Why 100 Global Locations Are Highlighted In Photos

While browsing the magazine section at Borders I found a Newsweek Special Edition issue with nature photos. Thinking it was one of those end of the year Favorite Places photo spreads, I picked it up to see where people had traveled last year. One hundred places worldwide, to be exact.


But then the rest of the title rose up on the cover photo of a blue-green volcanic atoll in the Pacific:  “100 Places to Remember Before They Disappear".   

Now, that’s a bold title!  Though I knew pretty quickly that this was related to climate change, my next thought was that mainstream media had actually taken up this scenario. 

Newsweek International had, indeed, published this beautiful magazine from a book and the photo exhibition of the same title. All the photo locations have some probable upcoming fate due to climate change mechanisms. The original photo collection was based on sites noted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data before the Copenhagen Conference last fall.  

The array of formats that have shown these 100 Places include the traveling photo exhibition, the hardcover book, the website and the newspaper stand magazine.  Check the project for the complete background, as well as the 100 gorgeous photos. The interactive world map is especially insightful.

Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek International Editor, points out that the world sites represented by the photos all take on their own peculiar set of climate change challenges.  Each occupies a “narrow ecological niche.”   Population distributions inherit a variety of climate patterns related to sunlight and rain and winds and temperature.  

The places photographed are not about policy or science.  They are about the people and habitations as we know them and appreciate them now.  They are a reminder that there is a world out there beyond our own daily lives.  Climate change becomes a story about beautiful places to preserve.

As usual, it is up to the “developed” world to make itself aware of cultures and the lands beyond its own.  Ethically, we owe the rest of the world in terms of climate change. 

I am awed that this project has taken off worldwide.  I applaud the courage to reveal places of challenge and the issue of the climate change charge.    

“UNLESS,” said the Lorax.

Revel In Nature With "Planet Earth"

A rigid diet of global woes will numb the good intentions in any of us.  It  takes Herculean commitment to remain supportive of our scientists and our common sense with issues of peak oil, clean water, overpopulation and anthropogenic climate change. Real downers.

The recommended antidote??  Good healthy doses of the DVD series “planet earth.”  These are the images that need embedding.  These are the glowingly beautiful cycles of ecology that should guide our own behaviors.

“planet earth” was produced in 2006 as a project shared by the BBC and Discovery Channel.  The eleven episodes reveal eleven major habitats around the globe as they have not previously been photographed.  Over the years of production, 71 camera men and women worked in 204 locations and 62 countries on all seven continents. (1) One wonders, when watching certain scenes, how the photographers themselves managed to stay alive in the elements.  One wonders, also, how nature can be so spellbinding.

“planet earth” is mesmerizing.  It is easily scheduled into nightly episodes or a pre-determined Night with Mother Earth each week. We need to be sharing the series with students of all ages at school.  I have seen awe in the eyes of fourth graders, high school juniors and graduated university students as the natural dramas unfold.

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