Surveying the Anthropocene: Environment and Photography Now 9781838382254

Table of contents :
Foreword
Contents
Into the Anthropocene
Surveying the Anthropocene: Environment and photography now
Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever
Anthroposcenes
Human marks
Marked land
Habitat destruction: the ecological crisis
Extraction: minerals and carbon: oil
Pollution: carbon: particulates and air quality; marine plastic; ingested plastic
Environmental destruction, political power, and self-promotion in the arts
Environmental justice: resources; confrontation of cultures
Environmental consciousness: between worlds and times; contemplating global crisis
Nuclear: ‘stagings’ and photo/performance works
Chernobyl revisited: Marie Curie’s fingerprint: Nuclear spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone: the images of Aleksandr Kupny
Ruin lust/Ruin porn?: What ‘ruin porn’ tells us about ruins – and porn
Climate Change
‘A cat in hell’s chance’: why we’re losing the battle to keep global warming below 2°C
Climate change: Ice
Climate change: Flood
‘Wild’/’Unwild’/’Rewild’ and Rephotography
Walk on the wild side: Rewilding, hillwalking and history
Natural process; Wildness; ‘Wild land’
Not so wild? – human cultural traces
Rephotography: an ecologist’s archive; habitat destruction; natural regeneration and rewilding
Survival/Extinction: survivor species; vulnerable species; endangered species
After the Anthropocene
Imagined future biologies: plastic; jellyfish
Edenic apocalypse meets gardens against Eden
Lessons from a pandemic
What coronavirus can teach us about climate change
After the Anthropocene: Seabirds and the oceanic images of J.J. Harrison
Contributors

Citation preview

Surveying the

Anthropocene Environment and photography now

Surveying the

Anthropocene Environment and photography now Edited by Patricia Macdonald with essays by:

Patricia Macdonald, Robert Macfarlane, Tobia Bezzola, Barbara Bloemink, Owen Logan, Kate Brown, Siobhan Lyons, Andrew Simms, George Monbiot, Pete Moore, Natasha Myers, Jared Diamond, Leslie Hook and Adam Nicolson and commentary by:

the artist-photographer contributors, and Willis Hartshorn, William A. Ewing, Fritz Franz Vogel, Michael Benson, Klaus Thymann, Jason Arunn Murugesu, Christine Eyene, Diane Smyth, Susan Munro, Jim Hansom, and Jonathan Hughes

Foreword Alexander Hamilton Chair of Studies in Photography

Previous page opening: Technofossil by Jared Farmer, photographed by Tim Flach

Studies Editions is a new initiative by Studies in

a wide range of international contributors, both

Photography / the Scottish Society for the History

artist-photographers and environmental writers,

of Photography which publishes a series of books

revealed by Patricia’s research.

on photography, alongside our well-established biannual journal Studies in Photography and our

For the Anthropocene Cabinet of Curiosities – a multi-university project exhibited at the Deutsches Museum – Jared Farmer created a future fossil of a BlackBerry Curve 8300. Farmer's companion essay, ‘Technofossil’, is part of Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, ed. Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett. (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

limited editions of prints. These books deal with specific topics in more depth than is possible within the scope of a journal article.

what is unseen’ – has a particularly powerful resonance for me. Patricia Macdonald refers to this in her Introductory essay where she quotes extensively from Rob Nixon’s ground-breaking

considers a topic that is of such enormous

book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism

relevance today: the contribution of photography

of the Poor. As Nixon so succinctly expresses it:

to an understanding of pressing environmental

‘How can we convert into image and narrative

issues and debates. The book provides an

the disasters that are slow moving and long

overview of the wide range of ways in which

in the making …?’

international artist-photographers are currently surveying the increasingly heavy impacts of human activity on the Earth’s interrelated operational systems, in particular climate and the web of life, including human life. These works, comment on the multiple effects of what has come to be called, not without controversy, the Anthropocene epoch, or ‘age of humans’ – a time

Polar bears depend on sea ice to catch their prey. They pounce on seals when they emerge through their breathing holes and stalk them as they bask in the open, but the ice is melting away as our climate warms. The thirteen winters following the year 2003 yielded the thirteen smallest ice extents on satellite records. Hunting seasons are becoming shorter, and for each week of ice that is lost from Arctic winters, polar bears lose around 15 pounds (7 kg) of fat.

discussed in the book – that of ‘how to present

We are delighted that this book in the series

in all their impressive variety, offer powerful

Opposite: Tim Flach Polar bear from the air from Endangered, Abrams, New York, 2017

One concept, among the many significant topics

during which the degree and extent of global human activity will leave a clear impact in the rocks of the future geological record. The book

Some of the best photography has the power to reveal what is either normally invisible or slow to present itself, to render, and hold in our minds, images that may motivate a call to action – and this possibility is particularly timely now, amid the multiple effects of the Anthropocene, and debates on how we humans may address them. As is impressively demonstrated in this book, photography has a continuing and valuable role as we attempt this essential work of healing our planet and ourselves.

