2019: The Year in Pictures

“I wanted to get her to my studio but that was simply impossible with her schedule, so I told Jen, my contact at Standing Rock, give me 15 minutes, and sure enough, I got my 15 minutes with her. And the rest is history.”

— Shane Balkowitsch, photographer

Technology has democratized the process of photography to the point where any year-end “Best of” reflection of the previous 365 days in nature photography has become both crowded and surprisingly — or perhaps not so surprisingly — revealing.

Everyone has a camera at hand these days, whether a smartphone, SLR or heavy view camera.

The result — deciding which images speak best to you personally — is that no two person’s lists are likely to be the same. The temptation is to narrow our choices down to between 50 and 100 or so but, seriously, who has time to sift through all that?

I’ve chosen to single out three images, less than a handful, images that jumped out at me over the past year and left an indelible, unforgettable impression.

No doubt, your list, if you have to choose just two or three, will be different. That’s probably as it should be.

That said, by narrowing the choices down to a select handful, images that genuinely deserve attention but might otherwise pass unnoticed are more likely to reach an audience. Less is more — always.

©Shane Balkowitsch

1. Standing for Us All. Shane Balkowitsch’s glass wet-plate collodion of 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019, has been officially catalogued for posterity by the US Library of Congress.

Balkowitsch’s lifelong relationship with the indigenous people of North Dakota, following in the footsteps of early 20th-century photographer Edward Curtis, who documented generations of Lakota Sioux in the formative days of photography, encountered Thunberg during her sojourn across North America this past fall, when she passed through the same land where, generations earlier, Curtis took more than 40,000 images of First Nations indigenous tribes.

“I pretend to take portraits of historic people when there are real historic people around

me,” Balkowitsch told Analog Forever earlier this month. “That history is not always about the past, but it is about the present day.”

Balkowitsch’s glass plate image of Greta Thunberg at Standing Rock, North Dakota, taken this past November, is now on permanent display at the National Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

The image has also been recognized by the (UK) Royal Photographic Society in RPS’ “2019 in Pictures” collection.

“I had been following Greta and her journey for months before I got to meet her,” Balkowitsch explained. “I have four children on this planet, and climate change has been a concern of mine for the last decade or so. To think that I would get my opportunity, I could never have imagined.”

©Mathieu Shamavu

2. Another Day at the Office. Congolese park ranger Mathieu Shamavu, who works with mountain gorillas in DRC’s Virunga National Park, snapped this selfie with mountain gorillas in April on his smartphone, and the image went viral.

“All my thanks to all worlds that loved and shared this experience, also for the recognition of our (work),” Shamavu posted on Facebook, days ago. “Not easy, but the courage. . . . This year was marked by several events on that. I still take these wishes to all our friends who have and continue to love this image a Merry Christmas and a Happy New

Year 2020.”

No good deed goes unpunished. Recently, a rueful Shamavu noted,  his selfie star smashed his smartphone to pieces while playing with it. Selfies sometimes come at a price. Shamavu has since replaced his smartphone.

The often dangerous work of protecting the world’s last remaining mountain gorillas, in DRC, Rwanda and Uganda, continues however, with park rangers facing constant and occasionally deadly harassment from armed bandits and poachers.

©Justin Mott

3. Kindred Guardians. In 2018, Vietnam-based photographer Justin Mott writes on his website, the last remaining male northern white rhino passed away of natural causes at Ol Pejeta conservancy in Laikipia County, Kenya, sealing the subspecies’ fate.

Not far from Sudan’s grave, as the iconic rhino was known, live Fatu and Najin, mother and daughter. They’re the last living northern white rhinos on the planet. Once gone, the subspecies will vanish forever,

Rhinos have been in trouble for a number of decades now, but never more so than in the past year. Habitat loss and poaching for their valuable horn — sold on the black market for traditional Eastern medicine purposes in countries such as China, Korea, Vietnam and Laos — is leading to the demise of all rhinos.

Fatu and Najin live in a large, fenced protected area on Kenya’s Laikipia Plateau, where they are guarded 24 hours a day by caretakers and heavily armed National Police reservists. The caretakers look after the rhinos, feed them, provide human companionship and educate visitors to Ol Pejeta about their plight. Armed patrols roam the 360 square kilometre (140 square mile) conservancy around the clock, looking for signs of poachers.

