If anyone doubts that there's an environmental crisis in China, they only need to make a quick visit to a place like Kaiping. I took great pains to get there, being that it's the ancestral home of my family. It wasn't easy though. I don't speak Chinese, and very few people in China outside of the big cities speaks anything but Chinese.

Kaiping is a pretty regular place by Chinese standards. It's an industrial and shipping town. The pollution there is astonishing to someone who grew up in the west. There are none of the silent electric motorbikes found in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. In Kaiping, the whine of noisy gas motorbikes is constant. The air chokes your lungs and makes your eyes burn, and your skin itches from it after about 30 minutes of exposure. The water of the Pearl River delta is muddy and infused with chemicals and sewage that pour into it from random pipes everywhere. Meanwhile, Kaiping fishermen pull greasy-looking fish from the river in long-handled nets and sell them to people on the banks.

I thought I'd try to capture the sunset in Kaiping one evening. It was the most underwhelming and depressing sight I experienced in China. The sun simply faded into a murky smog soup, about 30 degrees above the horizon. This photo captures about the last I could see of it that evening.

I really hope the Chinese can get their environmental act together, for their sake and for the sake of the rest of the world.

_{kevin thom photographer}