People & Planet Calendar & Diary 2012 | Copywriting

I was asked to pen 56 short stories for People & Planet‘s Social Justice & Environment Calendar & Diary 2012, which showcase the work of a slew of photojournalists and raise funds for 42 Australian charities including Friends of the Earth Australia, the United Nations Association of Australia, Oxfam and the Cambodian Kids Foundation. People & Planet requested a stand-alone story about each photograph, telling the tale of the images themselves and touching on any wider social, political or economic facts in under 110 words.

Hung Out to Dry – Ecuador

Johan Bavman (Sweden)

It is Saturday, laundry day in Santa Cecilia, Ecuador, and Emerita Salazar dries her clothes on the scorching Texaco Sote oil pipeline which streaks from the Amazonian rainforest through the Andes and to the coast of Ecuador. In February 2011, following more than 17 years of litigation over Texaco’s “deliberate dumping of 18.5 billion gallons of highly toxic waste into Amazonian ecosystems, contaminating the soil, rivers, and groundwater for over three decades” (Amazon Watch), Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2000, was found guilty of the environmental contamination of the Ecuadorian Amazon and instructed to pay $9 billion in fines; representing the second largest environmental damages award ever.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night – India

Harsha Vadlamani (India)

“Do not to gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The lines of Dylan Thomas’s immortal poem peer out from a wall facing the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, as two young girls pass dressed in summer garb. A gas leak at the Union Carbide plant on the night of 2 December 1984 initially claimed more than 3,000 lives and was subsequently responsible for nearly 15,000 deaths. 50,000 people have been left with permanent disabilities and many are still suffering from chronic diseases due to the contamination of groundwater by 350 tonnes of hazardous chemicals that are still present in the city.

Catch 22 – Malaysia

Kim Chong Keat (Malaysia)

Bajau boys play in the water in Bajau Village, Sabah. The Bajau people, often referred to as ‘Sea Gypsies,’ are one of Sabah’s indigenous tribes and its second largest ethnic group, constituting 13.4 percent of the region’s population. Traditionally making a living from diving and fishing, the 1980s saw the Bajau people begin to employ ‘blast’ fishing techniques using homemade bombs. A method which has seen ‘entire tracts of what were once coral reefs become nothing but broken rubble littering the ocean floor’ according to the World Wildlife Fund. Coupled with overfishing, the decimation of the area’s underwater breeding and feeding grounds now threatens to jeopardise the tribe’s livelihood.

Freedom – Australia

Katrin Koenning (Australia)

Peaceful protesters fly balloons in front of the police guarding the erstwhile Baxter Immigration Reception and Processing Centre – commonly known as the Baxter Detention Centre – in South Australia before its closure in August 2007. The Refugee Council of Australia welcomed the centre’s closing, lamenting that ‘Many people left Baxter with significant psychological damage’ and describing the move as a ‘welcome step away from a discredited, damaging and costly regime of immigration detention.’ Between 2009 and 2010 a total of 13,770 refugee and humanitarian visas were granted as part of Australia’s Refugee and Humanitarian Program with most refugees originating from Burma, Iraq, Bhutan and Afghanistan.

The Golden Fibre – Bangladesh

Jashim Salam (Bangladesh)

A Bangladeshi man carries jute – the world’s most-widely produced vegetable fibre after cotton – to market. Once the country’s main crop export, jute has been referred to as ‘the Golden Fibre of Bangladesh’ with Bangladesh and India remaining the biggest jute producers in the world. Jute is labour-intensive to grow and harvest, and this provides vital employment which has seen jute become integral to the economic health of Bangladesh’s rural population. Jute is biodegradable and environmentally friendly, acting to control soil erosion, improving soil nutrition and fertility, and helping to combat climate change as it enjoys a far higher carbon dioxide assimilation rate than trees.

Climate Change Ground Zero – Bangladesh

Shantanu Biswas (Bangladesh)

With increasing world temperatures attributable to global warming, the changing shape of rivers and beaches such as this in Kattali, Chittagong, exposes the harsh reality of the effects of climate change on Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest nations. Dubbed “climate change ground zero” by NGO The Asia Foundation, Bangladesh is already the country most affected by climate change and most vulnerable to further sea level rises which threaten to displace a significant proportion of the nation’s 162 million people. In Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, flooding is so frequent that rents for ground floor apartments are roughly a third cheaper than those for their first floor counterparts.

Strangers No More – Israel

Nicky Kelvin (UK)

Shortly after Strangers No More – a film about the Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, which educates the children of migrant workers and asylum seekers – won the Academy Award for Best Documentary short in 2011, the Israeli government announced that it would deport many of the school’s children, forming part of a governmental drive to deport all of an estimated 250,000 illegal immigrants by 2013 in a bid to preserve its Jewish character. Israel’s migrant workers are not legally allowed to have children and on 18 March 2011, in solidarity with the children facing deportation, Bialik-Rogozin’s students joined festivities around the Jewish festival of Purim in Tel Aviv.

Mother and Child – Angola

Eric Lafforgue (France)

A Mwila tribeswoman holds her daughter, who suffers from albinism, in Angola, South Central Africa. Although albinism is accepted in Angolan tribes, albinos face severe hardship and maltreatment in parts of Africa, with chairman of the Albino Association of Kenya, Isaac Mwaura, reporting that roughly 90 percent of albino children are raised by single mothers as a result of their fathers’ mistaken belief that their wives have had an affair with a white man. Between 2007 and 2009, 44 albinos were killed in Tanzania and 14 in Burundi, leading an estimated 10,000 East African albinos to go into hiding to avoid persecution.

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