Belo Monte Dam on Radio 4
Broadcast back in May, ‘Costing the Earth’ on BBC Radio 4 was about the Belo Monte Dam. Tim Hirsch was also working with Ruy Sporsati of the local NGO and branch of Amazon Watch: Xingu Vivo Para Sempre (translated link). The show show gives an insight into the local people that will be affected by the Dam, after visiting local communities in the Xingu region.
Listen to it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b010y0t5
Photographer’s ‘Baptism of fire’ during the August Riots
Here’s a link to an interesting short video piece about how Press Association photographer Lewis Whyld survived the riots in Tottenham in August, shooting for the first few hours on his camera phone. Some really impressive stuff anyway, let alone shooting on a tiny phone lens in some extreme conditions and difficult lighting. Hat’s off to him. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15519194
Brooke Sharkey Indiegogo pitch
I’m proud to say that I’m friends with the very talented folk singer Brooke Sharkey, and have recently been following her and band to some gigs and practice sessions, documenting a part of the wave of new folk acts coming out of East London.
Brooke is currently in the process of making her debut album, and paying for it through crowd funding on Indiegogo. So if you can, please support her in this quest, you will not be disappointed… Here’s the link: http://www.indiegogo.com/Brooke-Sharkey-Album#share
iSpeak
Photo: Adrian Fisk
Adrian Fisk’s interesting and unique photo project: ‘iSpeak‘ has come to a major turning point – being supported by the UN Population Fund for the next phase – iSpeak global.
Here’s an excerpt from the ‘Business Insider’ article, briefly explaining the project:
Photographer Adrian Fisk traveled 2,700 kilometers across China and India to discover that most young people are, in essence, exactly the same.
While living in India, Fisk realized he knew nothing about young people in the nearby country of China, and neither did anyone else in India. Fisk dug deeper into the subject and came across the staggering fact that there are 1.2 billion people under the age of 30 years old in China and India.
Full article: http://www.businessinsider.com/united-nations-supports-ispeak-china-india-adrian-fisk-2011-10#ixzz1cPJQxEUS
Putting Down Roots, at Tottenham community allotment
Last week I visited the Tottenham community allotment which is part of both the ‘Putting down roots’ and ‘Capital Growth’ inner London food growing initiatives. Putting down roots in run in association with St Mungos shelter, and is a way of rehabilitating homeless people through growing food. The Tottenham community allotment is a grow to sell scheme, supported by Capital Growth: the campaign to support community food growing project in London. I’m going to be working with both these organisations over the coming months.
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Occupy the City at St Pauls – Eviction Pending
It was announced on the news yesterday, that St Pauls Cathedral and the City of London Corporation have filed for an eviction order for the anti-capitalist protesters that have been there since 15th October. This occupation has, on the whole, given the protest movement in the UK some good press, especially compared to the riots and student protests earlier in the year. The occupiers have been media savvy and have successfully got their point across in a peaceful way. The location has also worked in their favour, bringing in a lot of walk by support and interest. Like half of the photographers in London, I was down there at the start of the occupation. I was shooting for the wire through Barcroft Media / Specialist Stock.
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Belo Monte Dam construction site occupied
Things are hotting up with the resistance to the Belo Monte dam in Brazil, the project I was working on back in April. Last Thurs, hundreds of protesters including leaders and members of the the Kayapo, Paquicamba, Arara and Juruna tribes, occupied the construction site.
It was reported on the BBC website on the 28th Oct, link here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15487852
Featured on the Printspace blog
The excellent gallery and print studio in East London – the printspace, has featured some of my recent work on their blog today. The link is http://www.theprintspace.co.uk/blog/phil-clarke-hill/
I had the honour of being involved in the ‘So show me II’ exhibition there last month. Thanks for the feature and selection Cathy and Wido.
Food Matters
Project now named ‘Food Matters.’ This is my official explanatory statement:
In a nation of over 60 million, the amount of food consumed every year in the UK, greatly outstrips what is grown here. Food has become a commodity, and one that is often seen as less important to spend our hard earned cash on than to new TVs, cars and holidays. This hasn’t always been the case, in the post war era, food was seen as so important that rationing continued for several years after the country was stable as a whole, and this was when we still had a largely rural based economy.
Nowadays, the Great British public seem to be more out of touch with where our food comes from and how it gets to our tables than ever before.
With meat coming in plastic trays, vegetables wrapped in Clingfilm and pastries factory packaged ready for the microwave, it’s little wonder that many don’t even consider that these products must have come from an animal or plant somewhere along the way, albeit quite far down the line in many cases.
