Tag:China’s growing sands
17th June marks the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought. This is a topic I have spent much time covering during my career, most notably in my two projects ‘Desertification in China‘ and ‘The Broken Land: Drought in India” which was a short film and photo-essay. As outlined by the UN‘s website: “Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas. It is caused primarily by human activities and climatic variations. Desertification does not refer […]
From the official Earth Hour Blog this week… 25 April 2016: Often viewed as barren, we like to think the resilience of the desert is something to learn from. In the absence of flora and fauna, we often think of deserts as a vast plain of inhabitable and harsh land, and while landscapes of these habitats often conjure up uninviting and barren images, that notion isn’t entirely accurate. Though lacking in water, deserts don’t lack life – shrubs, plants, animals […]
7 years on and one of my first major stories, on desertification in China, still gets plenty of attention. Followers of my work will remember that I began this work in 2007 and expanded it significantly in 2009 when I was awarded my first grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to travel overland across China to cover this issue. This week, the work has featured on LensCulture, one of the leading websites for contemporary trends in photography. Back […]
The text below is an adapted excerpt from MELTDOWN: Climate Change on the Tibetan Plateau, featured on UTNE Reader this week. There are some places in the world where you don’t want to get a flat tire. The middle of China’s vast Taklamakan Desert—with no cell phone coverage and no hint of civilization—is one of them. So when we got our second flat tire on our trek, we started to worry a little. We were suddenly a wheel short and […]
“The most massive tsunami, perfect storm, is bearing down upon us.” I came across this video yesterday that I felt compelled to share here on my blog today. The video is from the recent TED conference held in Long Beach, California and is presented by Allan Savory, a biologist who has been investigating new ways to help combat the increasing scourge of desertification. Savory offers compelling evidence that one of the most successful methods for converting deserts and drylands back […]
Today, June 17th, marks the United Nations‘ World Day to Combat Desertification. As regular readers of this blog and followers of my work will know, a large portion of my work in recent years has been about the scourge of increasing desertification in China. Please take this opportunity today to spread links and talk about the issue of desertification, one of our world’s most pressing and under-reported environmental crises. According to the United Nations: “Desertification, land degradation and drought (DLDD) threaten […]
This week, I returned again to the deserts of Inner Mongolia, whilst on assignment. I have been to this region a number of times over the past few years and really enjoy my time there. For those who don’t know, Inner Mongolia is one of China’s most northerly provinces, stretching across most of northern China. The landscape is dominated by grasslands however much of it is under serious threat from desertification. In this photo, locals were collecting firewood, moving it […]
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. I’m very happy to have a couple of my images from China included in the show. The […]
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 […]
This weekend I travelled to the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a city of some 7 million people lying next to the Yellow River in central Henan province. I was in the city to give a series of talks at Universities in the city, presenting some of my work in China over the past 4 years and also introducing our workshops to the students of the city. My presentation began with an introduction about myself, reasons for coming to China and […]