Followers of my blog will know that since last summer, I have been working on a project photographing and creating multimedia reports about the state of China’s wetlands, sponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The above video is the third in a series of seven that I am producing. Four and five are already complete, with six and seven coming very soon, however, I am working with a well known organisation to launch these as one package in the coming months. Much more on this soon…

I hope you enjoy the above video which highlights the plight of Dongting Lake, one of China’s most vital water systems. To view the first two installments of these videos, please head to my Vimeo channel here.

March 15-27 saw the holding of the Washington DC Environmental Film Festival in America’s capital. It was a showcase of short films made about environmental issues around the world and I was lucky enough to have been invited to show some of my recent work from China, as part of the presentation given by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Even though I wasn’t there myself, this was a wonderful opportunity to spread the message about my work on wetlands issues in China and bring this issue to a new audience. The above video is from the beginning of the Pulitzer Center’s presentation, given by Jon Sawyer, the Pulitzer Center’s Director. I’m proud and flattered that they led their presentation with my recent piece on the plight of Dongting Lake, in central China. You can watch the piece by watching the video above.

For more information about the film festival, here is their Missions Statement and outline from their website:

Mission Statement

The Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital seeks to further the public’s understanding of environmental issues – and solutions – through the power of film and thought-provoking discussions with environmental experts and filmmakers. The Festival is a platform that fosters environmental awareness and action.

Founded in 1993, the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital has become one of the world’s largest and most influential showcases of environmental film and a major collaborative cultural event in Washington, D.C.  Each March the Festival presents a diverse selection of high quality environmental films, including many Washington, D.C., U.S. and world premieres. Documentaries, features, animations and shorts are shown, as well as archival, experimental and children’s films at venues throughout the city.  Films are screened at partnering museums, embassies, libraries, universities and local theaters and are attended by large audiences. Selected to provide fresh perspectives on global environmental issues, most Festival films are accompanied by discussions with filmmakers, environmental experts and special guests, including national decision makers and thought leaders, and are free to the public. The Festival’s Web site serves as a global resource for environmental film throughout the year.

World Water Day | Newseum | Pulitzer Center

If you happen to be in Washingotn DC this week, you may want to drop by the Newseum to check out a slideshow that will be on show in the main lobby. The show is being hosted by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and National Geographic Society to mark World Water Day, showing images from around the world depicting the global water crisis.

World Water Day | Newseum | Pulitzer Center

I’m very happy to have a couple of my images from China included in the show. The show runs from March 17 to April 1, so should hopefully reach out to many people passing through the main atrium in the Newseum. If you’re in town, stop by and let me know how it looks!

World Water Day | Newseum | Pulitzer Center

Sandstorm over the Taklamakan Desert | NASA | NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response. http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/

What you are seeing above is a sandstorm hanging over the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert in western China, taken by one of NASA’s satellites. To get a really good look at it, click here for the HighRes. The Taklamakan is China’s biggest desert and is an immense sea of shifting sand dunes, which dominates the west of the country.

I was lucky enough to spent a couple of weeks travelling around the Taklamakan desert, as part of my Pulitzer Center sponsored work on desertification in China. The fringes of the desert are most susceptible to desertification, as overgrazing on farmland bordering the desert tends to strip the lands of their grass and hence allows the desert to take hold and expand. It’s a worrying trend which is having serious consequences for the people of this region.

A sandstorm in Ningxia Province, China. 2009

During the spring, winds tend to increase in intensity in the west of China. As the spring winds blow, they pick up the sand and dust lying on top of the degraded land and carry it into the air, creating these massive dust and sand storms.

During my travels in western China, I found myself in a number of these storms. Photographically, they are a challenge as you try to keep your camera equipment safe from the sand. The resulting pictures however are quite spectacular and offer a very surreal viewpoint sometimes, such as the image above.

[slideshare id=6014053&doc=yugongyishanexhib-101203023041-phpapp02]

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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