is particularly timely in this year in which the UK

We would like to extend our most grateful thanks

hosts the crucial COP26 Climate Conference,

to all of our distinguished contributors for their

in Glasgow, and in which the Covid-19 pandemic –

generosity in giving permission for their important

probably indirectly caused by environmental

work to be included in the book, thus enabling

degradation – continues to rage worldwide.

such a wide spectrum of expertise and approaches

The seed for the book was an invitation from the Editorial Team of Studies in Photography to the eminent artist-photographer Patricia Macdonald to guest-edit an issue of the journal, focussing on the environment. Alongside her work using photography, Dr Patricia Macdonald is also

to environmental issues to be presented together for the first time. Special thanks are also due to the book’s editor, Patricia Macdonald, and to its designer, Ian McIlroy, for their expert and sustained collaborative work in shaping and bringing it to completion.

a respected environmental academic, and a

And finally, we are deeply indebted to

committed and inspirational educator and

Baillie Gifford, whose support has enabled

communicator, with extensive experience of

a wider engagement with the exceptional

environmental practice and policy; she also has

contents of the book. We offer them our most

a long and continuing association with SSHoP,

sincere thanks.

having delivered the second of the Society’s highly successful series of Annual Photographer’s Lectures. The journal issue project rapidly outgrew the original idea due to the wealth of material by

Alexander Hamilton, Chair and Series Editor, Studies in Photography

Contents Into the Anthropocene 1 28

Patricia Macdonald: Surveying the Anthropocene: Environment and photography now Robert Macfarlane: Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever

41

Anthroposcenes

42

Human marks

46

Marked land

48

Habitat destruction: the ecological crisis

60

Extraction: minerals and carbon: oil

78

Pollution: carbon: particulates and air quality; marine plastic; ingested plastic

86

Owen Logan: Environmental destruction, political power, and self-promotion in the arts

94

Environmental justice: resources; confrontation of cultures

106

Environmental consciousness: between worlds and times; contemplating global crisis

110

Nuclear: ‘stagings’ and photo/performance works

114

Kate Brown: Chernobyl revisited: Marie Curie’s fingerprint: Nuclear spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone: the images of Aleksandr Kupny

126

Siobhan Lyons: Ruin lust/Ruin porn?: What ‘ruin porn’ tells us about ruins – and porn

131

Climate Change

132

Andrew Simms: ‘A cat in hell’s chance’: Why we’re losing the battle to keep global warming below 2°C

138

Climate change: Ice

146

Climate change: Flood

151

‘Wild’/’Unwild’/’Rewild’ and Rephotography

152

George Monbiot/Dan Bailey: Walk on the wild side: Rewilding, hillwalking & history

166

Natural process; Wildness; ‘Wild land’

174

Not so wild? – human cultural traces

178

Rephotography: an ecologist’s archive; habitat destruction; natural regeneration and rewilding

196

209

Survival/Extinction: survivor species; vulnerable species; endangered species

After the Anthropocene

210

Imagined future biologies: plastic; jellyfish

216

Natasha Myers/Ayelen Liberona: Edenic apocalypse meets gardens against Eden

218

Jared Diamond: Lessons from a pandemic

224

Leslie Hook: What coronavirus can teach us about climate change

226

Adam Nicolson: After the Anthropocene: Seabirds and the oceanic images of J.J. Harrison

229

Contributors

Into the Anthropocene

Previous page opening: Original colour exposed photograph of the first nuclear test explosion, code name 'Trinity’, White Sands, New Mexico, USA, 16 July 1945. Photographer: Jack Aeby, civilian worker, Manhattan Project, Los Alamos laboratory, New Mexico, USA. United States Department of Energy (public domain); Wikimedia Commons Opposite: Aerial view of the aftermath of the first detonation of a nuclear device, the ‘Trinity’ test, White Sands, New Mexico, USA, 16 July 1945. Federal government of the United States (public domain); Wikimedia Commons

‘This is the gift of a landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.’ Emmet Gowin, from Jock Reynolds, Emmet Gowin; Changing the Earth, Yale University Press, 2002

Above: Emmet Gowin Harvest Traffic over Agricultural Pivot near Hermiston, Oregon, 1991

Surveying the Anthropocene: Environment and photography now Patricia Macdonald Looking at emergency times

‘Our signal is embedded in the strata.’ 1 Jennifer Baichwal, in Burtynsky, Baichwal and de Pencier, Anthropocene, 2018

