Sockeye Salmon have returned to the Fraser River in BC!

The Globe has a small slideshow of photos  with the story. They’re not exceptional but the story itself is pretty surprising. To me, at least. Last year, barely one million salmon made the run and this year it’s expected to be 25 million! Go wild salmon! Hopefully this isn’t all part of an interconnected side-effect phenomenon related to arctic meltwater or short term algae growth.

Update: Video for the story, added.

Robert A. McCabe published a book of photos from his 1959 expedition to Antarctica and this essay shows a selection of the photographs. Not only are they really fantastic photographs but Antarctica 50 years later is still a frontier most people will never cross. Probably for the good, lots has changed since then in terms of what visitors can and can’t do to impact or interact with the place. It’s pretty funny to see the people in the photos picking up, posing and generally man-handling penguins and seals. Well, funny in that it seems like it was innocent enough.

Look at the essays “The East Anglians” and  ”Saskatchewan” in particular. After my trip and thinking about what stands out for me and what I want to work on further I can say that I’m glad that there are others out there looking at the prairies and the people there because their lot has an invisible impact on virtually every other population. I think that learning more about the prairies and the farmers provides the disconnected urbanites with a sense of place and history and direction that is lacking otherwise.

Guardian Photo Essay

This being the hottest August I can remember in my entire life, as well as the longest consecutive string of heat and humidity just in general, I’m a little bit hard pressed not to connect the weather to global warming. I’m clear – at least as clear as a layman can be expected to be – on the distinction between weather, weather patterns and climate. Climate change is by definition measured over time. But, the extremes in weather that come with that change seem to be here already. Hottest day, month, year on record. Tropical storms and floods are so common they don’t even make the news anymore.

As much as I find the humidity and heat unrelenting and awful I can’t help but brace myself for the world of Gwynne Dyer’s “Climate Wars” where people are literally driven from their homes by flooding and drought and storms and will need to find new places to live. The flooding in Pakistan is horrible and people continue to die. I haven’t heard any indication that the situation there is a permanent one so they can look forward to rebuilding but I dread the day that a coastline is rendered unlivable and the rich and powerful climate deniers simply direct the news elsewhere.

Further recent photos in the New York Times

Update:

From Huffington Post - 9 Nations That Topped Their Highest Temperatures This Summer (photos)

This photo essay by Donald Weber looks at a small town in the Ukraine that is badly contaminated by radioactive waste. He concentrates on the daily lives of the inhabitants rather than looking at the specifics of what went wrong and the the story of how it happened. I can’t help but attach my own bias to this story: that people really do need a lot of convincing to alter their daily lives.

Donald Weber is teaching a documentary photography seminar at Pikto in Toronto in October. I think I might look into that.

I attempted to post this from the road using the wordpress app on the iphone. No dice. As slick as the interface is both on the regular web and the mobile device, it really failed to simply allow me to post a bit of text with a photo.

Anyway, it was now last week that we drove through Crowsnest Pass, Alberta and happened on a long stretch of windfarms off the highway. I wanted to announce my official support for windpower as a viable alternative to the traditional fossil-based energy sources. I’ve been on the fence for a couple of years because not only is there a lot of data out there that says that wind-generated power is simply not efficient enough to replace nuclear or coal-based power plants but I couldn’t help but be a little bit swayed by the protests of locals who simply didn’t want to see their views replaced with giant white turbines.

After sitting through weeks upon weeks of bad news regarding the BP oil disaster I have to say that the aesthetic argument has all but disintegrated. I’d rather see every square inch of beautiful grassland covered in these giant propellors than face a future where entire ecosystems are wiped out, globally, due to unnecessary accidents related to our desperation for oil.

Really, my hope is that wind power can be further refined to generate more power and solar panel technology can be refined and applied to surfaces already industrialized and avoid the need for using up all the existing natural landscape for generating machinery. But, the bottom line is that all of this has to be explored and we have to be adults and walk away from what we know is destroying us.

I ask you: who is going to be converted to vegetarianism by a dude calling you a pussy? But, it’s good to know that there are obnoxious, loud and aggressive jerks on the vegan side of the fence. It’s tough to disagree with them when they’re all so mild-mannered and sensitive.

As usual, I agree with Bittman’s sensible approach to eating; that being much less meat than is the norm and lots more vegetables. I would never have picked up this book anyway. But, I just felt like it was unusual to see somebody who is, in all likelihood, a dolt extolling the virtues of a meat-free diet when that personality is usually all about pick-up trucks and blowing shit up.

Finally some good news! I noticed on David Suzuki’s site that one of the biggest forest conservation agreements ever is in the works to protect Canada’s Boreal forest.

The forestry industry is on board to make changes to protect caribou habitat and convert to more sustainable methods besides. I’m not sure how binding this all is in the face of our federal government’s penchant for oil and annihilation of wilderness but it’s something to build on.

I don’t think the photo above, that was from a trip to Killarney Provincial Park, actually counts as Boreal forest but hopefully I’ll get lots of chances for up close and personal experience this July when I drive cross-country with a camera.

I was interested to learn recently that there is a new photography magazine from  the photographers at VII. VII Magazine features the work of the photographers of the agency and its larger network. Anything that I see where documentary and journalistic photography is moving forward instead of being shut down gets at least one of my thumbs up.

James Nachtwey, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Franco Pagetti and Marcus Bleasdale all contributing regularly to one magazine? There’s a little bit of hope that the medium might survive.

As well, there is the original VII Photo Agency site as a more standard centralized portfolio of the photographers’ work.