George Steinmetz

High on Ethiopia’s Amhara plain at an elevation of 8,000 feet, villagers harvest delicate stalks of teff by hand. One of the earliest domesticated grains, the highly nutritious grain now feeds some fifty million people in the food-insecure Horn of Africa. Though teff is highly drought tolerant, yields are low.

At the end of August, some six hundred sheep descend from pastures above the Aletsch Glacier in the Valais region of the Swiss Alps. The communal flock has summered on steep alpine slopes, watched over by a lone shepherd. After a retreating glacier cut off the annual migration route, this narrow path was blasted out of a canyon wall in the 1970s to maintain access to the remote alpine pasture.