Randy Olson, Melissa Farlow Photography

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  • A teenager dribbles a basketball on an outdoor court with Nike ads.
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  • A couple talk and laugh at an outdoor restaurant at night.
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  • A couple talk and laugh at an outdoor restaurant at night.
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  • A couple enjoys a private moment at an outdoor restaurant.
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  • Musicians play lively dance music on a small outdoor stage for a crowd.
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  • The Heidelberg Project, an outdoor art museum started by Tyree Guyton in 1986.
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  • A timber faller works alone in the woods at Winter Harbor on Prince of Wales Island. He turns off his chain saw occasionally to listen for others working on nearby hillsides. It is a way the men look out for each other's safety.<br />
Loggers and fishermen rank in the top two spots for most dangerous jobs. Both are common lines of work for people in the Alaskan outdoors. Since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking fatal occupational injuries in 1980, there were 4,547 fatal work injuries in 2010, and fatality rates of some occupations remain alarmingly high.
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  • Cody, a timber faller, works alone in the woods at Winter Harbor on Prince of Wales Island. It’s dangerous work, and fallers listen for others’ saws between cuts to make sure a buddy isn't injured. Following his father’s example, Cody wanted to be a timber faller since he was a kid. He got his first chain saw when he was nine and has been working since he turned seventeen.<br />
  He leaves home at 5 a.m. driving an hour to the work site. Carrying a heavy chain saw, he walks with the grace of a ballet dancer on a maze of fallen trees. His shoes, called corks that cost as much as $750, have metal-spiked soles so he is stable on fallen trees.<br />
  Loggers and fishermen rank in the top two spots for most dangerous jobs. Both are common lines of work for people in the Alaskan outdoors. Since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking fatal occupational injuries in 1980, there were 4,547 fatal work injuries in 2010, and fatality rates of some occupations remain alarmingly high.
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  • Crew members from a family fishing operation land approximately 1,000 Coho salmon in the boat from a purse seine in waters near Craig, Alaska.<br />
Alaska’s fisheries are some of the richest in the world, with fishermen harvesting hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of salmon, crab, herring, halibut, pollock, and groundfish every year. However, overfishing, exploitation, and poor fisheries management in the ‘40s and ‘50s took a heavy toll on the industry. The state adopted drastic measures that saved the fishing industry from collapse. Tough times again hit the fishermen in the 1970s as the number of boats grew and increasingly efficient gear depleted catch levels to record lows.<br />
Permit systems and reserves helped the commercial industry recover in the late ‘70s—a trend that has continued to the present because of cooperation between scientists and fishermen.<br />
Fishermen and loggers rank in the top two spots for most dangerous jobs. Both are common lines of work for people in the Alaskan outdoors. Since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking fatal occupational injuries in 1980, there were 4,547 fatal work injuries in 2010, and fatality rates of some occupations remain alarmingly high.
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  • A girl plays with her toy horse backstage at a heavy metal rock concert held outdoors in Quito.
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  • A group of Turkish women eat a meal of potatoes, green beans, and bread outdoors.
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  • Huastec Indian seller and an indigenous woman haggle over the price of a pig at the local outdoor market held every Sunday morning in Ciudad Valles.
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  • Cowboys watch the White River Rodeo from a wooden grandstand above the outdoor arena.
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  • A worker helping to prepare for a festival takes a break to sleep in a comfortable chair placed in the middle of a street in Shanghai.
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  • Logging roads zig zag making a pattern seen from the air after a recent clear cut forest creating a barren slope on Admiralty Island. Less than 5 percent of the entire Tongass National Forest is composed of high-volume old growth. The biggest and best trees, the biological heart of the rainforest, has been cut—much of it for pulp.
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  • Islands surrounded by icy waters are seen from the air near Glacier Bay National Park. The wilderness contains rugged mountains, glaciers, rainforest and wild coastlines with sheltered fjords in Southeast Alaska.
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  • Rose Wedding Festival couples in a motorcade to Century Park.
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  • A young woman talking on a cell phone on a street at night.
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  • Buildings in the Bund.
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  • Fog rises from the base of the Straight Cliffs that rise up to the Kaiparowits Plateau in an aerial view of Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The protected Bureau of Land Management monument spans across nearly 1.87 million acres of public land from the cliffs and terraces to geologic treasures of slot canyons, natural bridges and arches. It’s remote location and rugged landscape make it an extraordinary unspoiled natural area valued by biologists, paleontologists, archeologists, historians and those who love quiet creation and solitude. Grand Staircase was named the first national monument in 1996.
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  • LeConte Glacier issues from the air in the Stikine Icefield. It is one of the few remnants of the once-vast ice sheets that covered much of North America during the Pleistocene, or Ice Age, the epoch lasting from 2.5 million to 11,700 years ago.<br />
<br />
 LeConte covers 2,900 square miles along the crest of the Coastal Mountains that separate Canada and the U.S., extending 120 miles from the Whiting River to the Stikine River in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest.<br />
There are over 100,000 glaciers in Alaska and LeConte is the southernmost active tidewater glacier in the northern hemisphere. Since first charted in 1887, it has retreated almost 2.5 miles but is considered stable.
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  • A young woman with a camera in a pedestrian shopping area.
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  • Adjusting the uniforms of guards at the Palais de Fortune development.
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  • Nearly a million cruise ship passengers visit Alaska, sometimes doubling a town’s population on a summer day. As many as six cruise ships make daily stops in Ketchikan - and as many as 500 a year - bringing tourists on the Inside Passage. Viewed from the air when landing a float plane, the ship is docked near sunset.<br />
<br />
Tourism is Southeast Alaska’s fastest growing industry. Travelers can shop for Native art and souvenirs or diamonds in one of many jewelry stores along what was a former logging town.
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  • A woman with a red flag is hoisted above a crowd at the Midi Festival.
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  • Taku Glacier is a tidewater glacier and the largest in the Juneau Icefield. Long an anomaly among  glaciers, it was advancing but in recent years has started to succumb to climate change and retreat. The blue textured ribbon of ice is mixed with sediment with the terminus of the Taku River.
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  • A bride in a white dress tosses confetti at a mass wedding at the Great Wall of China.
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  • A board where singles post their information to find a partner.
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  • A mass wedding at the Great Wall of China.
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  • A photographer leans in to capture couples in formal, bridal costumes and red balloons at a mass wedding at the Great Wall of China.
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  • A crowd of people in a walkway.
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  • View of Hong Kong from the upper floor of an apartment in the city.
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  • A young woman fluffs a pillow in her apartment.
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  • Trainer Kitty Lauman uses a rope as she works with a wild mustang on trusting to be touched. She learned gentling methods from her cowboy grandfather and patiently earns their confidence. She was a champion cowgirl going up and competing in rodeos.
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  • Taku Glacier is the deepest and thickest alpine temperate glacier in the world. Seen from the air, it originates in the Juneau Icefield of the Tongass National Forest, and converges with the Taku River.
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  • South Chilkat Mountain peaks are kissed with warm light at sunset above the Icy Strait. High winds sweep ice and snow from ridge tops creating a landscape that is severe, yet appears serene. Winds were so strong that it took several flights to find calm air to make this image.
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  • An upscale shopping mall.
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  • A bellhop at a boutique hotel.
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  • A dragon dance for promotional purposes on East Nanjing Road.
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  • Pedestrians walk past a movie theater.
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  • A couple on a bench with a lake view in front of a replica of the Venus de Milo at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
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  • Pedestrians in a shopping area.
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  • Brides line up for the Rose Wedding Festival, a mass marriage.
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  • Boats glide on plaid waters of the lake surrounded by high rises and empty stacked chairs in Century Park. The largest park in the Pudong area of Shanghai was built in 1996 and is also known as "Holiday Park."<br />
Part of China's plan for growth is to bulldoze old buildings and make gleaming new high-rise condos for the newly affluent which the Chinese prefer.
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  • Shoppers in pajamas in the 200 block of Guangdong road near the Bund.
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  • Two men sit outside a shop on a street that is known for wedding attire where dresses at the doorway lure shoppers inside.  <br />
<br />
Migrant workers in China are mostly people from impoverished regions who move to more urban and prosperous coastal regions in search of work. According to Chinese government statistics, the current number of migrant workers in China is estimated at over 120 million. China is experiencing the largest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in history with an estimated 400 million by 2025. Many are farmers and farm workers made obsolete by modern farming practices and factory workers who have been laid off from inefficient state-run factories.
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  • A young woman is doused with water as men engage in a water fight at China Folk Culture Villages in Shenzhen.
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  • Paintings by local artists in a painting village in Shenzhen.
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  • A young girl looks over the view from her apartment on an upper floor over the city of Hong Kong..
