So long, 2010; it’s been nice knowing ya…

Well, hello there 2011. You’ve got a hell of a lot to live up to.

As most people know, I started my whirlwind trip in late summer of 2009 and things haven’t really gone bad yet.

I started 2010 in the remote paradise of the Andaman Islands, far off India’s coast. I had just learned to dive and fell in love with the sport. Fish are friends, not food.

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Published: What lies beneath… India’s nascent dive industry?

Vibrant waters, ripe for conservation or destruction

My latest reporting: a magazine-style, travelogue/environmental essay published by my favorite Indian magazine, Caravan.

The piece focuses on my various experiences diving in India and asks in general whether the Indian government, environmental movement and people are in a position to conserve or consume this great underwater natural resource.

Many thanks to Dave, my editor, who gave me leeway to experiment in form and content. And to think it all started with a giddy, roof-top conversation over small cups of tea.

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Published: Darjeeling hills of tea ready to boil?

Face

I spent time in Darjeeling at the end of May reporting a political magazine story on the tension in the Gorkha movement after the leader of a smaller separatist party was killed in daylight near a crowded market. That story was published this month in a Delhi magazine and is available online now. The full-text version is also available here.

The photo above is from a massive political rally in Darjeeling the weekend I was there.

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Madagascar’s rare, unheralded flora

Last fall, I was in Madagascar and toured a forest preserve that protects a rare tree, call the sohisika. Above is an unpublished photo gallery form the trip, with botanists from the Missouri Botanical Garden, which runs the preserve.

(I know this is a flashback to the fall, but better late than never.)

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Published: Mining giant bills itself as eco-friendly?

My reporting from Madagascar last fall has finally been published. Globalpost.com picked up the story of the Rio Tinto mine that claims to be environmentally friendly.

The company has laid out an ambitious — some say impossible — environmental agenda in exchange for the rights to mine strips of coastal land for titanium

The Web site ran one of my photos as well. You can also see my entire gallery here.

Critics of the mine say its attempts at conservation and community development are little more than window dressing to procure mining rights. Indeed, the mine does have a lot of work yet to do, but it does have some NGOs on its side; time will tell, I suppose.

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Still have a few (million) newspaper readers over here…

Read, please!

India is a few years behind the digital revolution that has crippled U.S. newspapers. The paper is still one of the primary news sources for millions of people too poor and/or not savvy enough to use the Internet. Even TVs remain rare.

That will change inevitably, especially considering the boom in mobile technology here. Too, India’s literacy rates — particularly in the rural sector where most of the country still lives — favor a future involving more multimedia forms of news like streaming audio and cell phone news packages.

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Hunting for fish

The all important fish finder

Working on a diving story and feeling nostalgic. Here’s a shot from my exploration diving trip through Pondicherry. In the middle is the Garmin sounder that helps us choose where to dive. Out of five dives, three came up mostly empty.

But it was still a hell of a trip, diving waters no one has ever dived before.

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