Author Archives: robertmeyers

Save The Whales Photo Contest

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And the Winner is……..the creative spirit inspired by the love of whales.

Save The Whales

Greenpeace invited activists to submit creative photos to show President Obama that people are serious about saving the whales, and people of all ages, from all over the world have responded.  Greenpeace has offered prizes for the top three images chosen by Phil Kline, Greenpeace Senior Oceans Campaigner, Diana Silbergeld, Greenpeace National Activist Network Director and myself.

The images they are sending to http://www.greenpeace.org/photocontest are posted on http://www.flickr.com/photos/save_the_whales. We will be delivering the images, along with petitions and signatures to the White House on June 3.  Some are charming in their simplicity and others are breathtakingly complex. All are individual expressions of love and respect for these amazing fellow mammals that remain at risk of violent destruction more than two decades after the International Whaling Commission voted to stop commercial whaling. Now the IWC is considering a proposal to resume commercial whaling and the United States is supporting that proposal.

Greenpeace and other groups are in an all out effort to let President Obama know that this must not happen. The pictures show that people care, and express that in so many ways. There are images of whales, leaping humpbacks, breaching tails, Grays, pilot whales, orcas, fin whales and dolphins. They are in the ocean, in the middle of the air and in outer space. There are horses, birds, dogs and people. People graduating, leaning on cars, holding signs, young people, elderly folks, kids and a great diversity in between. There are words, signs, banners, symbols and expressions. Waves, sunsets and lighthouses.

Seen together and great multilingual visual story of why we love whales and don’t want them slaughtered anymore. Contest entries close at midnight Wednesday, May 26, 2010. Stay tuned for the announcement of the winners as we stay focused on the U.S. position and the outcome at the IWC meeting June 20 in Agadir, Morocco.

Daniel Beltra, ABC Person of the Week

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For more than two decades, Daniel Beltrá has been saving the world, one photo at a time. Now, the world is recognizing him for the astonishing work he has produced for Greenpeace and for the work he has produced as the winner of a 2008 World Photography Award special category sponsored by Sony for the Prince’s Rainforest Project.

On Friday, Oct. 16, 2009, Beltrá will be named “Person of the Week” on ABC’s ” World News with Charles Gibson, at 6.30 Eastern Time, and 5.30 Pacific. The scheduled program will showcase his year-long tropical rainforest project, broadcast an interview with Beltrá, and display images from an exhibition at the Mercy Corps Action Center which runs through Nov. 15th at 6 River Terrace, Battery Park City, New York, NY.

The segment will also feature footage of Beltrá at work in Sumatra where he was shocked to find that more than 80 percent of the original forests have been destroyed and replaced by monocultures of palm oil, acacia, and eucalyptus.

I’ll be watching the footage of this master environmental photographer at work hoping to pick up any clues to his technique and to try and figure out how he is able to keep looking through the lens and making equally incredible images of the beauty of the natural world and the full horror of its ongoing destruction. I hope you will tune in whether you have appreciated his past work or are just discovering something new.

Through Beltrá’s lens we see the majestic grandeur of polar ice formations and the plight of polar bears leaping between melting ice pods in their disappearing habitat. Through him, we look down into depths of the Amazon forest and see the variety of plant and animal life and we see it disappear in a plume of dark smoke blotting out the wide horizon as it billows from the blackened earth under broken trees. Through his images, Beltrá takes us to the far reaches of the world bearing witness to what is happening to Mother Earth. He wields his camera to pierce the smoke and shatter the mirrors with which governments and corporations attempt to hide the awful truth of their plunder.

No Coal is Clean Coal

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Mr Peabody Coal and Mr. Massey Ferguson were walking down a winding country road in the Mountains of Appalachia. The kind of road John Denver sang about in “Country Road, Take Me Home.” They were talking about which of the surrounding mountaintops they would remove next, when one of them kicked at what looked like a can in the tall lush grass of the roadside. It was heavier than he thought it would be and hurt his toe a little bit and scuffed his Gucci boot.

They both bent over and discovered it was an antique lantern with a spout. Mr. Peabody rubbed at the surface to see if there was a logo or anything to identify it when a genie appeared out of it in a puff of smoke. They were astonished to see such a thing in the middle of a forest in the middle of the day, but before they could recover enough to accuse the genie of trespass on their land, which was everything as far as the eye could see and a bird can fly, the genie offered to grant them three wishes.

They could hardly believe their luck. First they asked for CCS technology, the here-to-for holy grail of the industry. The genie promised that all the CO2 from now on would disappear underground. Rubbing their hands with glee, the coaligarchs carefully considered their second wish, after some minutes in animated conference they turned to the genie and asked that the trillions of acres of toxic fly ash accumulating around their coal power plants could disappear removing the threat of devastating flooding from thousands of miles of watersheds.

The genie nodded his head with some gravity and assented to their wish that this threat to water and land vanish immediately and poof, the ponds were gone. The two megabillionaires thumped each other on the back and lit big cigars in celebration. They thought long and hard and threw out ideas about they could ask for next, maybe get the means to turn coal into gasoline, or to burn in streetlights or right in the engines of automobiles, but then they both focused on what was most on their minds, what they had spent so many millions to advertise and together they turned to the genie and asked them with one voice,  “make coal clean.”

The genie looked at them intently for many minutes with a look that shook the exuberance off their bravado and slowly he shook his head. As he did so they were effortlessly transported into the future they had planned for this very part of the lush eastern forest. Their eyes stung in the heat and the dust as giant excavators devastated the dense old growth forest and ripped into the ancient stone of the million year old landscape. Around them the cries of millions of creatures obliterated in the waste of the mountainsides and spoil of the mining operation filling the lush dark valley below. After the quick glimpse of the change from life sustaining forest to toxic desert the genie said “alas, you have wasted your last wish, for not even magic can produce such a thing as “clean coal.”