Blogposts tagged 'Forest Fires'

As someone born in Australia, now living in London, it's been a poignant few weeks to be working as a senior campaigner on the Greenpeace forests campaign.

When I was a young kid in Australia, we lived on a three acre property in a valley that was a mixture of bush, pasture and citrus orchards in the foothills of Perth, Western Australia.  In summer we would sniff the wind nervously. Some years, we watched with grim fascination as uncontrolled fires swept the opposite side of the valley. One year, before I was born, the flames came close to my families' home, but we were fortunate. 

At primary school, diligent teachers instructed us in the risks of bushfires. There's nothing like a match dropped on a pile of dried eucalyptus leaves, even in controlled conditions, to make the point to a group of rapt five year olds. Eucalyptus trees are full of oil - they explode and the fire jumps. When I was eight, Colin Thiele's classic Australian children's book The February Dragon, telling the story of an idyllic rural life consumed by summer fires, drove the lesson home. Some times as a child I couldn't sleep because I imagined the smell of smoke. 

It's currently the dry season in the Amazon and, as the live webcast last week demonstrated, fires have been decimating large areas. The video crew weren't the only ones documenting the fires and last week we received images from another Greenpeace team who took to the air to photograph them and the devastated areas they leave behind. We've put together some of the most striking (not to say depressing) images into the slideshow below.

One of the pleasures of working at Greenpeace is having access to a truly incredible photo library and there's been more than one occasion when, looking for images to accompany a blog story, I've become lost in the wealth of powerful and affecting images.

The photographers who supply us with these photos are rewarded for their work with the occasional trophy and Daniel Beltra, who has accompanied Greenpeace campaigners on expeditions all over the world, was last week presented with the Global Vision Award for photos he took in the Amazon as part of Pictures of the Year International. He also received an Award of Excellence in the Science/Nature category for a collection from the Antarctic, taken during last year's Southern Ocean expedition on the Esperanza.