Given growing awareness about environmental change and how it affects human life, it is perhaps not surprising there is also a growing audience for environmental filmmaking. At the 2014 Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital on March 25, the Wilson Center premiered ECSP’s latest documentary, Scaling the Mountain: Protecting Forests for Families in Nepal. Together with Heart of Iron, a recent film on mining in the Congo Basin, the event took viewers into some of the world’s most remote forests to see how their inhabitants are adapting to rapid changes in the natural resources on which they depend.

Factories in China’s Pearl River Delta tick-tock around the clock, rapidly churning out gadgets from iPhones and Barbie dolls to forks and light bulbs, shipped off to village shops in Uganda and super Walmarts in America’s sprawling suburbs. But far from the global consumer’s view, manufacturing and rapid development are placing unrelenting pressure on China’s environment.

To date, despite their demonstrated importance in both conflict recovery and the risk of conflict recurrence, natural resources have been largely ignored or downplayed in post-conflict settings around the world.

There’s a popular saying in Afghanistan reflecting the value of water: “Let Kabul be without gold, but not without snow.”

Living in a refugee camp across the border in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation, my father, who worked as a doctor in Samangan, Bamyan, Kunar, and Balkh provinces, used to tell me about the importance of our country’s natural wealth. He was optimistic that it was Afghanistan’s land, water, forests, and minerals that would help the country re-emerge as a strong nation. However, he also knew that the mismanagement of our natural resources is partly to blame for the instability, insecurity, and vulnerability that have gripped our country for so many years. This is the paradox of the natural resource wealth in Afghanistan.

The black, blasted landscape of Wuhai City sometimes looks more like the moon than Inner Mongolia. But this scene is becoming all too common across much of Northern China. China’s massive coal industry is not only polluting the air and water, but also fundamentally altering the surrounding landscape and communities.

Fire needs oxygen to burn. When a fire starts inside a building, the floors, ceilings, walls, doors, and windows can constrict the flow of air. Breaking in to fight the fire thus carries the risk of opening a new airway. If that happens, a smoldering fire can expand explosively, bursting into roaring flames as it sucks air in through the new passageway. This sudden inrush of air to fuel a burst of fire has a name: backdraft.

China’s economic boom appears to be contagious. Over the past few years, China’s northern neighbor has quietly caught the bug and become the world’s second-fastest growing economy, experiencing a GDP growth rate of approximately 17.3 percent in 2011.