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  • A cloud of dust rises as two helicopters guide 870 mustangs across the desert into a trap. They were rounded up from the Winnemucca Rangeland Area after the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) determined that the number of wild horses there could not be supported on public land. Drought and wild fires created a dire situation for the horses, but advocates of mustangs believe horse herds are systematically being eliminated from western lands.<br />
Although there were as many as two million mustangs at the turn of the century, their numbers are much smaller and reduced regularly by BLM gathers.
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  • A young woman laughing on a street in the Chaoyang district.
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  • A cyclist with his son rides down East Nanjing Road.
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  • Posing before statues of Chinese leaders in the Huaxi village square.
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  • A romantic embrace on the street along the Bund during October Holiday week in the Puxi side of Shanghai where this couple is one of the lucky ones. “Bare Branches”—a phenomenon where a boy just cannot find a girl is a social problem in China. <br />
<br />
According to the 2010 census, there were 118.06 boys born for every 100 girls. For the population born between 1900 and 2000, it is estimated that there could be 35.59 million fewer females than males.
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  • A groom signs a wall with a kiss at the Rose Wedding Festival.
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  • A bride puts lipstick on her groom at the Rose Wedding Festival.
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  • Young people converge nearby an American chain coffee-house in the Xintiandi mall area.
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  • A street scene with a Coca Cola kiosk.
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  • Urban street scene in Beijing shows a woman wearing a dollar sign earring. Southern Metropolitan News surveys since 1989 cite Guangzhou residents as responding that “love” comes after “money” on the value ladder.
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  • Wilderness islands off Prince of Wales Island at the Dixon Entrance of the Inside Passage seen in an aerial view.<br />
Tongass National Forest covers 16.7 million acres stretching over mountains, bays, glaciers, 1,000 islands, 18,000 miles of coastline, and almost all of mainland Southeast Alaska. Approximately 94% of Southeast Alaska is federally managed lands, and of that, 60% is set aside as Congressionally-designated Wilderness, National Parks, and National Monuments.
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  • Tracy Arm Fjord is formed by a retreating glacier melting between granite walls. Sawyer Glacier calves into the fjord in the heart of the Tracy Arm-Fords Terror Wilderness seen from the air in Southeast Alaska.
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  • Kids doing a fashion shoot in a new unfinished mall in Nanjing.
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  • A young woman talking on a cell phone.
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  • Workers dismantle a protective fence around the Olympic Stadium area.
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  • Children of migrant workers play outside an office building where workers are taking a break as moving men in Beijing.
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  • Kentucky Fried Chicken and other business signage lights the busy streets in Guangzhou, which was the first city in China to reach first world status  in 2008.
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  • A couple walks hand in hand on a pedestrian escalator and walkway.
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  • People on a pedestrian escalator and walkway.
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  • People near the statue of Deng Xiao Ping in Shenzhen park.
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  • The Window on the World amusement park in Shenzhen allows Chinese to travel the world in an afternoon. Behind “Mount Rushmore” in this photo, actors dress as Africans in huts and Egyptians at the Great Pyramids of Giza. Historically, during Mao, Chinese have not been able to travel, but for now they can look at the “Eiffel Tower” and “Mount Rushmore” at Window on the World. <br />
<br />
Because of China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1978, this is the first generation in the world’s history in which a majority are single children, a group whose solipsistic tendencies have been further encouraged by a growing obsession with consumerism, the Internet, and video games. At the same time, today’s young Chinese are better educated and more worldly than their predecessors. Whereas the so-called Lost Generation that grew up in the Cultural Revolution often struggled to finish high school, today around a quarter of Chinese in their 20s have attended college. The country’s opening to the West has allowed many more of its citizens to satisfy their curiosity about the world: some 37 million will travel overseas in 2007. In the next decade, there will be more Chinese tourists traveling the globe than the combined total of those originating in the U.S. and Europe.
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  • A statue of Mao Tse Tung towers above a smoke stack at the gate to Wuhan's Iron and Steel plant.
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  • The government has made clear that it will do whatever it takes to keep the swelling middle class happy. Like anyone else, their experiences and those of their families shape members of the comfort class. When their parents talk about the Great Leap Forward (the disastrous Mao campaign in the late 1950s that left 20 to 30 million dead of starvation) and the subsequent chaos of the Cultural Revolution, they mostly tell horror stories that would put anyone off politics forever. One event that the comfort class does remember is the crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989. But to young Chinese, the Tiananmen protests are less a source of inspiration than an admonishment. Continued popular uprisings like Tiananmen, they believe, would have have provoked a counter reaction by conservative forces that would have led to a return to fortress China, meaning no more iPods, overseas shopping trips or snowboarding weekends.
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  • Kitty Lauman learned to train horses from her grandfather and now, she works with mustangs and difficult horses on her western ranch. Her daughter rides one of the many wild horses she has tamed and trained.
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  • Fog-draped forest wilderness and rugged mountains are typical in Southeast Alaska where the 17 million acre Tongass National Forest receives an average of 200 inches of precipitation a year.
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  • A woman talking on a cell phone on a city street at night.
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  • A young woman adjusts her hair and makeup on the street in Guangzhou while looking into a compact mirror.
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  • Photographer Randy Olson stands on a lift to photograph the gate to Wuhan's Iron and Steel plant that has a statue of Mao Tse Tung with arm raised.
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  • Traffic sweeps past an American chain restaurant on East Nanjing Road.
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  • People at an upscale shopping mall.
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  • A man with a mohawk and his girlfriend at the Midi Music Festival.
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  • A mass wedding at the Great Wall of China.
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  • A greatly laden rickshaw carries styrofoam packaging boxes.
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  • Brightly-costumed Russian dancers hair matches their sexy dresses on stage in Mingzhu Park during the October holiday.
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  • Rose Wedding Festival couples in a motorcade to Century Park.
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  • New construction along the Dong Da Ming Road.
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  • Traffic in Shenzhen at night.
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  • A male mannequin figure in black and white striped clothing stands at the door to entice people into a Beijing chain restaurant.
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  • A resident exits a villa in the Palais de Fortune development.
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  • Workers in the Palais de Fortune development outside Beijing.
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  • Arial view of a terraced V-shaped valley fill that sits at the edge of a reclaimed West Virginia mining site. Entire mountains are blasted away in mountaintop removal mining in order to obtain a small seam of coal. Unwanted rock is pushed into valleys and streams destroying natural watersheds and the length of the Ohio River has been filled in. The result is a threat to clean water and the biodiversity of the ecosystem.<br />
<br />
The Central Appalachian Plateau was created 4 million years ago, and one of its richest assets is wilderness containing some of the world’s oldest and biologically richest temperate zone hardwood forest. A flattened moonscape on top is mostly unusable.
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  • A young woman smiles with her eyes from a partially open car window.
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  • Models on a cattle call.
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  • Giant, splashy ads and billboards dwarf shoppers at the Parkson Mall at the  Intersection of Huaihai Road and Shanxi Road in Shanghai.
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  • A worker repairs electrical power lines above pedestrians. <br />
<br />
The need for electrical power is great in Shanghai and migrant workers are hired to hook up cables by strapping a high voltage wire around their waist walking on the actual wires that bring the electricity.  <br />
<br />
A coal-fired power plant comes online every four to five days in China that can power a city the size of San Diego. One hundred cities with populations over 1 million faced extreme water shortages. China’s survival has always been built on the notion of a vastly powerful, infallible center. And yet, air pollution contributed by these plants kills 400,000 people prematurely every year.
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  • A woman holds an umbrella while watching dance classes in Li Zi Park.
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  • Street scene of Beijing, China at dusk with lines of traffic in the road.
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  • Devils Thumb, captured from the air, stands distinctively higher than other granite peaks in Stikine Icefield. <br />
Cloaked with hanging glaciers, it's name is Taalkhunaxhkʼu Shaa in Native Tlingit language, which means "the mountain that never flooded." <br />
The sheer cliffs covered in ice are often unstable creating avalanches making it a technical challenge for advanced mountain climbers.
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  • Estuaries along the Lynn Canal are shrouded in morning fog while Lion's Head in the Tongass National Forest rises above as seen in an aerial view.
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  • Icy winds blow snow clouds blow over the jagged ridges of the South Chilkat Mountains that rise above Southeast Alaska's coast. Weather makes aerial photography a challenge as strong gusting winds force small float planes to land.
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  • Aerial view of a drag line that scrapes through rock after a explosives blast away the top of mountains. A fresh snow contrasts the blackened coal that is revealed. Mountaintop removal mining devastates the landscape, turning areas that should be lush with forests and wildlife into barren moonscapes.
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