Our second One Earth Photography Competition concluded on Friday with over 450 submissions, double last year’s; 27 winners across school and open categories; three million rupees in prizes. The numbers are encouraging but it is the context that matters more.
The contest has three themes – ‘Life in a Changing World,’ ‘Biodiversity in Your Backyard,’ and ‘Conservation in Action.’ These are based on the reality that nature is not a place we visit; it is the system we live in. Too often we speak of protecting the environment as an act of generosity — a cause we support when we can afford to. As growers, we know that this is distant from reality – our Dilmah Tea & Ceylon Cinnamon, the tea, coffee, rubber, cinnamon we produce on Kahawatte Plantations – are grown, not manufactured.
Every ounce of our Tea, Cinnamon, Pepper and similarly other crops, depend – for taste and goodness – on living soil, clean water, a stable climate, and labour of pollinators and microbes no one thinks of. This agricultural economy – our food security – is therefore unquestionably a subset of nature. Logically that means conservation of Nature is not charity, nor optional but our own survival.
We started our photographic competition last year because what we do not notice, we cannot defend. One Earth deliberately goes beyond national parks, inviting people to photograph nature in our backyard — the ordinary nature that vanishes quietly because no one notices. By the time that loss becomes visible, it is usually too late.
The winning images featured neighbourhoods from Rathnapura to Galle from the doorsteps of the contestants. Young Danuja was placed in three separate categories, simply by looking closely at what was around him. That is the whole idea because a photograph interrupts our inattention and makes something too often overlooked, worth looking at.
My father spent thirty-five years insisting insisting on respect for the people and nature that grow our food. Our One Earth Photographic competition is a modest expansion of the work of Dilmah Conservation and the MJF Foundation. They are a record of what is still here, near us, waiting to be noticed.
The 60 shortlisted works are on exhibition at Genesis: the Dilmah Centre for a Sustainable Future in Maligawatte, from 25 July. I encourage you to visit, and to look closely because what we notice, we protect.
