SeaWeb's Marine Photobank and Project AWARE Foundation invite you to participate in the Ocean in Focus Conservation Photography Contest.  Submit your compelling photos that engage viewers in pressing marine issues and solutions that address the rapid decline of our ocean's health.  Contest opened on World Oceans Day (June 8) and runs through August 27, 2009. 

Grand prize package includes:

Seven nights ocean-view accommodations at MATAVA, a premier eco-adventure resort in Fiji. Package includes 5 days, 2-tank diving for two and 6 days unlimited shore diving for two as well as roundtrip airport transfers.

A DVD copy of A Sea Change

16 tons of Carbon Offsets through NativeEnergy for your home and car for one year, plus carbon offsets for one round-trip air flight.

Visit the photo contest's home page.

Last month,both iLCP Associate Vincent Munier and Emerging League Member Inaki Relanzon were chosen as photographers of the week.

Visit the Wild Wonders of Europe website to see the latest posts on their blog (now also available in Spanish).  Join one of their many communities or check out the new galleries of images.  You can also enter the photo competition, or place your vote!  The last day of each month is the deadline for each coming month's competition.

iLCP Affiliate Sharon Guynup contacted us to share this essay with everyone.

Day Seventy-nine
by Barbara Kingsolver

We find ourselves in a chapter of history I would entitle "Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came Around to Bite Us in the Backside." We're ravaged by disagreements, bizarrely globalized, with the extravagant excesses of one culture washing up as famine or flood on the shores of another. Even the architecture of our planet-climate, oceans, migratory paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs-is collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Twenty years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that carbon emissions were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said, We need to think about that. Ten years later, the world's nations wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our carbon emissions. The United States said, We still need to think about it. Now we watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity go out, the oceans reverse their ancient order. A few degrees look so small on the thermometer. We are so good at measuring things and declaring them under control. How could our weather turn murderous, pummel our coasts, push new diseases like dengue fever onto our doorstep? It's an emergency on a scale we've never known, and we've responded by following the rules we know: efficiency, isolation. We can't slow productivity and consumption-that's unthinkable. Can't we just go home and put a really big lock on the door?

Not this time. Our paradigm has met its match. Now we can either shift away from a carbon-based economy or find another place to live. Imagine it: we raised our children on a lie. We gave them this world and promised they could keep it running on a fossil substance-dinosaur slime-and it's running out. The geologists disagree only on how much is left, and the climate scientists now say they're sorry, but that's not even the point: we won't have time to use it all. To stabilize the floods and firestorms, we'll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent within a few decades.

We're still stuck on a strategy of bait and switch: okay, we'll keep the cars but run them on ethanol made from corn! But ... we use petroleum to grow the corn. Even if you like the idea of robbing the food bank to fill the tank, there is a math problem: it takes nearly a gallon (or more, by some accounts) of fossil fuel to render an equivalent gallon of corn gas. Think of Jules Verne's novel in which the hero is racing Around the World in Eighty Days and finds himself, on day seventy-nine, stranded in mid-Atlantic on a steamship that has run out of coal. Phileas Fogg convinces the captain to pull up the decks and throw them into the boiler. "On the next day the masts, rafts, and spars were burned. The crew worked lustily, keeping up the fires. There was a perfect rage for demolition." The captain remarked, "Fogg, you've got something of the Yankee about you." Oh, novelists. They always manage to have the last word, even when they're dead.

How can we get from here to there without burning up our ship? That must be our central task now: to escape the wild rumpus of carbon-fuel dependency in the nick of time. We must make rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what we use and possess. We must radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat. In the words of my esteemed colleague and friend Wendell Berry, the new Emancipation Proclamation will not be for a specific race or species, but for life itself. We Americans are the 5 percent of humans who have made around 30 percent of all the greenhouse gases emitted since 1750. But our government has been reluctant to address the issue, for one reason: it might hurt our economy. For a lot of history, many nations said exactly the same thing about abolishing slavery: We can't grant humanity to all people-it would hurt our cotton plantations, our sugar crop, our balance of trade. Until the daughters and sons of a new wisdom declared: We have to find another way. Enough of this shame.

Have we lost that kind of courage? Have we let economic growth become our undisputed master again? As we track the unfolding disruption of natural and global stabilities, young people are told to buy into business as usual: you need a job. Do what we did, preserve a profitable climate for manufacture and consumption at any cost. Even at the cost of the other climate, the one that was hospitable to life as we knew it.

In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint, "Your money or your life," the answer is not supposed to be difficult. And in fact a lot of people are rethinking the money answer, looking behind the cash price to see what it costs us to mine and manufacture, to transport, to burn, to bury. What did it harm on its way here? Could I get it closer to home? In previous generations we rarely asked about the hidden costs; we put them on layaway. But the bill has come due. Some European countries are calculating the "climate cost" of consumer goods and adding it to the price. We're examining the moralities of possession, inventing renewable technologies, recovering sustainable food systems. We're even warming up to the idea that the wealthy nations have to help the poorer ones, for the sake of a reconstructed world. Generosity will grind some gears in the machine of Efficiency, but we can retool.

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. Each time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules and those who said, "We already did. We have made the world new." The hardest part will be to convince ourselves of the possibilities and hang on. If we run out of hope at the end of the day, we'll rise in the morning and put it on again with our shoes. Hope is the only reason we won't burn what's left of the ship and go down with it. If somebody says, "Your money or your life," you can say, "Life." And mean it.

All journalists (including photojournalists) are welcome to register on the website for the Earth Journalism Awards!  These awards are designed to spur and improve reporting on climate change around the world during this crucial year leading up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (in Copenhagen December 7-18, 2009).  The competition officially opened on June 5.  Winners will be invited to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen this December, where they will cover these pivotal negotiations and be honoured at a high-profile awards ceremony. Download the PDF for all the information.

Internews and MTV announce the launch of the MTV Positive Change Award on creative multimedia coverage of climate change.  Any young person between the ages of 18 and 28, who is passionate about climate change, is invited to apply to a  special category of  the Earth Journalism Awards specifically designed by MTV and Internews for young creatives.  The winner of the MTV Positive Change Award will be honored at a high-profile awards ceremony at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December and will be supported by a production team from Internews to cover the pivotal negotiations for youth audiences around the world.  Since the announcement of the Earth Journalism Awards at the G8 Environment Ministers Meeting in Italy on Earth Day, April 22nd, journalists and bloggers from over 115 countries have signed up for the opportunity to be at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen.  The MTV Positive Change Award gives one highly creative young adult a chance to have their work showcased on the eve of the final negotiations.

Save the Date!  November 6-13 2009 Merida, Mexico
The iLCP will have a significant presence during WILD 9!  We have been invited to organize a Conservation Communications symposium that we have titled Wild Speak, to discuss ways in which communications can have a greater impact in achieving conservation success. We will also coordinate a series of photography-related events, including exhibits, workshops, lectures and presentations by some of the world's best conservation photographers.

Join us at Wild Speak for four days of discussion, debate and creative thinking on the power of communications to achieve conservation outcomes!  View the preliminary agenda for Wild Speak here.

Also, you are invited to join iLCP Fellow Brian Skerry at the opening presentation of WILD9 on July 10th in Cancun, Mexico!  View the full invite here!