TAILINGS: Nickel tailings, waste from mining, found floating in a river in Sudbury, Ontario, from 1996.
Image: Courtesy of Edward Burtynsky (edwardburtynsky.com)
Supplemental Material
Photo Album
Unnatural Landscapes: The Human Impact on the Earth's Surface
It’s no secret that, as nations continue to grow and develop, they alter the face of the Earth. Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photographs show how industrial development is restructuring terrains across the world. His work has taken him to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, which forced the relocation of more than one million people in China, to Canadian mines where tailings, or residue, run through lakes in Ontario, and, most recently, to the dryland agricultural fields of Monegro, Spain.
“These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence,” Burtynsky says in his Web site’s statement. “Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet set us into an uneasy contradiction.”
View a slide show of changing landscapes around the world.
Mountaintop removal mining: EPA says yes, scientists say no
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Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCalifornia, where I was born and raised and made children, has had an unnatural amount of mining. Almost all of it occurred without regulation. My children are both autistic. I called the suppossed air regulators and now they regulate mercury in the air, which should have been obvious centuries ago to the guy who told humanity to mine and use mercury in the first place. I wrote a paper on the causes of autism, please read it. It is on my MySpace page in the blog for Mark Reman Hamilton
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswe've seen enough pictures, like the Jewish genocide of the 40's. We know, we do not need to see any more pictures. The people ignorant of the need to respect the planet we are chained to must be fueled by some deluded vision that they will leave this shithole when they are done with it. Where are they going? I'd like to go there myself, but that's a pipe dream. We have to fix this planet or it's going to fix us; easy for me to see. But they, the royal we, won't see it that way because Rush is right, in their dreams, subconscious. The ability to get into their dreams would be a nice trick. Can we try that with things more powerful than pictures?
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