Hardly anyone seeing the awarded images in this past weekend’s World Press Photo 2018 Awards could walk away without feeling shaken and, deep down, at least a little stirred.

No written summation of the winning images would be complete without the images themselves. That’s the whole point of photojournalism, in which the image truly is worth a thousand words. Good photography transcends different languages and cultures, which is why Mexico City-based photographer Ronaldo Schemidt’s image of a protestor set ablaze during street demonstrations last May in Caracas, Venezuela is so wrenching. It’s the kind of image no one wants to see, and yet it’s an image that’s impossible to tear one’s eyes away. The World Press Photo association awarded Schemidt the group’s Photo of the Year award for 2018, as well as 1st prize for spot news.

Schemidt’s image, taken for Agence France-Presse (AFP), is undeniably powerful, but it was just one among many.

©Ronaldo Schemidt/Agence France-Presse (AFP)

Charlottesville, Va. local-news photographer Ryan M. Kelly, a staff photographer for The Daily Progress local newspaper — the only daily newspaper in Charlottesville — won 2nd prize for spot news for his harrowing image of a 20-year-oldwhite supremacist and neo-Nazi, now charged with first-degree murder, ramming his car through a crowd of demonstrators at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in the Virginia city last August.

@Ryan Kelly/The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Va.)

It’s a sign of these troubled times for the planet, though, that the organizers of the 61st World Press Photo Awards saw fit to make room for separate environment and nature categories, where they joined such traditional news categories as contemporary issues, general news, long-term projects, people, sports and spot news.

North Carolina-born, Montana-based Ami Vitale, profiled in this space just a few weeks ago, won 1st prize in the nature/stories category for her photo essay “Warriors Who Once Feared Elephants Now Protect Them,” about the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in Samburu, northern Kenya, for National Geographic.

http://www.amivitale.com/2017/07/warriors-who-once-feared-elephants-now-protect-them/

It was a good week — a good year, in fact — for South African-based image-makers.

German-born Thomas P. Peschak, a trained marine biologist who moved to South Africa and switched careers to “document the beauty and fragility of our oceans,” won no fewer than four World Press Photo awards, all of them for National Geographic.

Peschak won both 2nd and 3rd prize in the nature/singles category, for his image of rockhopper penguins doing just that (2nd place), and an image juxtaposing a historic photo of an African penguin colony, taken in the late 1890s, against an image taken in 2017, showing the stark contrast in declining numbers between the two. (“Singles” are standalone images; “stories” are photo essays, in which a series of images tells a single story.)

Peschak won 2nd prize in the environment/singles category for his sobering image of a South African Antarctic Territory juvenile grey-headed albatross recovering from an attack by an invasive mouse species. He won 3rd prize in the nature/stories category — the same category in which his fellow National Geographic photographer Vitale won — for his haunting photo essay of the Galapagos archipelago.

Peschak switched to photojournalism, he says now, when he realized his images could do more for conservation than simply curating scientific statistics for academics (https://www.thomaspeschak.com).

Alaska commercial fisherman and occasional photographer Corey Arnold won 1st prize in the nature/singles category, for his equally sad image of a bald eagle picking over meat scraps in a garbage dumpster in Dutch Harbour, Alaska.

Top prize in the environment/singles category was awarded to South African conservation photographer Neil Aldridge for his unspeakably sad image of a southern white rhino, drugged and blindfolded during relocation to the Okavango Delta, Botswana from its home in South Africa, to protect it from poachers.

Photography is both a calling and a profession for Aldridge; he’s a lecturer in marine and natural history photography at Falmouth University, in Cornwall, in the UK, and runs workshops, expeditions and seminars, and in 2016 established the self-explanatory NGO Rhino Conservation Botswana.

“Photography is more than just a beautiful picture, a moment frozen in time; it has the power to transform our relationship with the world around us for the better,” Aldridge explains on his website at,

www.conservationphotojournalism.com.

