LIFE exists on Earth because of the sea. Life awoke in the sea, reached its greatest diversity in the sea, and conquered the land by crawling from the sea. Since the first primitive humans beheld the oceans, we have wondered at their secrets and the life hidden within their 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of...

(Text by Khong Swee Lin. Photos by Carl-Bernd Kaelig) WORKING round the clock, stevedores trot up and down narrow gangplanks propped between port and deck, loading the holds of an armada of Buginese schooners commonly known as pinisi thronging the old harbour of Sunda Kelapa on Jakarta’s north coast. With double masts thrusting skywards, their...

(Text by Wang Guan Li. Photos by John Novis/Greenpeace) Glaciers in the Himalayas used to provide the water source for one-sixth of humanity. Dubbed the “Third Pole”, for having the largest concentration of glaciers outside the polar caps, the Himalayas boast 11 peaks over 8,000 metres and around 100 over 7,000 metres. Scientists predict that...

The natural wealth of the Philippines has spilt across the 7,107 islands of the archipelago. However, in a twist of fate, much of the diversity is now restricted to the areas of its natural origins – the slopes of the volcanic mountains. A recent expedition explored one such area in northern Negros, revealing an...

How Japan’s broken economic state destroyed the middle-class haven (Text by Kara Kandarakis and photos by Michael Kandarakis) It was January 10, 2001 at exactly 7pm. The outdoor thermometer on a high-rise building read -2DegC – an unusually frigid winter month for January in Tokyo that year. Matsui watched the snow gently float from the...