Hubert Westermann’s eerie landscape of the Camargue region of France (Cat.57) reveals the artist’s fascination with the ambiguity of the abstract and figurative in an image, and his delight in the contrast of irregular forms and shapes in strong light and shadow, and in the subtle effects of receding light over distance. Although the painting relates to a specific area, it is conceived primarily as a stark, symbolic visual argument with a universal message to warn of the apocalypse that awaits mankind in the new millennium, should widespread disrespect for the planet continue. Other strong images from France on this subject are Frédéric Gracia’s intriguing view from space of a blue-cratered world with pure droplets of water (Cat.59), 
and Annie Creton-Boizet’s painting Uncertainty (Cat.58) about the ever-present threat posed by nuclear power, in which she juxtaposes a 16th century chateau with a nuclear power station, near where she lives.
The potentially catastrophic impact of deforestation on environment and community is dealt with by the overall winner of the competition, Secoya Indian artist, 
Ramón Piaguaje. In his picture of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador (Cat.46), he argues for the preservation of ‘this lung of the world’ by painting as faithfully as possible the sheer beauty and complexity of what will be lost: ‘I do not want the rainforest to be just a memory represented in my pictures’, he remarks poignantly. Daisy Pimentel of the Dominican Republic delivers a similarly bleak message in her multi-image picture With Faith into the Year 2000 (Cat.44), 
in which she has applied pieces of cork to the canvas to imitate the roots, trunks, and branches of trees. Head studies of people are placed alongside to enforce the point that lives and livelihood depend on the maintenance of the trees in a balanced ecology. Further images showing the physical encroachment of man on nature include the loss of terraced paddy fields in Japan through building developments (Cat.125); the impact of tourism on the island of Barbados (Cat.11); and the saturation of the countryside around Chile’s capital city, Santiago, by ‘iron girders, cement, and people’ (Cat.30). 
Rached Bohsali’s trompe l’oeil watercolour painting Eco...Logic (Cat.132), one of the 12 international prizewinners, is critical of commercial developments along the Lebanese coastline between Beirut and Tripoli, to the north: ‘Our landscape has been the victim of the logic of real estate and a chaotic economy’, he says. A solitary red rose in the centre of the picture stands as his symbol for ‘the optimistic green future’. Another international prizewinner, 
Sudjai Chaiyapan from Thailand, presents a damning symbolic image of the destructive effect of man on the world’s environment in his painting The Way of Life from Imagination in the Year 2000 (Cat.228). All is a human landscape of death and decay, with piles of bones and polluted pools. The colourless streams of water which pour from the figures are also blighted. The wastage of man has poisoned everything and led to loss of fertility.
Overpopulation is also addressed imaginatively. José Pelletier, from the Dominican Republic (Cat.41), 
shows houses piled on top of each other, and humans as cellular forms squeezed into compartments, while in The Last House (Cat.230), Chamnan Prangsook, of Thailand, focuses on the animal world, revealing a nightmarish scene in which ‘genes and nature are threatened by man’. Rodents and monkeys are held captive, probably for experiments, and birds find it difficult to feed their young.
