1 000 WORDS
When words fail.
Photo essays from the frontline.
16 Feb 2025
Tending the dead
The maiden’s quiver tree is the Cinderella of three tree aloe sister species that grace the Richtersveld’s gravelly moonscape. Maybe it’s outshone by the towering charisma of the giant and common quiver trees— it’s stocky and stout — but its future is as uncertain as its siblings’, as the desert’s climate ratchets up from hellishly hot to unbearable.
30 April 2025
Wind-blown sand scouring life off a Southern African landscape
A nasty wind rips across Cornell’s Kop one afternoon in the spring of 2024, driving emeritus professor Timm Hoffman and his team to abandon the hilly study site a few clicks west of the |Ai-|Ais Richtersveld Transfrontier Park that straddles the South Africa-Namibia border along the Orange River.
First published in Mongabay.
14 May 2025
Agent Orange
The foothills of south-western Lesotho are like a burn victim who has barely survived their injuries. It’s as if they’ve been doused with napalm. The once plump, glowing skin of soil and grass is reduced to scar tissue, drum-tight over the jutting sandstone bones beneath. The wound is trying to heal, but the keloid scars of erosion gullies can’t close.
16 July 2025
Piles of Sh*t: Corporates are at odds with our constitutional right to a healthy, safe environment
Pollution comes in many forms. The story of a cattle herding community tackling single-use nappy pollution in the Eastern Cape’s communal grasslands shows up the foundational flaw in the global use-and-discard economy. Consumers are expected to mop up the pollution coming out of its tailpipe, when powerful profit-taking corporates should be turning off the pollution at source.