‘We’re living in emergency times.’ 2 Barry Lopez, 7 May 2019

Since its earliest days, photography has looked at how people have changed their surroundings – for better, for worse; in sensitive and gradual ways, or with drastic and often damaging rapidity. Surveying the environment is not new. What is new now, however, is the scale and significance of the changes involved – we are living in emergency times. Also new is the recognition, based on increasingly authoritative evidence, of a unique and terrifying development in Earth’s recent history – the potentially catastrophic disruption by human activity of the Earth’s essential and interconnected operating systems – the way the world works. This book looks at a variety of art-photographic practices that portray this accelerating development, and how it may be adapted to or resisted. But before looking at how artist-photographers have been responding to these issues, it may be useful to consider some of the current science – and also some of the commentary from a range of viewpoints across several disciplines – involved in recognizing what is happening, and assessing its significance. The first half of this introductory essay attempts a brief summary of these topics. The second half discusses a representative selection of current and recent photographic practices in relation to surveying the Anthropocene. The work of artist-photographers need not, of course, be informed by scientific data; many artists travel by that alternative route, ‘the road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect’3. But all artists live in the world like everyone else, and what they perceive and make is influenced, at least, by available information, and is increasingly being driven by the concerns identified by scientific, environmentalist and environmental-justice observers regarding the current state of the Earth, its inhabitants and their environments. Many of these concerns are familiar ones. In the past, however – at times when the effects of disruptive human activity were less deep and globally pervasive – many of them were perceived intuitively as premonitions, and were articulated differently. But these responses have sometimes been precursors of today’s ongoing activism. In the early nineteenth century, for example – around the time of the invention of photography – a conjunction of ideas and concerns occurred across the arts, the humanities and the sciences, involving the functioning of environmental interconnections and human social systems, and their disruption by the rise of industrial activity in the ‘First Industrial Revolution’. Eminent figures such as Charles Darwin and John Ruskin variously used powerful images of a ‘tangled bank’, of glaciers, and of river-cut, layered exposures of rock, as enduring metaphors for the functioning of natural processes and the struggle for existence. Karl Marx, too, had a nineteenth-century, eco-socially led awareness of these fundamental interconnections.

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Surveying the Anthropocene Patricia Macdonald

The Anthropocene A new geological epoch?

'The new epoch is distinguished from the old by the nature, the degree of significance, and the global scale of human-caused (anthropogenic) changes to the Earth’s geology, atmosphere and ecosystems ...’

Returning to the twenty-first century, and briefly to the scientific context, a recommendation was made in 2016 by an official expert group of geologists to the International Geological Congress that a recent stretch of time, leading up to and including the present day, should be re-designated as a new geological time-interval, the ‘Anthropocene’: the ‘new epoch of humans’.4 These geologists make a distinction between the proposed new epoch and what they consider to be the previous, familiar one – the equable and relatively environmentally stable Holocene, which began at the end of the last Ice Age almost 12,000 years ago, and which has underpinned human life and civilization. The new epoch is distinguished from the old by the nature, the degree of significance, and the global scale of human-caused (anthropogenic) changes to the Earth’s geology, atmosphere and ecosystems that have occurred in the recent past. During this very short time-interval (the blink of a geological eye), the sum of anthropogenic activity has become an agent of change to global systems which not only may be seen from space, but which will also be visible in the future record of the rocks, as a series of layers (geological strata), clearly distinct from those laid down earlier – hence the reason for considering that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – has been entered. So far as the Earth’s geological record is concerned, resistant remains of human bodies – future fossils (equivalent to those of, say, ammonites or dinosaurs from the distant past) – will obviously form part of these Anthropocene layers, but the effect of recent human activity will be much more far-reaching than this, changing the very character of the rocks themselves. An indication of the magnitude of this change is that very few other species in the past have so significantly altered both the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, and that of the actual matrix of the rock strata within which their fossils may be found. Probably the first life-forms to cause pollution on a planetary scale were cyanobacteria, which, while developing the seemingy magical process of photosynthesis, belched out oxygen as a toxic by-product. This ‘Great Oxygenation Event’ was followed, around 2 billion years ago, by the first of the five mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth. By changing the prevailing chemical balance, cyanobacteria gave rise to vast rust beds (iron oxides) on the Earth’s surface, wiping out most of the extant anaerobic life 5. Eventually, life adapted to this new selection pressure, and novel creatures – later including ourselves – evolved, utilizing (and finally requiring) oxygen and carbohydrates, the products of photosynthesis. Human activity is currently initiating the sixth mass extinction. In any case, few would now deny that (some) humans have caused dramatic, long-term, and often detrimental alterations not only to their own immediate environment, but also to the environments of other humans and of other species living on the planet – or that this process should be clearly identified by science (the concept of the Anthropocene does this; it focuses attention on the issue as a global phenomenon, although it also does much more6). Many, increasingly, would also consider that attempts should be made, where appropriate and possible, to reverse or eliminate the most problematic aspects of this process (which is a separate, and more contentious, issue, but one which is rising up the political agenda as the scale and significance of the changes ‘we’ have made are becoming more widely realized).

