Courtesy of
Marcio Pimenta
Climate Change Series
Marcio Pimenta
2nd
A member of the Explorers Club since 2021 and National Geographic Explorer 2022, Marcio Pimenta is a photographer and explorer who focuses on a testimony to human history, defined by conquest and loss, and sociocultural issues, identity, and climate change. He is based in the South of Brazil, and his work has been featured in multiple print and online publications worldwide, including National Geographic, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and El PaÃs.
He is an International Fellow Member of The Explorers Club, 2022 National Geographic Explorer, and Pulitzer Center, Grantee.
He has received numerous awards for his environmental reporting from him. In 2016 and 2017, he was in Iraq to cover the war against the Islamic State and the rebirth of the Yazidis women. This resulted in his first photo book, published in 2020, "Yazidis".
Rory Peck Trust Grantee.
Member of EveryDay Climate Change.
Man and Earth
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru
2018 - 2021
In times of climatic emergency, evidence from the scientific community and the daily lives of different peoples of the world points to significant tensions in various systems essential to humanity – in particular, the interrelationship between basic resources: energy, water, and food. Climate change will certainly put further pressure on these relations.
I chose to document the climate crisis from the perspective of history and geography. The identity of a people is not dissociated from culture, politics, historical process, and place. We need to understand how geography is in the order of everyday life, so it is important to record images that are a repository of human memories. The human condition. How do we get water, energy, and food in each place, and how do these practices connect regionally and globally?
The significant tensions between these key systems will increase. The so-called "stress nexus" is under greater pressure with the climate crisis caused by human activities on Earth and which defines a period known as the Anthropocene, when the technical capacity for transforming nature gains proportions so profound that it contributes to the stress that images can already reveal. "It can be said that the entire surface of the Earth is compartmentalized, not only by the direct action of man but also by the political presence. No fraction of the planet escapes its influence", Milton Santos, geographer, 2004.
"Man and Earth – Latin America and the Caribbean Chapter" is a documentary and artistic exploration. A long-term project, which is underway - as well as the results and impacts of climate change - and which aims to research, witness, and document an important issue in times of climate emergency: the relationship between human beings and geography, this is, climate, natural resources, borders, sources of energy, food, cultural identities, economy, and space, in a time of complex transition that is also reflected in everyday life, especially of people who will suffer from climate change before they can adapt. Stories of rupture, loss of geographical and cultural reference, but also of the search for survival and resilience that refuses to abandon the land, the shelter territory of many, as Milton Santos also says.
Of the people who inhabit and give meaning to landscapes and who also live a daily life that the consequences of climate change have already shaken. The temporal issue is highlighted because it is a part of exploring nature in the name of profit, which is in the order of the present day and points to possibilities for the future. How much time do we have to correct our destiny?
If human experience builds time, as demonstrated by Eric Hobsbawm, then positive changes must already be visible today and learning from these people based on the symbiosis relationship they establish with nature is a path of reflection and action that photographs can contribute to giving visibility to these processes.