Mott’s poignant image of a caretaker lying against his resting companion is both a memento and a powerful reminder of what the world is about to lose. Good photos stir our emotions. Great photos leave an indelible impression. The greatest photos are unforgettable.

©Justin Mott

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A Christmas Tale: Gorilla Youngsters Seen Dismantling Poachers’ Traps

“I’m always amazed and very proud when we can confirm that (mountain gorillas) are smart.”

— Veronica Vecellio, gorilla program coordinator, Dian Fossey Fund

And now for something completely different: A feel-good dispatch from the journals of New Scientist,.

Days after a poachers’ snare killed one of their own in Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda’s green-limned forest home to the critically endangered mountain gorilla, conservationists on the scene witnessed two young gorillas searching for, finding and then destroying wire snares.

Conservationist Veronica Vecellio, a gorilla program coordinator with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund based in Rwanda, told National Geographic at the time that this was the first time researchers witnessed juvenile gorillas doing that.

“I don’t know  of any other reports of juveniles destroying snares, she told NatGeo. “We are the largest database and observer of wild gorillas . . .  so I would be very surprised if somebody else has seen that.”

The unrelenting trade in illegal wildlife trafficking and poaching for bushmeat — coveted throughout forested areas of Africa as a good source of protein and, in some cases, a delicacy — has seen a proliferation of wire and rope-and-branch throughout the subcontinent, traps which are intended for small antelopes and other mammals, but which sometimes ensnare apes as well. Adult gorillas are strong enough to tear the snares apart, but baby gorillas are not always so lucky.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the mountain gorilla as Endangered as of November, 2018, which is actually down-listed from Critically Endangered, as it was before conservation efforts began to take hold in Rwanda and neighbouring Uganda. At their lowest point there were estimated to be no more than 680 mountain gorillas remaining, a population that has since recovered to more than 1,000 individuals. Mountain gorillas, a close relative of the more common but also threatened lowland gorilla, have benefited from intensive conservation actions as anti-poaching patrols using armed rangers on foot and the physical removal of snares by park rangers.

The IUCN Red List, established in 1964, is a critical indicator of the world’s biodiversity and has evolved to become the connected world’s most valuable, comprehensive and trusted source of information, using statistical and behavioural science to inform the conservation movement and galvanize it to action.

The Red List was designed to both inform and stir people to action on behalf of endangered species, not just animals but also plants, trees and fungi. The IUCN Red List provides hard facts about size, habitat and ecology of various endangered species, human use and exploitation of said species, and threats, both natural and human. The idea is to prompt policy change where needed, all the while providing information that helps inform conservation decision making. More than 30,000 animals, plants and trees are threatened with extinction, 27% of all discovered, identified species.

Vecellio, for her part, told National Geographic that while researchers are gratified, if not entirely surprised, to see the gorillas take matters into their own hands, they won’t encourage other gorillas to do the same, or teach them. It’s imperative that conservationists not affect animals’ natural behaviour, she said, even when the species’ survival is at stake.

We may be closing in on the year 2020, but the natural sciences are still capable of making new discoveries.

Just 10 days ago, scientists have identified a new species of primate living in the Amazon rainforest, Plecturocebus parecis, a  new species of grey monkey endemic to Brazil’s Parecis Plateau in the state of Rondônia. The surrounding rainforest is under threat from the usual villains, but the monkeys have survived so far because — much like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World —  the plateau’s steep sides make it hard to access.

Scientists first noted the species in 1914 but it is only now that biologists have identified the monkeys as being members of a distinct, separate species, based on DNA readings and detailed studies of the monkey’s genome that rely on recent breakthroughs in biotechnology to separate one species from another.

One of the wonderful things about nature is its resilience.

https://gorillafund.org/young-mountain-gorilla-saved-poachers-snare-thanks-daily-protection-gorilla-trackers/

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/monkeys-new-species-amazon-rainforest-brazil-parecis-plateau-deforestation-a9257921.html

©GerMai-Pixabay

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Newly Discovered Cave Art Reveals More About Humankind’s Early Journey

“When you do an archaeological excavation, you usually find what people left behind, their trash. But when you look at rock art, it’s not rubbish — it seems like a message, we can feel a connection with it.”

