harrowing

Once again the planet’s biggest and most important environmental photographic competition has brought into sharp focus the wonder and pain of the modern world.
These images convey, in a glance and capturing for all eternity, the beauty and brutality of ourcollective relationship with the natural world.
... With more than 32,000 entries from over 160 countries, the judges, under the chair of the highly respected Japanese photographer Takeyoshi Tanuma, were given an enormous challenge.
We live in an increasingly vulnerable world. Vulnerable to disasters, both natural and man-made,vulnerable to disease, civil strife, hunger and poverty as a result of environmental abuse and neglect.
The harrowing image of a Zambian man, slumped in a desolate fi eld of sugar cane stalks, the pitiful shot of a victim of the 2003 Bam City earthquake or the elderly Chinese man, head clenched in a desert of dry and cracked soils, contrast sharply with the heroic attempts of a group of Brazilians to rescue a stranded whale or the Buddhist monks reverentially dressing a tree in Thailand.
All are reminders of the impacts wrought on the environment and equal reminders of the special place it holds in our hearts. Reminders too that we have a choice, if we all agree to re-Focus on Our World.
-- Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP