Northern Focus is about us and our environment. Its about the small things and the large things, the animals and the mountains. Its about us learning to live in our environment rather than trying to control it ... to not destroy it for our own short term interests.

It seems that as a society we've never had it so good. The pace of scientific and technological advances in the last 50 years has been astounding. Advances that have radically changed the fabric of our society. However, the rate of advances have turned us into constant consumers of finite resources, always buying the next best thing, always believing that if we can "just have that..." we will be happy. We've got it wrong though, we have mistaken the pleasure we feel when we get a new car or go on an exotic holiday for happiness. When the pleasure wears off we need to acquire something else for a pleasure fix. As long as we continue to mistake pleasure for happiness we will go on seeking pleasure through consumption, consumption that tears at the very fabric of the world that supports our existence.




Often people look at what they think are ancient landscapes and try to conserve them in their current state. There is nothing wrong with conserving these environments, but it is often a fallacy that they are natural. Britain used to be a forested island, many of our current iconic landscapes would not exist except for the wholesale deforestation that occurred over the last millennium. Originally felled for settlements, around 300 years ago acts were passed to prevent trees being felled for any purpose other than for providing timber for the rapacious demands of naval shipwrights. Now that we only have small isolated woods left we are causing the deforestation of rainforests for hardwood and for crops like Oil Palm. In the process we are not only removing the lungs on the planet, but we are removing the habitat of thousand of species from the smallest insects to higher primates like orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees. Why is it that the outcry only comes when it is too late to rescue the situation or when a species has vanished forever?

Mankind has always had an effect on the environment. Very little of the world has not been shaped or affected in some way by us and what we perceive as untouched wilderness is often far from it. Individually we consume far more resources than our ancestors did. Combine increased personal consumption with a huge increase in the world population and we have an unprecedented strain on our natural resources. I still haven't heard a convincing argument that suggests we can avoid the ultimate conclusion of using up finite resources at a faster rate than we can renew them.

Photographs can look nice, but they are ultimately worthless unless they carry a meaning and convey a message to the viewer. My message is simple - this is the only planet we have, we are (and have always been) part of the environments in which we live. We cannot help but affect those environments, however, we can choose how we shape them ... or we can destroy them and destroy ourselves in the process.


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