— Maxime Aubert, archaeologist, Griffith University (Australia)

The cave painting, discovered in Indonesia, seems insignificant on the face of it. As the journal Nature revealed late last week, though, it is a lot more than that.

At a cursory glance the painting depicts two wild pigs and four small, early relatives of the water buffalo — and, most intriguingly to palaeoanthropologists, eight human-like stick figures brandishing what appear to be spears.

What the painting is meant to represent is unclear — is it a hunt, and if so, are the early humans hunting the animals or the other way around? — but what is clear is the painting’s age.

First discovered in 2017 by an Indonesian cave diver named Hamrullah — many Indonesians prefer to go by a single name — the cave painting is now believed — “likely,” researchers say — to be the oldest known story told through pictures.

We’re talking some 44,000 years, which would make the painting more than twice as old as the famous Lascaux cave art in France, which is estimated to be some 19,000 years old.

The Lascaux cave art depicts, among other things, a bison charging a bird-headed man, which suggests early humans did not have it all their own way when it came to foraging for food.

The past year has seen many such discoveries, and not just in one place but all over the world. Early art has been found on every continent but Antarctica, and the findings have the potential to completely reshape the picture of our human journey.

Far from being chastened by getting it wrong in the past, most palaeontologists are excited by the prospect of new discoveries leading to more, and better, knowledge of how we became who we are today.

Caves are a perfect depository for ancient art because they’re sealed off from the outside world in large part, away from the corroding effects of sunlight and outside air. The Lascaux caves were closed to tourism, shortly after their discovery in the mid 20th century, because it was found that tourists exhaling carbon dioxide were corroding cave art that had survived thousands of years. In his 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the German filmmaker was one of the last human beings allowed to see — and film — the Chauvet Cave in southern France, home to cave art dating back some 32,000 years, until the Indonesia find, the oldest human-painted images yet discovered.

The Indonesian find is unique because, quite apart from its age, it was found in Sulawesi’s Maros-Pangkep region, an area where, millions of years ago, underground rivers cut through the limestone to form a maze of caverns, hidden from view until only recently. The find suggests there may be countless other underground cave systems throughout the world that haven’t been discovered yet.

Early humans were reluctant to paint human

faces on their portraits, despite the detailed facial expressions of many of the wild animals they painted, but what they did do was leave hand stencils, which may have been the artists’ signature or a statement of claim. By studying the hand stencils, palaeoanthropologists have been able to determine the size and other characteristics of early humans.

Previously unknown examples of early human art has been discovered everywhere Australia to the Balkans during the past calendar year. The finds do not disprove the generally accepted conclusion that the very first humans migrated out of Africa, but they do suggests those early migrations were much more widespread than originally believed.

The science of dating cave paintings is exactly that, a science, and not idle speculation. As with much of our knowledge of science, recent breakthroughs in technology have greatly enhanced our collective understanding of what happens in the world, and why.

Dating cave paintings involves a number of different, unrelated methods, mixed together and combined much like an artist painting a canvas. Palaeoanthropologists examine and identify specific minerals that have grown over the cave art over time, minerals that include trace amounts of radioactive uranium that decays and becomes thorium. The older the deposit, the more thorium it will have relative to uranium. Minerals form over the pigment layer used in painting; the process of dating the painting is similar but not identical to the way art historians determine forgeries from originals in the high-stakes world of art collecting.

The scenes depicted in early cave paintings may seem simplistic and obvious to those of us living in the modern age, but they’re anything but to the archaeologists and behavioural scientists to study them. What seems like early humans hunting a bison to us hints at the special bond between early humans and animals was cultural and philosophical, and not just physical. Early humans were small and wiry, and physically weak compared to the megafauna they shared their world with. Many cave paintings suggest they lived in a world of near-perpetual terror, where their very survival depended on cooperation with their neighbours, or whoever they happened to be sharing their cave with at the time.

