Diary (2010) from Tim Hetherington on Vimeo.

Diary is a short experimental documentary by photojournalist Tim Hetherington currently making its way around the festival circuit. Tim photographs conflict, most notably in Liberia and Afghanistan. He’s currently up for an academy award for his film Restrepo. (Which you should watch. It’s great too.)

Tim describes Diary as “a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting. It’s a kaleidoscope of images that link our western reality to the seemingly distant worlds we see in the media.”

The film is set in Liberia and Afghanistan.

I like taking photos, and I like chaos. But I could never be the kind of artist Tim is. I don’t like to photography conflict or disaster. It’s not that I don’t cope well in these environments – I do. But when it comes to actually snapping a photograph, I loose my capacity. I learned that in Haiti.

Anyway, Diary pushes the documentary form. Watch it. It’s great.

As a visual artist and science communicator, data visualization feels like a natural marriage. But often, it’s lack lustre, created by scientists who are more interested in raw data than pretty pictures.

Here’s Hans Rosling, an expert on global development, and a data visualization guru. He brings home the correlation between visualizing data and thereby comprehending it. Stats on a page don’t jump out at you. But pictures do.

It also bring home just how far the continent of Africa has fallen behind.

This is a few months old now, but frankly, the content is ancient. Why is it mission critical when it’s in our own backyard, but business as usual elsewhere?

Nigeria is in my top five place to report from. Top five. In fact, it might even occupy position number one.

Dinner of the decade

Invitation reads: Supermodels, Freedom Fighters, Warlords and Washed up Actresses only!

Seriously, sorry for the inconvenience Naomi, I know you’d never even heard of Liberia and all, but when you dine with the stars, sometimes you gotta testify.

In other news, I have received an invitation. To screen a little film I made last year at Planet in Focus. More on that later.

HT Sana

The World Press Photo winners for 2010 were announced today.  While there’s lots of good stuff, I’m particularly stoked on Francesco Giusti’s portraits of the sappeurs society in the DRC. If only I looked that good, maybe I could get a date…

Trees for Africa

Yes, Africa is vast, and yes, the condition of the continent’s forest ecosystems can not be assessed without looking at its compiling nations as individual states.  That said, a surprising number of links today from around the great interweb about forestry in Africa.

1) Wangari Maathai, noble laureate, interviewed by the HuffPo.
After witnessing the destruction of the forest in her native Kenya, Maathai started a forest conservation movement.  In the process she went to prison, nearly died, toppled a dictator, transformed how African women saw themselves, and won a Nobel Prize

“I can’t live without the green trees, and nor can you. I’m humbled by the understanding that they could get along without me, though! They sustain us, not the other way round. Wedon’t really know where we came from, where we are going, and what the purpose of all this is. But we can look at the trees and the animals and each other, and realize we are part of a web we can’t really control.”

2) Charcoal production in Tanzania
No doubt you’ve heard – charcoal production is both essential and destructive to nations that depend on it for their livelihood. From the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine, a report that looks at the relationship between charcoal, climate change and poverty in Tanzania.  The article argues that instead of removing trees for coal production, African nations should aim to reap the economic benefits of hosting significant carbon sinks in world which increasingly relies on cap and trade initiatives to curtail global emissions.

“To get an idea of the value of the sink, the removal of nearly 5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by intact tropical forests should be valued at around $25 billion a year. This is a compelling argument for conserving tropical forests.”

3) Liberia rejects proposal to conserve forests in favor of jobs.
According to the blog Estyonage, Liberia recently recently rejected an offer for a cash settlement from western partners to preserve their largely untouched Upper Guinean Rainforest as a carbon sink, instead opting to ratify millions of dollars worth of forest contracts to create jobs for the recovering post-war state.

(Forest preservation) is valuable in a way that is difficult to sometimes rationalize in a country with an unemployment rate of 85%, and a desperate need for jobs: telling rural workers that they cannot have a job because of a global crisis involving a substance in the air does not translate.

Earlier today Reuters reported that African leaders are planning to ask rich nations to pay $67 Billion per annum in climate mitigation funds.  Ministers from 10 African nations met in Addis Ababa to draft a position in advance of the Copenhagen summit.  It is unclear if these funds will be in the form of Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) or simply as compensation.  Climate change, after all, is said to have a disproportionate impact on the world’s poor.  Shouldn’t they be duly compensated for a mess made by wealthy nations?

This is tricky.  On the one hand, it only seems fair that poor nations should be compensated.  A report by Global Humanitarian Forum suggests that the worlds 50 poorest countries produce less than one percent of global CO2 emissions, yet bare 90 percent of the burden.  Fifteen of the 20 countries most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change are in Africa.  Why not provide them with the capital resources necessary to navigate the impacts a changing climate will have on their nations?

On the other hand, skeptics are concerned with issues of accountability.  Will that $67 billion truly go towards fighting climate change, or simply serve to line the pockets of corruption?

Aid won’t mitigate CO2 emissions, but it could help mitigate their impact.  What do you think?  Are reparation payments for our dirty work appropriate in a warming atmosphere, or is the notion that aid payments could help just a whole lotta hot air?

Reuters reports that a new study by Oxfam warns that farmers in developing countries are already experiencing the impacts of climate change.  Seasonal weather patterns have shifted, resulting in drought in villages like Nassapir, Uganda.

“We don’t know why the god is no longer answering our requests,” said Laurien Lokwareng, an elder of the Jie ethnic group. “For years, we used to ask the god for rain and we got it in abundance, but we have had four years without enough rain now, and this is very strange.”

The report surveys a cross section of farmers in 15 countries throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, who allege that shifting climatic patterns are producing shorter growing seasons and crop failure. The agency predicts that the maize harvest in Sub-Sahara Africa could drop 15 percent by 2020, enough to leave a lot of people hungry.

I haven’t had an opportunity to read the full report yet, but my interest is peaked by the methodology. The information used to support the claims is a combination of data from the scientific community with traditional knowledge from the civilians who are living in the wake of our changing climate.  As I’ve mention previously on this blog, academics have been swift to reject studies that fail to prove a causal relationship between climate data and human impacts.  It will be interesting to see over the next few days how this report in received.