Today while riding by bike around Canberra I stopped over at the old parliament house to catchup with a friend. I was blown away by a stunning exhibition called “Beyond Reasonable Drought”. The exhibition documents in photos the effects of drought on the people, livestock and the land over the last few decades. The project looked to the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project from the great depression for inspiration. The FSA project is no doubt was one of the most impressive examples of photo-journalism.

In the Australian exhibition, as if the photos were not impressive enough upon checking out the website (http://www.oph.gov.au/brd/) for the exhibit I found all photos are geotagged.
http://tinyurl.com/drought-map-kml
http://tinyurl.com/drought-map-flickr

This information when overlaid on top of the major river basins in Australia provides an instant understanding of why the Darling/Murray basin is running out of water. If we take the clustering of the photographs as a surrogate for drought intensity then most of the photos are clustered in the southern end of the daring/murray basin in Victoria.

Google Earth
Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

On a related note I just finished a project with Mikel Maron to document the growing trend in the US amongst younger people to take up farming. This aims to capture profiles of young farmers by getting them to complete a survey and provide their location. Check it out here http://www.serveyourcountryfood.net/ (it was just launched and is currently in beta)