2

The Anthropocene: concept and controversies The concept and naming of the Anthropocene itself have themselves, however, generated considerable controversy. This has been the case in both the sciences and the humanities for Above: Aerial view (annotated) of the aftermath of the ‘Trinity’ nuclear test, White Sands, New Mexico, USA, 16 July 1945

several reasons in each respective context. Federal government of the United States/ Bomazi (public domain); Wikimedia Commons

Controversies in a scientific context In a scientific context, the broad shape of the facts of dramatic global environmental change is no longer in dispute. The main concerns, in terms of the designation of a new epoch, have centred on the following topics.:

• the (as yet) very short length of this potential new unit of time in relation to the timeintervals of the geological time scale;

• the selection of an appropriate time-unit (these range – from vast to relatively short – from eons, through eras, periods and epochs to ages and other smaller units);

• technical matters of defining the beginning of the proposed epoch and the choice of its start-date (inevitably arbitrary, and ranging widely from (an extreme view) 8000 years before present, to the sixteenth century CE, when ‘Old World’ cultures are known – from records of CO2 in polar ice cores – to have begun seriously to impact those of the Americas7, through the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century – when Earth’s human population was about 1 billion – to the ‘Great Acceleration’ of population, energy use, industrialization, technical development, agribusiness and globalization, including globalscale warfare, of the mid-twentieth century – human population about 3 billion, which has since risen to about 7.8 billion in the early twenty-first century);

• the choice of the most suitable globally widespread and synchronous, but also ‘sharp’, indicating ‘signal’, or geological ‘primary stratigraphic marker’ (the unfortunately named Above: First deployed thermonuclear bomb, code name 'Castle-Romeo', Bikini Atoll of the Marshall Islands, 26 March 1954

‘Golden Spike’) – because the Anthropocene as geology would be identified by future rock United States Department of Energy, NNSA/NSO Photo Library (public domain); Wikimedia Commons

strata; suggestions include the bones of the domesticated chicken – at present the world’s commonest bird! – as well as concrete, plastics, persistent organic pollutants like DDT, and ‘technofossils’ like the remains of mobile phones, and – the current ‘favourite’ – the artificial radionuclides from atomic testing, which began in 1945;

• and whether the primary motivation today for distinguishing a new epoch is, or is not, inappropriately ‘political’, rather than ‘scientific’ – its principal purpose allegedly being to focus minds on urgent, current environmental issues (surely it can be both?)8. Some of this taxonomic debate may seem rather arcane, but the broad picture is what matters, rather than the detail. A significant boundary is being recognized between the Holocene epoch – which has been ‘hospitable’ to most of Earth’s current life-forms – and the much more uncertain and ‘uncongenial’ one that we now appear to have entered. Controversies in the context of the humanities In the context of the humanities, some of the concerns relate to the choice of the word ‘Anthropocene’ and its anthropocentric (while also being self-critical), generalized or

Above: Crater from ‘Sedan’ shallow underground nuclear test, part of Operation Plowshare, Nevada Test Site, USA, 6 July 1962

‘universalistic’ and, some would emphasise, gendered, etymology; its failure to account Federal government of the United States, NNSA/NSO Photo Library (public domain); Wikimedia Commons

for different human voices; who should be entitled to do the naming; and its ‘technocratic’ framing of Earth system change. Other related issues are rooted conceptually in specific historical and/or socio-political discourses (mostly in relation to disgraceful practices –

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Surveying the Anthropocene Patricia Macdonald

many still ongoing – and legacies of the exploitation of ‘natural resources’, slavery, colonization, and gross environmental pollution), such as those explored in recent ground-breaking publications by public intellectual polymaths and environmental historians (for example Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, of 2011, and Jason Moore’s Anthropocene or Capitalocene?, of 2016).9 The respective approaches to ‘human/nature’ or ‘human/inhuman’ questions of philosophers including Bruno Latour (for example ‘Agency at the time of the Anthropocene’, 2014) and Timothy Morton (for example Dark Ecology, 2016, and Being Ecological, 2018; of interdisciplinary geographers such as Kathryn Yusoff (A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, 2018); and of scholars of literature like David Farrier (Anthropocene Poetics, 2019) are also highly relevant. Nigel Clark has clearly summarized the ongoing situation, particularly a ‘new turn’ among geographers: ‘... there are questions about whether geography’s current prioritizing of socio-spatial relations permits it to fully confront the provocations of planetary dynamism and multiplicity. In an important new turn, some geographers are exploring new ways to rethink human politics, subjectivity and identity through the forces and potentialities of Earth processes – which effectively complements the critical task of “socialiizing” geological thought with a new “geologizing” of social thought. Such willingness to work creatively with insights from the Earth sciences also raises difficult but promising questions about how to engage with indigenous and other marginalized ways of knowing – or what we might see as the imperative to “decolonize the Earth”.’

