels that make up the Dujiangyan Irrigation System.

SEAN GALLAGHER, FOR THE PULITZER CENTER, SICHUAN PROVINCE, CHINA

Water did not seem in short supply as I arrived in China’s southwest province of Sichuan. Rain was pounding on the windshield of my taxi and pools of water were starting to flow down the streets of the province’s capital, Chengdu. People scurried around the streets, desperate to get out of the storm that had quickly descended on the city.

This unsavory welcome was compounded by the delivery of  bad news from my assistant upon my arrival at my hotel. Our primary location for the week, the largest highland marsh and peat lands in Asia, Ruoer’gai in the north of Sichuan, had just been sealed off from the outside world. The heavy rains had caused  landslides which had wiped out all roads leading to the 3500 meter plateau which it sat upon. These marshes comprise half a million hectares and have been dubbed the ‘kidneys’ of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau. Made up of 90 percent water, they act like a sponge sequestering carbon and providing a home for a vast range of highland species. A vital ecosystem and source of water, they are the origin of the Yellow River, one of China’s mightiest waterways.

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A teenager with his yak on the shores of Qinghai Lake. 2010

SEAN GALLAGHER, FOR THE PULITZER CENTER, QINGHAI PROVINCE, CHINA

Tenzin’s green eyes bored into me as I looked at his sunburnt face. “Qinghai Lake is a very holy place for us. We regard it as the ‘soul’ of Qinghai.”

He was sitting by the side of a road running parallel to the lake shore. The sound of cars rushing past filled the air as Tenzin’s kneepads, torn and grazed, fluttered in the wind generated just a meter or two away. Tenzin was taking a momentary break from prostrating his way around the 360km circumference of the lake, in a stark and vivid act demonstrating the importance of this lake to Tibetans, who make up 80 percent of people in the region.

Located at 3200 meters above sea-level on the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau in the northwest of China, Qinghai Lake is the country’s largest inland body of saltwater at 4318 square kilometers in area. Over the past century, however, the lake has found itself in a worrying downward trend as 700 square kilometers of its area have been lost and its surface level has dropped by 13 meters.

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