A great deal of food is still grown and produced in the UK, and increasingly those who are doing so are making a point of using it as a unique selling point, often at a premium price (does it not seem wrong that it costs less to produce something in Kenya than in Kent).
The ‘Food Matters’ project bridges this gap between consumers and producers of food in the UK. With photography and multimedia, the project shows what is going behind the closed doors of the UK food industry, ranging from small scale organic veg box farms and community gardens, to traditional livestock and arable sites, to large industrial operations with automated packing and international distribution.
The project will reconnect consumers with where their food comes from, how it is made, and the sheer scale of this multimillion pound industry that is essential to the survival of every one of us.
For companies willing to grant access for the project, it will improve their business through showing transparency and good practice in their production, as well as an opportunity to showcase any new and interesting technologies they are utilizing to make the production more efficient, greener and safer.
Food security and Food Sovereignty are not widely known terms at present, but are issues that will affect everyone increasingly in the coming years, and are only going to become more important in business and national policy. Whilst photographing the Cereal’s event and Fruit Focus for Haymarket exhibitions this year, I picked up a lot on this topic in the discussion forums, it seemed like it was on everyone in the industry’s minds, including Dominic Dyer of the Crop Protection Association and Peter Kendall of the NFU to name just 2 eminent speakers present. As an island nation that imports over 50% of the food that is annually consumed, the UK could be hit a lot harder than many of our European neighbors, if the risks are not addressed quickly and seriously. There are many different ideas, approaches and theories as to what will happen and how to tackle it, and ‘Food Matters’ aims to explore as many of these as possible, from both sides of the fence.
Some things like strawberries still have to be hand planted. Riverford Organics Aug 2011
Food Cycle
In a couple of weeks time I’m going to be shadowing the work of food cycle, a organisation that collects waste food that would be thrown away by supermarkets to distribute to those that need it, including cooking it and selling it at bargain price at their cafe in Crouch end. Check them out: http://www.foodcycle.org.uk/
Oruro Carnival Pictures published
Back in February, I was sent to Oruro in Bolivia by Tom Broadbent of Bizarre magazine, to document the annual Carnival, known by some as the Devil’s carnival. This is because the locals dress as Devils and various other costumes, parade through the streets to the sound of brass bands, throw water and foam at each other, drink all day and night, and generally get up to all the carnage that they not supposed to do during the rest of the year.
The celebrations also include a llama sacrifice ceremony down a tin mine, in which I ended up covered in llama blood, face, glasses and clothes! but it was well worth it for the shots. Besides, the whole process was very humane and is a long-standing tradition, the miners see it as lucky, and judging by the conditions they work in every day, I can completely understand that anything to help them feel safer in the mines is greatly welcomed. When shooting this I was with 2 wire photographers from Reuters (David Mercado) and AFP (Jorge Bernal), working as a team we found the mine and gained access, all conducted in Spanish which I proudly managed to understand most of. The photos and article was published in the August print issue of Bizarre, and now a larger edit is on their website, have a look at it here. Below are is a small selection of shots from it for you…
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Work on Belo Monte Dam halted from ruling by Brazilian Judge
BBC – Brazil Judge Halts Work on Belo Monte Amazon Dam
Reported on BBC news yesterday (thurs) this is big news for the Belo Monte Dam story: A high court judge has ruled that construction of the Dam to be halted with immediate effect, in order to stop any interference of the flow of the Xingu river, one of the Amazon’s main tributaries. This is great news for the campaign, although the fight is far from over.
According to Ruy Sporsati from Amazonwatch / Xingu Vivo Para Sempre, this is a small step and the type of decision that a large consortium like Norte Energia can easily bypass over time. At present they are only building the workers quarters which is fairly far away from the river, a site which I visited with Ruy back in April when construction had already begun, this was before the full licence was granted on 1st June. This is an important day for the campaign, and has brought it back into the International public eye with some much-needed press, but in essence it’s business as usual for Norte Energia, at least for now.
Below: Workers surveying the site of the banks of the Xingu for the density of the land. Building Belo Monte will need more earth to be moved than was excavated to make the entire Panama Canal.
Shortlisted for Environmental Photographer of the Year
One of my images ‘Bolivian Tin miner’ was shortlisted for the Environmental Photographer of the Year competition, run by CIWEM. They are now in the final judges stages, results tbc…:
This is the image that was selected:
Belo Monte Dam in the Ecologist
Below is an article by Karen Hoffman who is working with Amazonwatch and Xingu Vivo Para Sempre in Altamira, Para, Brazil – the same team I produced the Belo Monte photostory with back in April. The piece gives a good insight into the logistics and politics behind the dam and how it will affect the local indigenous people. Published in the Ecologist in August 2011.