A different view of this recent turn among some geographers is elaborated by David Chandler and others, in the context of the implications of the concept of the Anthropocene for the governance of human societies.10 These debates are usefully and accessibly discussed in the essay here, ‘Generation Anthropocene’ by Robert Macfarlane.11 Some of these debates may seem as arcane as those around the exact geological definition of the Anthropocene boundary discussed above. But, again, their import is deep. Either the radically changed crisis situation in which humanity now finds itself in relation to the rest of ‘nature’ is again being recognized with concern, and its origins investigated; or the entire basis of the ‘grammar of geology’ is being questioned, and ‘the politics of the Anthropocene [are being addressed] within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology’ (Yusoff, 2018, see endnote 10). And humanity needs to find out how some members of our species got ‘us all’ into this

‘... agriculture presupposes industry.’ Jacques Derrida, from Of Grammatology (De la Grammatologie), 1976 (1967)

situation (which Timothy Morton has labelled ‘agrilogistic’ – as contrasted with ‘ecological’ – thinking, and which writer Amitav Ghosh has called ‘the Great Derangement’ of ‘modernity’12), so as to find ways to get both ‘ourselves’, and the other living creatures with which we share the planet, out of it – as well as to explore what types of sustainable, ‘ecological’, ‘earth-bound’ relationships are desirable or possible. One interesting aspect of some of this discourse relates to the very recent recognition (long familiar to scientists) by humanitiesbased philosophers and writers of the truly complex and ‘entangled’ nature of the Earth’s inhabitants and global systems, from the level of the ‘individual’ (in fact made up of many interdependent ‘individual entities’ including, in the case of mammals, for example, an entire flora of normally benign, symbiotic gut bacteria), through that of ecosystems (made up of webs of interconnected living creatures), to that of ‘hyperobjects’ like the ‘airy’ atmosphere,

4

the ‘rocky’ geosphere, the ‘watery’ hydrosphere, the ‘icy’ cryosphere, and the living biosphere – none of which can any longer, in the light of recent scientific research, be considered as separate entities or agents. Another is the radical questioning, from the socio-political point of view of some humanities-based commentators, of the longconsidered ‘neutral’ discipline of geology. Climate change and other Anthropocene impacts A specific, and extremely serious, aspect of Anthropocene impacts is that of climate change (or global heating – the familiar term ‘global warming’ is a misleadingly friendly phrase), due mainly to human-caused emissions of the ‘greenhouse’ gas CO2. Andrew Simms gives a useful briefing on this in his essay here, ‘“A cat in hell’s chance” – why we’re losing the battle

‘... the concept of the Anthropocene ... has become “a synonym for extensive global environmental change”.’ Colin Waters and Jan Zalasiewicz, in Burtnynsky, Baichwal and de Pencier, Anthropocene (see note 14)

to keep global warming below 2°C’13. But one of the reasons that the concept of the Anthropocene (by whatever name) is so significant, and so potentially powerful in terms of environmental politics, is that it considers, as mentioned above, a much broader view than the specific issue of climate change. It has become ‘a synonym for extensive global environmental change’; it is ‘a means of giving precise meaning, within the geological framework of “deep” Earth time, to [the current] rapidly evolving assemblage of processes and their material products ... [and it] allows the scale, rate and novelty of Anthropocene change to be compared with change in prehistoric times. Some of the comparisons are striking: for instance the rate of CO2 rise in the Anthropocene is over a hundred times faster than its rate of rise as the last glaciation event gave way to the Holocene – a rate of rise that is itself considered rapid on a geological scale.’14 Humanity’s accelerating global impacts are, in fact, by no means restricted to changing the climate, and current climate change itself is still in its very early stages, ‘and remains only a modest part of the characterisation of the Anthropocene’15. Humans have also engaged in over-hunting and over-fishing, extensive natural habitat destruction (mainly due to agriculture and fisheries), and the spread of pervasive toxic chemical pollution – both of ‘naturally occurring’ substances in ‘unnatural’ quantities and locations, and of anthropogenically synthesized compounds previously unknown ‘in nature’. Anthropogenic activity has now joined the list of the cataclysmic threats to the entire biosphere, such as meteorite strikes, enormous volcanic eruptions (both of which, separately or in combination, have been proposed to explain the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs about 66-65 million years ago), or the much earlier dramatic rise in the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere, due to the activities of cyanobacteria, mentioned above – most of which have also involved climate change – which have brought about one of the ‘big five’ mass extinctions of life-forms during Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history. To summarize, then, during the time of the proposed new epoch of the Anthropocene, the planetary environmental situation that enabled the stability of the Holocene epoch has begun to change towards a much hotter and less stable state, from at least the date of the First Industrial Revolution, due to the actions of a rising human population, many of whom are using the Earth’s resources in new ways. Anthropogenic activity is changing the planet’s

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Surveying the Anthropocene Patricia Macdonald

’... the planet is now on a new geo-historical trajectory ... with no precedent in Earth’s history.’

