Losing ground in Tibet
When Phil Borges visited Tibet in 1993 he meandered across a pot-holed road in the capital city of Lhasa rarely disturbed by passing cars. When Borges travelled across the Tibetan plateau, the vegetation was so high in places that nomads complained about losing sheep within the voluminous folds of grass. But when Borges returned to Tibet almost twenty years later, the pot-holed road had become a six-lane highway and a significant portion of the Tibetan plateau was barren and dry.
China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reports that about 18 per cent of the Tibetan glacier has disappeared since the 1950s.
Borges, a humanitarian photographer, was locked out of Tibet for, which documented exiled Tibetans and their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, was unpopular with Tibet’s new governing force, the People’s Republic of China. When Borges finally did return to Tibet, he encountered a landscape severely altered by not just Chinese development, but rapidly rising temperatures across the Tibetan plateau.