It’s simplistic — and too easy — to draw comparisons between the world of yesterday and today, where politics and depletion of the environment are concerned, but it’s fascinating to see new answers to old questions being revealed almost every day.

Hardly anyone is likely to have fond memories of 2019, looking back on it in future years, but one positive does jump out: This was an outstanding, possibly unique year for breakthroughs in the field of palaeoanthropology and cave art.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/12/humans-were-not-centre-stage-ancient-cave-art-painting-lascaux-chauvet-altamira

©Adam Brunn/Griffith University (Australia)

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Climate Activism: It’s Not About the Selfies, It’s About the Future

“If anyone thinks that what I and the science are saying is advocating for a political view — then that says more about the person than me. That being said, some are certainly failing more than others.”

— Greta Thunberg, on Facebook

It was the TV equivalent of clickbait. A CNN moderator kept steering the conversation back to how unseemly, how vile and wrong it was for the leader of the free world to belittle a 16-year-old climate activist on Twitter, while the legal expert on the panel kept trying to steer the conversation back to the real issue: the climate crisis, and how a discussion about cyberbullying, as  unpresidential it might seem, pales in comparison to the seriousness of the ongoing climate emergency.

The clickbait won out in the end, of course. CNN is supported by advertising revenue, after all.

The climate emergency is not going away, though. And it won’t go away any time soon.

CNN’s legal expert had a point, a point not lost on Greta Thunberg herself when, in the midst of a particularly nutty week of Twitter fights, an international climate conference and a divisive UK election, she vowed on her Facebook page that she’s never supported any political party, politician or ideology.

“I communicate the science and the risks of failing to act,” she posted. “And the fact that the politics needed don’t exist today, neither to the right, left nor center.”

Never mind the Twitter fight that started it all, or the fact that TIME magazine this past week named Thunberg its person of the year for 2019 — or the fact that voters in the UK overwhelmingly elected a prime minister who, during the  election campaign, couldn’t even be bothered to show up to a leaders’ debate about the climate crisis.

The week also saw out the international climate conference in Madrid, at which Ursula von der Leyen, newly installed president of the European Commission, tackled those critics who say politicians’ efforts to combat the climate crisis amount to a lot of hot air, but little actual action.

Thunberg herself has been criticized by some of her detractors for doing a lot of complaining but not posing any concrete solutions, which some might argue is a heavy burden to place on the slender shoulders of a small-for-her-age 16-year-old — but we live in a social-media world, and the social-media world is thus. On social media, anything goes.

Von der Leyen, who represents the New Europe — as opposed to Merrie Olde England — has promised to deliver a sustainable European investment plan, representing some €1 trillion of investment, over the next 10 years.

In March, three months from now, the European parliament — of which Britain will no longer be a member — will propose the first European climate law that promises not only

to chart the way ahead but be irreversible —  “written in stone,” as it were.

The plan is too little, too late, detractors say, but it’s something. It’s certainly more than anything coming out of the US and Canada, or the UK for that matter.

The New Europe has decided to go it alone, as the US is no longer considered a reliable partner — for obvious reasons.

Von der Leyen accepts that the transition from fossil fuels to renewables will be costly, as the economy shifts and entire industries will need a new way of thinking, which is why the European Commission is attaching actual dollar figures — euros, to be precise — to the transition.

The climate law will encourage people to take a hard look at how they produce and consume, work and live.

“We must protect those who risk being hit harder by such change,” von der Leyen wrote in her op-ed piece for The Guardian. “This transition must work for all, or it will not work at all.”

That means helping those regions in Europe that will need to take the biggest steps — i.e. the post-industrial wastelands of the East and rural industrial regions in the West — “so that we leave no one behind.”

Europeans are mindful of what’s at stake, von der Leyen insisted. Many European citizens have already changed their lifestyle — choosing bikes and public transport over cars, renouncing single-use plastics and coming up with sustainable alternatives for bringing produce to market, to cite just a few examples.

Nine in 10 European citizens have demanded decisive climate action, von der Leyen noted. “Our children rely on us.”

It’s being called the European Green Deal, “(our) contribution to a better world.”

