There is something so haunting about desert landscapes, and much as we love our own in the Middle East region, we are blown away by China’s desert scenes depicted through Shi Shaoping’s “The Eggs” art installation.
A ship carrying thick black bitumen, the same stuff found in Canada’s tar sands, sank off the coast of Oman on Sunday and its contents are now floating on the Gulf of Oman – about 40km east of the capital Muscat.
Oman is a small and increasingly popular country that borders Abu Dhabi, the home of Masdar City and the Shams 1 concentrated solar power plant, and it is hosts the world’s second largest population of Loggerhead Turtles. Listed as vulnerable by the International Union of Conservation (IUCN), these marine turtles can weigh anywhere from 300 […]
A Few Brave People by Turkish director Rüya Arzu Köksal won the Golden Deer Award for Best Feature Film at the inaugural Abu Dhabi International Environmental Film Festival (ADIEFF) last Thursday night. Recognized alongside five other nature-themed films at the closing green carpet ceremony, the documentary highlights the challenges faced by people living in Çağlayan, İkizdere and Senoz in the Black […]
It’s Earth Day, which means you will see at least 100 stories in your Facebook and Twitter feeds that will list the many ways that you can become a better earthly citizen. And most of them are valid. Yet I yearned to find a more meaningful way to honor the day, so this year I […]
Eating at unique restaurants around the world is just one of the perks of a traveler’s life, but these experiences are always more fun when shared with our readers – especially when it involves subterranean spaces, that brought to mind these 700 year old cave homes in Iran. Thought to be up to 180,000 years […]
An American environmental activist who shone a piercing light on environmental negligence in Egypt, Mindy Baha el Din died suddenly last week after suffering a brain stroke, leaving behind a husband, two daughters and a large community of grieving eco-warriors. Born and raised in the United States, Mindy first moved to Egypt in 1988 and married […]
Locusts that bred in southern Egypt first swarmed Cairo, causing panic in Israel and Jordan, and now Lebanese farmers are battling the pests as well. Farmers in the north and south of Lebanon reported locust clouds over the weekend and expressed concern over the impact the insects would have on their crops. But the Agriculture Ministry […]
An artist’s impression of the Arctic camel. Illustration by Julius Csotonyi via The Guardian Millions of years ago, the ancestor of modern-day camels once roamed the Arctic, according to scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature. While working in Ellesmere, a cold and unforgiving place that lies within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, Dr Natali Rybczynski […]
Making Ecocide a crime and legally punitive could be one way of getting corporations to respect the environment Unlike humans, nature does not have a voice. It cannot voice its concerns for being mistreated, overused and abused and it cannot stop the harm it often undergoes; however, this may change soon. In April 2010, Polly […]
A surge of round-the-world cyclists have emerged in the last few years as touring gear has improved and borders have become more fluid (for certain passport holders.) Two South African men cycled to Mecca, and a pair of American women traveled the Silk Road to support trans-boundary conservation efforts. But these adventures are not without […]
Richard Allenby-Pratt’s popular Abandoned photo series still haunts us. Currently based in Dubai, the professional photographer received numerous accolades for extraordinary compositions that depict wild animals meandering through a deserted Dubai. How surreal, and yet not so far removed from the truth, it is to see rhinos and giraffes searching for food amid a backdrop […]
Taskurgan is an unforgiving place. Located at 10,140 feet in the Pamir mountain range on the borders of Afghanistan and Tajikistan, close to Kyrgyzstan and Pakistan, this small autonomous Kashgar Prefecture county in Xinjiang, China is cold, the winters are long, and food is hard to come by. But out of such a place emerged a fascinating […]
Omar Samra was the first Egyptian to summit Mt. Everest in 2007 and now he is hoping to be the first Egyptian man in space! The founder of Wild Guanabana and one of the most recognizable faces in Egypt as a result of extensive media coverage surrounding his mountaineering exploits, Samra is participating in the […]
This is the first time celestial navigation has been seen in insects but the scientists believe it is common.