chemical cycles, reshaping its landscapes, re-moulding the biosphere and its ecological communities, including their human members (thus driving a current rapid extinction of life-forms), and raising the temperature of the atmosphere and of the oceans, and so causing melting of polar ice and ancient glaciers and, in turn, rising global sea-levels. The overall result of this activity has been that the planet is now on a new geo-historical trajectory, characterized by a wide range of rapid, ongoing physical, chemical and biological changes, many of them with no precedent in Earth’s history.16

Human responses to Anthropocene changes Recording, showing and telling A vast global effort has been taking place over the past half-century to record, describe and predict the development of all these changes, and to make information on them (and their likely consequences) widely accessible, most of it using the language and visual conventions of science, augmented by non-technical summaries for policymakers. Presentations of this kind bring present realities alive for many people. These include: statistics (of familiar types, in highly consensual and well-interpreted profusion17, and of the storytelling variety, like the ancient ‘Lily-pond Riddle’ about visualizing exponential population growth: ‘If a lily plant in a pond doubles in size every day and after 30 days it completely covers the pond, on which day does the lily cover half the pond?’ – the answer is not ‘day 15’ – when in fact it covers only 0.003% of the pond – but ‘day 29’ – the very last minute ...18); or rapidly understandable graphics (like the ‘climate warming stripes’ of Professor Ed Hawkins), or graphs (like the controversial, so-called ‘hockey-stick’ curve – based on the data on global heating, as dramatically demonstrated by former US Vice-President Al Gore climbing a ladder in the 2016 film An Inconvenient Truth – in which the historical, more-or-less horizontal or slightly upward-curving ‘handle’ of the ‘hockey stick’ graph of rising global temperature elides into the recent-time ‘blade’ of the stick, which suddenly shoots up almost vertically through the roof like Jack’s beanstalk19). Following page opening: Tim Flach African elephant herd in Tsavo, southern Kenya from Endangered, Abrams, New York, 2017 Judging by the 2016 census, there are about 352,000 wild African elephants today, across 18 countries, a fall of 30% in 7 years. It comes down to two key threats: the ongoing trade in ivory, and the rising pressure of human population growth, which makes inroads into elephant country, leading inevitably to human-elephant flashpoints.

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Summarising and assessing the data: tipping points and shifting baselines All these data clearly show that we are currently approaching, or may have already passed, crucial tipping points (beyond which it is not possible to return to the old ‘normal’) in global systems (see endnote 16). A further quick look at the two most significant of these will give some indication of the picture that is becoming increasingly clear. Climate change As already mentioned, the tipping point that has been most widely discussed recently relates to anthropogenic climate change. Since 1980, greenhouse gas emissions have more than doubled. The atmospheric concentration of the principal greenhouse gas, CO2, is now at about 416 ppm (July 2021, Mauna Loa, Hawaii, monthly average) and still rising (with a few brief hesitations – the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 will have very little effect), compared to a pre-industrial level of about 280 ppm and a supposed ‘safe level’ of about 350 ppm – higher than at any time in the history of humanity. The higher the concentration of CO2, the higher the global temperature. This level of CO2 is likely to lead to a global temperature more than 2ºC above pre-industrial levels (more than 1.5ºC is widely considered to be unsafe) by the end of the present century, with dire and lasting consequences for the climate.20

The destruction of nature Another tipping point, now becoming more familiar, concerns the degradation of the biosphere: the thinning and tearing of the global web of life (both in its diversity, and in its overall quantity, measured either in numbers of individual living things or by their total weight – ‘biomass’), along with its associated benefits to humans and others (so-called ‘ecosystem services’, hitherto considered ‘free’) – benefits like clean water, fertile soil, insects that pollinate many plants – on which depend the future of human civilization, and perhaps even of human survival. Three quarters of land environments, and two thirds of marine environments, have been severely altered to date by human actions, causing devastating ‘losses’ (i.e. destruction) of interconnected webs of wild creatures, and of humans. Due to the phenomena known as ‘slow violence’ (see Nixon, endnote 9) and ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ (the latter describes Above: Timo Leiber THAW #1 Global warming looking right back at us