A compelling image is about forging an emotional connection with the viewer, he says; the aim is to create stories that inspire positive change through the conservation of nature and the environment.

“I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose,” W. Eugene Smith famously said.

“The ability to keep things in perspective is very important for a journalist. In a tense situation you need the ability to be there, yet somehow step aside; to keep a cool head and keep working without getting frustrated.” — Philip Jones Griffiths.

“It’s a lot more than clicking the shutter. It’s the ideas, it’s the visual voice, it’s the telling the story, it’s kind of going beyond that initial things that just means you happened to be there at the right time.” — Ron Haviv.

“I think of myself as a journalist who chooses the art of photography to bring awareness to the world. Art is a powerful means of expression, but combined with journalism it has the ability to bring awareness to issues that can elevate understanding and compassion. It’s the basic reality of why I do what I do.” — Renée C. Byer.

“As photojournalists, we supply information to a world that is overwhelmed with preoccupations and full of people who need the company of images. We pass judgment on what we see, and this involves an enormous responsibility.” — Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Here, then, without further ado, are the winners I’ve mentioned, with the primary emphasis — given the tone of this site — on matters involving nature and the environment.

https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/2018

NEIL ALDRIDGE

THOMAS P. PESCHAK

AMI VITALE

Poisonous toads, bleached coral, sloppy tourists, debt forgiveness and two new marine parks — this has been the past week in enviro-news.
An invasion of toxic toads from Asia is threatening what’s left of Madagascar’s already fragile ecosystem, according to a report in Sunday’s Observer by The Guardian global environment editor Jonathan Watts. The numbers are frightening, and the speed with which it’s happened has taken even most pessimistic conservation estimates by surprise.

In slightly more positive news, the Seychelles has established a pair of vast marine preserves in a world first. The proposal, as reported by Guardian environment editor David Carrington, would enshrine marine protection in exchange for debt forgiveness. It’s an innovative scheme backed by the likes of ardent conservationist and enviro-crusader Leonardo DiCaprio, and if the calculations are right it could conceivably show the way to saving large expanses of the world’s oceans.

And in another Sunday Observer report, Guardian culture editor Hannah Ellis-Petersen asks whether a temporary ban on tourists can help save the Thailand beach made famous in the Leonardo DiCaprio movie — yes, DiCaprio again — The Beach.

Much like the ecosystem itself, the three stories are different and yet connected in important ways. Tourism — too many people, treading on fragile coral and smashing their way through previously pristine wilderness areas — climate change and invasive species all play their part.

The crisis facing Madagascar seems especially poignant, because it mirrors what has already happened in one island paradise — Hawaii — and could conceivably be a harbinger of things to come in the Galapagos Islands.

Much as rats arrived in Hawaii, the Asian common toad, Duttaphrynus melanostictus, is believed to have been a stowaway aboard a ship from far away, in this case a container ship from Vietnam unloaded at a Madagascar port and then accidentally opened a nickel processing plant. (Nickel, used in smartphones and other handheld devices, is a huge driver of Madagascar’s otherwise rocky economy.) The toads are large, nondescript looking and poisonous. They lack the bright markings and vibrant colours that would otherwise warn predators like snakes and birds to stay away. They’re bigger and tougher than the local toads, and they breed, well, like rats, only more so. Frogs local to Madagascar lay roughly 10 eggs at a time; the Asian toad spawns an estimated 10,000 to 40,000 at a time. The Asian toad was first spotted, so to speak, in Madagascar in 2008. Today, it’s believed there may be as many as 7 million of them — by conservative estimates. More liberal estimates put the number closer to 21 million.

It matters because, in the short term, biologists worry the toad will spread to the Betampona Nature Reserve, home to Madagascar’s famous ring-tailed lemurs. The toads do not pose a direct threat to the lemurs, which are critically endangered as it is, but could prove deadly to the forest the lemurs depend on to survive. It’s the story of the world’s ecosystems in microcosm: The smallest player in the circle of life plays a major role in the big picture, regardless of size. Once again, humankind has interfered in the natural order of things. Even a casual reading of the situation suggests it may already be too late.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/24/madagascar-toxic-toads-lemurs-ecology-threat

All power, then, to the Seychelles scheme, which — if it pans out, and even if it doesn’t — is at least trying to address the problem, rather than add to the already growing litany of environmental woes.

