For millennia, nomadic herdsman have raised goats, sheep, and cattle on the grassy steppes of Mongolia, packing up their circular tents, known as ger, several times a year to migrate with the seasons. This is still the way of life for approximately a third of Mongolians. But, over the past four decades, the combined effects of climate change, overgrazing, and other human activity have caused the desertification of vast swaths of the country’s vital grasslands. In the past fifteen years, two hundred thousand herders have been forced to abandon their traditional lifestyle; many have moved into Ulaanbaatar, the country’s polluted capital, where they pitch their tents on the city’s outskirts and find work as construction workers, cab drivers, or custodians.
As part of an ongoing series exploring the cultural effects of climate change, the Korean photographer Daesung Lee recently set out to capture Mongolia’s transformation. But rather than documenting picturesque pastoralists at home in the Gobi Desert, or the squalor of Ulaanbaatar’s ger district, Lee created and photographed living dioramas that vividly juxtapose the old Mongolian landscape and the new.
The photos in the series, entitled “Futuristic Archaeology,” show billboard-sized backdrops of past or future landscapes erected in the countryside: images of grasslands stand in the desert, cordoned off behind velvet ropes; pictures of sandy slopes are set against a still-lush steppe. Former nomads, recruited with the help of a local environmental N.G.O., enact scenes—of hunting, herding, and, in one case, Mongolian wrestling—in the contrasting artificial and actual scenery. Dressed in traditional deel robes, the nomads seem frozen in time, like displays in a natural-history museum. In one image, an older couple gazes from the confines of their roped-off square at a man, woman, and two small children clad in jeans and T-shirts. The elders seem like otherworldly visitors from the past. The modern family, and the arid sands around them, appear as embodiments of Mongolia's present and future.
Rachel Nuwer is a freelance journalist living in Brooklyn.
A video captures the historically severe drought in the state's normally fertile Central Valley.