Belo Monte dam marks a troubling new era in Brazil’s attitude to its rainforest
Karen Hoffmann – 15th August, 2011
Belo Monte is just one of a dozen giant dam projects Brazil plans to build in the Amazon region in the coming decades and opens up the world’s largest tropical rainforest to oil and mining exploration
The Kayapó chief stands, and a hush comes over the circle. All the other caciques wait expectantly for Raoni Metuktire to speak.
Instead, he starts to dance, whooping and shouting, a dance for the enemy. Afterwards, he speaks. ‘I will go there, to Belo Monte, and warn my family,’ he says, the disc in his lower lip punctuating his words. ‘What happened with Tucuruí will not happen again.’
His nephew Megaron Txukurramãe translating, Raoni exhorts the chiefs gathered at the 50th anniversary of Brazil’s Xingu Indigenous Park: ‘I want you to feel strong, you are great! I want to see you fighting!’
Raoni and Megaron are intimately familiar with the Belo Monte dam. They’ve been fighting it for decades. Belo Monte’s first incarnation was called Kararaô, a name that was quickly changed after indigenous people pointed out that the word, in Tupi, means ‘war.’
In 1989, a major protest was held in the town of Altamira. Even Sting showed up at the event. In a memorable speech, a Kayapó woman said: ‘Electricity won’t give us food. We need the rivers to flow freely. Don’t talk to us about relieving our ‘poverty’ – we are the richest people in Brazil. We are Indians.’ (See‘Adios Amazonia?’ in the Ecologist, Vol 19 No 2, March/April 1989)
That protest put the brakes on Belo Monte for two decades. But now, the project is on the fast track once again.
The picture has changed significantly since 1989. Then, the funding was mostly international: loans from the World Bank and international companies like Lloyds of London, Midlands, and Citibank. This made the project more susceptible to international public pressure.
This time around, the dam is being funded by Brazilian government and business. The consortium that’s building the dam, Norte Energia, is mainly funded by the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), reportedly with a push from President Dilma Rousseff, formerly Minister of Energy.
Belo Monte’s price tag is a substantial R$30 billion, but its actual cost is even higher. The enormous dam – it will be the third largest in the world – will both flood more than 500 square km, including parts of Altamira, and dry up more than 100 km of the Xingu River.
The particular section of the river most affected, called the Big Bend, happens to be home to indigenous and riberine communities such as the Juruna, Arara, and Kayapó. The project would cause the disappearance of entire species of birds, reptiles, and fish, and displace tens of thousands of people.
And Belo Monte is just one of dozens of giant dam projects Brazil intends to build in the Amazon region in the coming decades.
First dams then mining
The obvious argument in favor of hydroelectric projects is that Brazil needs more energy to power its astonishing ascent. But critics say that energy could be recouped in other ways. ‘Brazil could be hugely more efficient in its transmission and consumption of energy,’ says Brent Millikan, Amazon Program Director of International Rivers.
Where, then, will the 11,200 megawatts generated by Belo Monte go?
‘Belo Monte is a pretext for mining and oil exploration in the Volta Grande,’ says Sheyla Juruna, a leader from the Juruna tribe. One journalist tells me she has the governor of Pará on record saying just that.
Tucuruí, the older dam project of which Raoni spoke, was built in the 1980s on the Tocantins river to convert bauxite into aluminum. It caused major flooding along its 125-km reservoir and caused loss of forest, displacement of indigenous peoples and riverside residents, eliminated fisheries, created breeding grounds for mosquitos, and caused mercury methylation with potentially grave public health consequences for fish consumers in urban centers like the city of Belém, says researcher Philip M. Fearnside of the National Institute for Research in the Amazon.
Organicelea
Yesterday I was down at Organiclea’s Hawkwood nursery for an open day and good food swap. Organiclea is a workers co-operative that ‘grow’s food, sells food, and helps you grow food.’ At the nursery in Chingford, East London, is an abundant glasshouse and outdoor plot, growing a lot of the vegetables that go into their market stalls and veg box scheme. All the veg is organic, and through these initiatives they aim to have good locally grown food getting direct to the consumers. I got some winter salad seedlings to get growing on my windowsill: wild rocket, salad rocket and lambs lettuce.
The Good Food Swap is a great idea: people bring something they have either grown, made or foraged. All items are laid out and labelled, then the bartering commences, where everyone can see what they can exchange for their wares…
