With the current climatic problems and the ever growing energy concerns, the work undertaken at Sunseed grows more and more important in our understanding of the balance that can be maintained between us and nature.

One of the most interesting aspects at Sunseed must be demonstrating communal living. This is one of the key aims at Sunseed, as far as possible using methods which have the least environmental impact. All energy for the project is supplied via Solar panels. Solar energy is even used to heat water for showers and to cook food during the summer months.

There are several departments within Sunseed, all responsible for different aspects of maintaining a small community of people. These include everything from dry land regeneration to waste management. It is this community spirit, with everyone having their own unique role within the community, which makes Sunseed such an interesting environment.

An interesting twist to the work being undertaken at Sunseed is the research into Low-tech methods to promote the use of Mycorrhizal. These are fungi which attach themselves to the roots of plants and trees and have been shown to markedly increase the growth of some crops in desert regions.

These factors, combined with the growing lack of natural resources such as Oil upon which we have become so heavily dependent, make the work undertaken by Sunseed Desert Technology a more contemporary issue than ever before. Focusing on the relationship between the community and their environment has allowed the images contained within the accompanying book to have a more personal touch which will hopefully add to the urgency with which at least some of these methods should be incorporated into modern lifestyles.

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The olive harvest, from late October through November, has always held a significant place in the Palestinian agricultural economy. However, since 2000 and the beginning of the second ‘Intifada’, the olive harvest has been overshadowed by Israeli policy of collective punishment, manifested in repression, closure and blockage of streets, confiscation of agricultural lands, repeated attacks against Palestinian farmers by the Israeli army and settlers, and finally by the construction of the Apartheid Wall.

This infamous wall which is slowly snaking its way between the two populations supposedly follows the ‘Green Line’ dividing the two states. However, it has frequently drifted further into the Palestinian side as a means of confiscating more and more land from the Palestinians.

Today many Palestinian farmers cannot access their land as artificial and often invisible boundaries have been enforced by the Israeli military, preventing them from being able to harvest their crops.

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During the communist times, Porto Romano served as a base for the construction of leather tanning and pesticides factories for the rest of Albania.  After the fall of communism, the state shut down the factories but during the great social upheaval nothing was done to decontaminate the region from the dangerous chemicals needed in the mainly Russian and Chinese technologies used during the manufacturing processes.  A report published in 2004 by the Albanian Ministry of Environment along with the World Bank states the levels of HCH and Lindane present on the sites of the former factories as being hundreds of times over the limits permitted in EU nations.

Families have moved down from the mountainous northern region to try to gain work in the port city of Durres.  Settlers in Porto Romano have lived around the abandoned factory buildings for the past 8 years, despite regular attempts by NGOs and the Albanian government to move them on.  The main problem with their living quarters are that they are built with contaminated materials scavenged from the derelict factory buildings.  The UN Environment Programme designated this site an environmental disaster area which posed, “grave risks to human health, groundwater and the marine habitat” in a survey conducted in 2000.  Until 1992, the Porto Romano factory made use of a range of hazardous chemicals, including chromium-VI, which is used in leather tanning, and lindane, a pesticide many countries have banned.  The last of the plants there was shut down permanently in 1998.

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Our relationship with the natural environment has always been a fragile one and this is best exemplified by our need to encage and exhibit animals in zoos.  On the one hand, zoos offer a valid opportunity for education for the young to learn about the animals they cannot see and yet their future actions serve to protect.  By seeing these animals in the flesh it helps people relate to the animals they hear about in the wild facing extinction unless they adapt their consumption.   On the other hand holding any animal captive, including the process of breeding them for captivity surely cannot be argued to be anything but morally corrupt.

Dalian Forest Zoo in North East China exemplifies the various trends in zoos all within one enclosure.  It is at once both a look at what western zoos were like in the past with tiny, concrete enclosures and also a view of a more modern system with more spacious enclosures for the savannah animals.

The portraits of the animals of Dalian Forest Zoo presented in this project depict not only the physical and mental situation of the zoo’s inhabitants but also allude to how the Chinese people are embracing the rapid transformation of their country.  Importantly the work also addresses my own feelings of isolation living in a country as foreign as China for someone of British origin.  This isolation I felt on an individual level is very similar to how the Chinese as a population feel as a country that only within the past 30 years since the end of the cultural revolution is starting to find its own voice in the world.

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Thames town is an English style new satellite town built close to Shanghai as part of the local governments ‘One City –Nine Towns’ plan.  This plan was hatched out of the population boom being experienced in Shanghai.  In the past 15 years the population has increased by 8 million and the landmass it covers has increased from 100sqkm to a staggering 680sqkm.  Despite this growth Shanghai is still four times as densely populated as New York.  The ‘One City –Nine Towns’ plan seeks to construct nine satellite towns around Shanghai.  Six of these towns are to be themed on European style cities from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Italy.

The rise of China’s new middle ‘class’ is resulting in the creation of a new suburbia, the same phenomenon as seen in post-war Britain and America.  Now that disposable incomes are reaching levels that allow people to pay for better education, annual holidays and private accommodation, the landscape of China is changing in the same manner as seen in the West.  This is China’s suburban revolution.

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The city of Dalian in North East China is a city stuck between vast natural beauty and the ever-present human condition of commercialising nature, resulting in an often-bizarre landscape that aptly represents China’s rapid surge for progress. The development of theme parks alongside this natural beauty perfectly illustrates the global culture of advertising tourism to beautiful unspoilt areas that in reality come under threat through the increased visitation and development of the landscape. Much like in the 1950s in which we saw the sprawl of the growing middle classes in the West, China is now experiencing the this same phenomenon and where better to witness it than through how a culture spends it’s leisure time?

Whilst on the one hand this body of work challenges our preconceptions of the visual aesthetic of modern day China, the images also highlight global trend of the subtle destruction of nature for reasons mostly linked to financial profit.  There has been much press on China’s environmental record whilst avoiding issues of domestic destruction of nature in the West.  By making this series of images almost ambiguous as to location the goal is for Western audiences to question their own role in the perversion of nature.

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