Dubbed tongue-in-cheek as “Debt for Dolphins,” the Indian Ocean nation of Seychelles will establish two large marine parks in exchange for much of its national debit to be written off.

If enacted, the legislation will throw a lifeline to tuna, dolphins, sharks and turtles caught in fishing nets, as create a barrier against overfishing. Seychelles relies on tourism for a large portion of its foreign exchange, but tourists are unlikely to come to dive if there is nothing to see underwater. That’s especially true of the coral reefs, which sustain marine life and are under threat from “bleaching” — the whitening that results when ocean temperatures rise precipitously and the living coral dies — throughout the world’s tropical seas.

Again, why care about the Seychelles?

Simply, the Aldabra archipelago, Seychelles’ jewel in the crown of biodiversity, rivals the Galapagos in ecological importance, marine scientists say. It’s not just manta rays, humpback whales, tiger sharks and clownfish, or ‘nemos’ as some call them, either. Aldabra is home to the dugong, or sea cow, said to be the single most endangered species in the entire Indian Ocean. Some 100,000 rare giant tortoises roam the tropical beaches and swim the local waters. The protected marine reserve at Aldabra will encompass some 74,000 square kilometres (28,500 square miles), roughly the size of Scotland.

A second, even larger marine reserve, 134,000 square km in all (52,000 square miles) is centred on the main Seychelles island of Mahe.

The parks are the indirect result of the first-ever debt swap for marine protection, and involve some $22 million owed to the UK, France and Belgium. (The swap was facilitated through the NGO The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which raised some $5 million from donors to pay off part of the debt and help cut the interest rate charged by lenders.)

Enforcement may no longer be the bugaboo it once was, either: New satellite programs are being designed to monitor fishing boats from space and detect erratic or illegal fishing patterns.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/22/debt-for-dolphins-seychelles-create-huge-new-marine-parks-in-world-first-finance-scheme

Another potential solution — albeit temporary — to the crisis facing the world’s surviving coral reefs is about to tried in Thailand, on the sands of Maya Bay, the cove on the small island of Koh Phi Phi Leh made famous in Danny Boyle’s 2000 cult film The Beach, starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio as a disaffected backpacker who tries to find paradise — and encounters greed, lust and murder instead — on an idyllic, untrammelled beach in Thailand.

Maya Bay is no longer untrammelled. The tiny, white-sand cove is now so choked with so many tourists that 80% of the coral has been destroyed. The despoiling of Maya Bay mirrors the destruction of once-pristine coves and beaches throughout Southeast Asia.

Money trumps the environment every time, even though it’s the environment that attracts tourist dollars in the first place.

Now, recent announcements from Thailand’s government suggest Maya Bay could be closed to visitors for as long as six months, to give the fragile marine environment time to recover. The Philippines is reportedly considering a similar action for its equally famous — and equally troubled — island of Boracay. More than 2 million tourists descend on the eight km-long (5 miles) every year. It’s not hard to imagine raw sewage and detritus from construction sites will destroy what’s left of the coral — and this after a massive die-off in 2015 sounded an alarm in conservation circles, though not among the developers themselves, it would appear.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/25/can-tourist-ban-save-dicaprios-coral-paradise-thailand-maya-bay-philippines-boracay

It may already be too late, of course.

Jojo Rodriguez, an NGO marine conservationist who has been monitoring Boracay’s coral reefs since 2012, told the Sunday Observer that it will take more than six months to solve the problem.

“Maybe 60 years, if we are lucky,” Rodriguez told the paper.

As campaigners point out, though, Southeast Asia’s coral reefs continue to die. A six-month ban on tourism may not seem like much — and it isn’t — but it’s a start.

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen