A piece I photographed and researched last year in Vietnam, on the rampant sand mining on the Mekong River and the impact it has on landscapes and communities has just been published on National Geographic.
Chunks of the Mekong Delta are melting away into the river daily, taking with it people’s ancestral lands and homes, partly due to the massive mining for sand — a resource we barely think about but is being depleted.
The barge-loads of river sand are going towards building the cities in fast-urbanising Vietnam, but also being shipped further afield to my native Singapore — the world’s largest importer of sand, for its large-scale land reclamation.
This is a chapter of my long-form and in-progress work on sand and how the world is running out of it, parts of it in collaboration with Vince Beiser who has written a forthcoming book on the topic.
A big thank you to Alexa Keefe for the year-long collaboration and editing, as ever for her patience and kindness.
Thank you to the two producers who worked their butts off in field alongside me Phạm Lan Phương and Dat Tien Vu.
And thank you to Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for helping cover expenses with a grant for part of the trips.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/vietnam-mekong-illegal-sand-mining/