the situation in which people often do not notice what has been gradually happening and become accustomed to a new ‘normal’, even when the changes have taken place in plain sight), we have ‘lost’, and are continuing to ‘lose’, a vast proportion of the living creatures with which we share the planet – and these statistics continue to worsen. Today, in terms of species, about 2 million (of a total of Earth’s approximately 8 million species) are globally threatened with extinction – about 40% of amphibians, fish, corals, and plants; about 25% of mammals; more than 10% of birds; about 14% of insects. The current, accelerating, rate of species extinction is tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the last 10 million years.21 In terms of the abundance of individual creatures, there has been an 80% decline in the biomass of wild mammals since prehistoric times. In many places, up to 75% of insects have been ‘lost’ over only the last 25 years22 – we no longer need to scrape their corpses off a car windscreen after a journey, as was considered ‘normal’ fifty years ago. And in Europe alone, over the last 50 years, more than 400 million birds have been ‘disappeared’; if we begin to pay attention23, we realize that we have not – to give British examples – seen a swallow yet, and it is already the middle of May; and we may not have heard a skylark or a cuckoo, let alone a nightingale, for years.24 And it is even more likely that we miss the destruction taking place when what is ‘disappearing’ is out of everyday sight, for example soil fertility or ocean fish populations – the oceans are heating up, becoming more acid, and losing dissolved oxygen, leading to large predicted ‘losses’ of marine life. And the connections between one creature and another, including ourselves, are not always obvious. Then, before we know it, a tipping point is reached and nothing can be done – and the result (at the level of individual species) is extinction, or (if many connected species are involved) large-scale ecological collapse. Many environments are now, therefore, due to these interconnected threats, ecologically

Above: Daniel Beltrá Oil spill #20

degraded ‘shadows’ of their former ‘selves’, populated by the ‘ghosts’ of their ‘lost’ inhabitants – visible to those able to see them – on an Earth which has become a ‘world of wounds’25. And these wounds – many of them ongoing – include those inflicted by some humans on others as well as on their environments, in both local and global contexts of colonization, war, and inequitable practices of insufficiently regulated resource extraction and industrial and development operations (such as led to the catastrophes of Bhopal, in India (1984);

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of Chernobyl, in the former USSR (1986); of the oil rigs Piper Alpha, in the North Sea (1988) and Deepwater Horizon, in the Gulf of Mexico (2010); and of large dam projects on several continents, and incrementally but irreparably polluted environments, worldwide). And an understanding of further terrifying effects of anthropogenic damage to ecosystems is also currently emerging, as John Vidal has recently reported: ‘Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harbouring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans such as Ebola, HIV and dengue. But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise – with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike.’26 Following page opening: Viral pandemic: The 2019 coronavirus pandemic began in late 2019 with an outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), in the city of Wuhan, Hubei, China, possibly linked to the operations of a ‘wet’ animal market, with bats being the most likely natural reservoir. The virus then spread to multiple countries. The first identified case in the USA, reported on 20 January 2020 in Washington State, was in a patient recently returned from a visit to family in Wuhan. The image overleaf was made from a clinical specimen from this patient. See: https://www.nejm.org/ doi/full/10.1056/ NEJMoa2001191

The multiple crises of the Anthropocene Transmission electron microscopic image, January 2020, of an isolate from the first identified US case of COVID-19, formerly known as 2019-nCoV. The spherical extracellular viral particles contain cross-sections through the viral genome, seen as small, darker dots, within the blue circular areas of the viral particles. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Hannah A. Bullock; Azaibi Tamin (public domain)

Suddenly, the future of humanity, which is dependent on the sum of the Earth’s ‘ecosystem services’, and on cooperation between people and their institutions, is in doubt. And we are coming to realize, at last, that, like the rest of the Universe, the Earth is not, and never has been, about us – and it is no longer possible to avoid saying ‘we’ and ‘us’, even if some of ‘us’ have never been to blame. The complex life-support systems of nature may be likened to a hammock in which humanity, together with all other living things, is resting: ‘You can pull out some threads but at some stage the whole fabric unravels and then we will really see the consequences.’27 Actions: if not now, when? So, it looks as if humanity may be in deep trouble – in a hole and still digging. It is crunch time – the sides are falling in all around – all this is no longer in the future. The human species needs to change its ways, and fast, as many scientists and environmentalists have been warning, on the basis of increasingly hard evidence, since at least the 1970s, and as many other observers – artists, writers, historians and philosophers as well as earlier scientists – have been sensing, and communicating, for much longer. And the changes need to be radical. In addition to issues of climate change and biodiversity destruction, they must address in fundamental ways the issues of global and local levels of human inequality and inequity that the current form of turbo-charged neoliberal capitalism, far from solving, appears instead to be exacerbating. Global media reports reflect the long-running discussions, and continuing attempts to reach agreement on the necessary urgent actions, taking place both within and between governments at the highest international levels, but goals continue to be missed – even those that have been agreed – usually for time-worn and intractable economic and political reasons (and, perhaps increasingly, due to circumstances beyond human control). Civil society must continue to press governments to break these deadlocks. Recent non-governmentalorganization (NGO) movements like Extinction Rebellion, the Youth Climate Strikers, and those fighting for environmental and racial justice – all of whom are bringing socio-environmental protest closer to daily life for many people – are now building on and modifying the

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approaches of longer-established socio-environmental activist NGOs, aiming to bring about widespread ‘ecophany’, and to ‘re-imagine society in a way that makes sense to us all’.28 They deserve support for their peaceful activities in a range of forms from those able to give it.

