Once were wetlands. (An Unusual Round Trip)

Pawn/fish farms and palm oil plantations are replacing mangroves and salt marsh at an unprecedented rate. 

This photo has had an interesting voyage around cloud computing (unintentionally). First I was investigating the updated google photo app, and eventually got to see my on-line photos again. In the meantime when I was in Singapore google autoback must have vacuumed up all the photo I had taken that day, when I put my camera card in my laptop while checking my email and attempting to blog. So I was looking at the jpeg version of the photos, thinking what the?, and wanted to straighten this one. Turns out the edit features are no longer snapseed they are a simplified set of basic tools (without a straighten tool), A lame set of colour filters and a cropping tool (ok that can wiggle the image from left to right). Bit of a disappointment really. However tucked away in the options (just on the android app) is the option to edit the photo in snapseed, so I did and played a bit (eg adding the borders) and I saved that on my phone. In the meantime my flickr app had updated (and even though I had previously turned off the automatic upload) it to vacuumed up my phone images (including the edited photo above) and posted to flickr (albeit privately). I kind of liked it and it tells an important story so I changed it to public. Even better I could paste the link to the photo here in blogger.

So what is the important story it tells. I am working on a new art project I have begun to call "The Veil of Gaia", and I want to illustrate the beautiful analogy of James Lovelock of various earth systems as a force to protect life itself. He suggest rainforests are like her lungs, but we are tearing those down at a great rate, which must make it much harder for her to recover. Rivers are her circulatory system and particularly wetlands act like her renal system purifying her vital waters, but we are now slicing those apart too. This must be making her very sick indeed and her task of keeping the earth suitable for all forms of life is going to get more difficult for her.