Let These Stunning Pictures of our Environment, Move You Today
These photos were exhibited at the COP21 – the UN climate summit in Paris in December 2015.
We know that a picture tells a thousand words – and these photographs perfectly illustrate the perilous state of our environment.
From beauty to destruction, hope to despair, peace to war, these photos will move you.
War-torn Aleppo in Syria
Destruction. Bombings. Fires blazing. Smoke everywhere.
Nothing can survive there.
When people are being killed, there is no hope for the environment.
Kings Canyon National Park in California, USA.
Amphibians are highly susceptible to chemicals (e.g. from pesticides) and diseases such as fungi. They also suffer from habitat loss, and drought due to climate change.
Many amphibians are facing extinction.
Beijing, China
When we throw things away – there is no “away”- it’s away from you but it’s still on the planet.
Some stuff that we send for recycling ends up in landfills like this one in Beijing.
Sometimes the materials can’t be recycled, are too damaged to be recycled, or it may be that it’s simply not economical to recycle them.
Whatever the reason, landfills all over the world are full of recyclable materials, adding to the pollution in our environment.
We’re on a finite planet. Recycling is always the last thing we should do – much better not to buy in the first place.
Baku, Azerbaijan
Utter Destruction
With the exception of the people who work here, there is not a single living thing in this oil field.
Everything has been killed and destroyed to grab fossil fuels (oil). Nothing but pollution is left – a dead environment.
Near Bankok, Thailand
This photo speaks to me on so many levels. These elephants spend a large part of their lives living in these abandoned apartments (the “urban jungle” of the photo’s title) with their mahouts or farmers. When the mahouts have work, the elephants work long hours either hauling wood in illegal logging operations, or working on farms. Often, they are high on amphetamines. Then the farmers bring them into the city when their seasonal work is finished, and tourists feed and pet the animals in exchange for money.
Elephants are not meant to live in cities, and this haunting photo shows the problem of poverty as well as habitat destruction.
Rajasthan, India
This beautiful photo was taken on a road through the desert to a town called Jaisalmer.
Women and children were working on the road, and when the dust storm hit, they had nowhere to shelter. In the strange dark orange light and the howling wind, battered by sand and dust, they sang and prayed.
Switzerland
These 2 images show the dramatic difference just 9 years have made.
In the first picture you can see the glacier almost down to the lake. Now there is greenery instead of ice and the glacier has retreated significantly due to climate change.
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Mojave Desert, California, USA
How the landscape is changing due to renewable energy.
(Some people object to solar and wind farms saying they don’t look nice. A coal plant made of concrete and steel, belching pollution, is pretty?)
Enakievo, East Ukraine
You can see why the photographer called his photo “Paradise Lost”. This was a lovely area, now ruined by huge factories and production plants that pollute the environment of the whole region.
USA
I don’t really need to say much about this photo, do I?
Please share these dramatic, sometimes haunting, world-class photographs – sharing buttons below and right. What do you think of them? Let me know in the Comments below.
Thank you
