Earlier this year I decided to visit a strange looking waste management site in Um Al Quwain – one of seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates. From satellite imagery it looked like raw sewage was being dumped in the desert, just a couple of kilometres from Um Al Quwain’s precious mangrove estuary.
Not only was this quite impressive, but the bordering desert, being mainly fenced off (to all but the most persistent photographers) was alive with a multitude of wildlife in an evidently rich desert oasis ecosystem.
Sadly, the chain of sewage treatment lakes was bordered on the other side by domestic waste, and other, landfill.
So I found myself in a bizarre, contradictory landscape. What a sadly wasted opportunity to create a unique wildlife reserve!
Have a look for yourself at 25°30’25.28″N 55°37’1.06″E
Note from the editor: this photograph is part of a series called “Consumption” that seeks to document consumerism’s impact on the environment. From resource extraction and commodity production all the way down the supply chain to retail stores and waste processing facilities, Richard artfully examines what nature has come to mean in a world that depends on buying stuff.
Author: Richard Allenby Pratt
Richard is a British photographer living and working in Dubai, UAE. His concerns about the sustainability of the way we live and our economic systems only really became urgent after the birth of his son in 2008. As a landscape photographer he found the obvious way to express these concerns was by making photographs of the places impacted on by human activity, and particularly those places that best display the terrifying scale of our consumption. His basic method is to study google earth and then visit the most intriguing and inexplicable places thereby discovered.
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