Thunberg herself, while not wearying of the fight just yet, is choosing her spots. She turns 17 next month, but she’s losing interest in the politics of climate change.

“As often as I can, I try to say no to having meetings with politicians,” she told TIME magazine, in a video interview from La Vagabonde, the wind-powered catamaran she crossed the Atlantic on during her month-long journey to the CoP25 climate conference in Madrid.

“It’s just small talk, basically. And of course they want to take selfies. I’m a bit tired of selfies right now.”

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"I’ve Had the Most Extraordinary Life:" David Attenborough and ‘The Green Planet.’

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of much in life that makes life worth living.”

— David Attenborough

In just one day, one large tree can draw as much as 100 gallons of water from the surrounding ground and recycle it back into the air, in the form of life-giving water vapour. Trees provide food and shelter for wild animals in the area. Temperatures in an area shaded by trees can be anywhere from 11-25°C (20-45°F) cooler than the same area in direct sunlight, depending on the time of day. Dendrochronology — the dating of trees by analyzing tree rings — has shown many trees to be older than entire generations of people living in the area. 

Tree rings do more than reveal a tree’s age. They’re a historical record of natural history, everything from volcanic eruptions to drought. There are ancient woodlands in England, increasingly under threat from development, that date back to the 1600s and the reign of James VI.

Trees help combat flooding by capturing and storing excessive amounts of rainfall, both in the canopy and in their often labyrinthine tangle of roots that anchor the tree to the ground and nurture its growth.

It should come as little surprise, then — though some TV watchers admit to being exactly that — that David Attenborough’s next landmark natural history series, The Green Planet, will be about trees, and how they quite literally provide the roots of life. Attenborough’s stirring series Seven Worlds, One Planet has yet to air in the US — its BBC America debut is Jan. 18 — but the seeds have already been planted for Green Planet, which will bow on UK television in late 2021. 

One of the undeniable appeals of Attenborough’s nature programs is the way they show the connection between animals and people.

With this new series, though, Attenborough faces a new challenge. He will show, among other things, how some trees seem to “talk” to each other, such as the way certain willows will emit a chemical substance when attacked by parasitical webworms, alerting other willows in the area to produce a substance called tannin, which makes their leaves harder for webworms to digest.

John Wyndham’s 1950s post-apocalyptic classic The Day of the Triffids envisioned a future world where sentient plants slowly absorb other forms of life, and threaten to take over the planet — revenge, some

believe, for humankind’s despoiling the natural world around them.

Read into Day of the Triffids what you will: Attenborough’s point is that while scientists know much about trees, little of that knowledge has passed on to the general public. Trees are something we collectively take for granted.

“This is a wonderful opportunity to explore a neglected yet truly remarkable part of the natural world,” Attenborough said this week in a statement prepared for the BBC. The Green Planet will be Planet Earth from the perspective of plants.

It’s designed to be “an immersive portrayal” of an unseen, largely hidden interconnected world, full of the kind of quirky behaviour, gripping stories and surprising heroes audiences have grown used to seeing in past Attenborough series like Blue Planet and Life on Earth. The idea is to take audiences into a world, beyond the imagination, and see things, in the words of program producer and veteran Attenborough collaborator Mike Gunton, “no eye has ever seen.”

“The world of plants is a mind-blowing parallel universe; one that we can now bring to life using a whole range of exciting new camera technology,” Gunton said.

Filming locations range from Croatia and Costa Rica to the US and northern Europe, and will encompass deserts and mountains, rainforests and the frozen north. Attenborough will be at each location in person, guiding the viewer through what for many will be a brave new world.

Attenborough will meet the largest living things that have ever existed, in Gunton’s words, “. . .trees that care for each other; and plants that breed so fast they could cover the planet in a matter of months. He will find time-travellers — seeds that can outlive civilizations, and plants that remain unchanged for deceased. He will examine our relationship with plants, past, present and future, and reveal how all animal life, ourselves included, is totally dependent on plants.”

Attenborough will turn 94 in May.

“I’ve had the most extraordinary life,” he admits in the new Netflix documentary David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. “It’s only now that I appreciate how extraordinary.”

©DarkWorkX-Pixabay

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