The involvement of photography Surveying the Anthropocene But how on Earth can the visual medium of photography, even in what should be one of its most powerful incarnations – as an art form – find meaningful ways to represent and to help Above: ‘Art for Extinction Rebellion Once we go there, there is no coming back. Rebel, Regenerate, Re-wild. Seize the Event Horizon.’

us comprehend these enormous recent and impending changes to specific environments Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration et al., and Extinction Rebellion From the album ‘Cover photos’ by ‘Art for extinction rebellion’ on Facebook (accessed 19 April 2019)

or communities or to the planet – the most significant of which are often either invisible, or ‘hyperobjects’, impossible to see all at once, or unfolding over long periods of time? And how – even more importantly – might it help humanity to envisage and create a more sustainable future? As Rob Nixon has so eloquently written in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor: ‘... how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and

‘... how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making ... disasters that are ... of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor

warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time?’

and further: ‘To engage slow violence is to confront layered predicaments of apprehension: to apprehend – to arrest, or at least mitigate – often imperceptible threats requires rendering them apprehensible to the senses through the work of scientific and imaginative testimony. An influential lineage of environmental thought gives primacy to immediate sensory apprehension, to sight above all, as foundational for any environmental ethics of place. George Perkins Marsh, the mid-nineteenth-century [American] environmental pioneer, argued in Man and Nature that “the power most important to cultivate, and, at the same time, hardest to acquire, in that of seeing what is before him [sic].” The conservationist Aldo Leopold similarly insisted that “we can be ethical only toward what we can see.” But what happens when we are unsighted, when what extends before us – in the space and time that we most deeply inhabit – remains invisible? How, indeed, are we to act ethically toward human and biotic communities that lie beyond our sensory ken? What then, in the fullest sense of the phrase, is the place of seeing in the world that we now inhabit? What, moreover, is the place of the other senses? How do we both make slow violence visible yet also challenge the privileging of the visible? Such questions have profound consequences for the apprehension of slow violence, whether on a cellular [i.e. within the body] or a transnational scale.’

Nixon goes on to discuss the ‘political, imaginative, and strategic role of environmental “writer-activists”’, and to offer a series of powerful and convincing examples to support his argument that ‘[T]he narrative imaginings of writer-activists may ... offer us a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen.’29 Nevertheless, human biology does indeed ‘privilege the visible’, and the contribution of the visual arts, especially that of photography, therefore remains highly significant – although a combination of image/s and appropriate text may often be even more so.

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Other commentators have discussed the relative usefulness of various visual art forms in representing the Anthropocene. For example, the film-maker Nicholas de Pencier has pointed out that ‘[lens-based media] represent the most technological, most anthropogenic, of the art forms ...’30 Does that make them more suitable for this purpose, or less so? And is the moving image more useful in this regard than the photo-essay, the ‘epic’ series, or the time-lapse series of still images? And how can both fields of art-photographic practice – as well as the widespread current use of mobile-phone image-making, social-media practice, and the enormous, energy-greedy, server farms on which these rely – be made less environmentally damaging? How can photographers take part in materializing the ‘ghosts’ haunting today’s landscapes, or find ways to portray the so-called benign ‘monsters’ or ‘hybrids’ made up of interconnected beings (once widely considered to be distinct and separate) that it has become increasingly vital to recognize and understand?31 And can the current mainstream of art-photographic practice learn from the increasing number of Indigenous artists who are overtly reversing art history’s colonial gaze in relation to issues of environment and territory, and ‘testing the boundaries drawn by the art world, contemporary Native worlds and traditional societies’, often employing, to powerful effect in terms of wider and deeper understanding, a performance-based ‘chain of narratives in which humans, animals and the natural world collaborate’?32 Whatever the answer to all these questions, the medium of photography has actively engaged with issues of the current environmental crises in many different ways. Perhaps the Following page opening: left: ‘The Black Marble’: The Americas at night (public domain); NASA/ Wikimedia Commons right: ‘The Black Marble’: Africa, Europe and the Middle East at night (public domain); NASA/ Wikimedia Commons

most widely familiar of these has been through the role of (primarily scientific) organizations like NASA, which has made freely available its incredible images of the Earth from space. The informational photographic or digitally acquired by-products derived from satellite monitoring systems have recently included, for example, productions such as NASA’s ‘Black Marble’ Night Light Maps (night-time equivalents, and ‘rotating globe’ animated versions, published from 2012 onwards, of the rightly celebrated, apparently pristine, ‘Blue Marble’ daylight Earth image from Apollo 17, of 1972).33 These Night Light Maps show both the huge disparities between different parts of the Earth, and also the enormous scale of energy wastage from brightly lit urban areas, blasted out into the global night. Artist-photographers and the Anthropocene

These composite images were assembled in 2017 from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The new data was mapped over existing NASA Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet. https://blackmarble.gsfc. nasa.gov

The main focus of this book is, however, on the contribution of photography used –

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even if not primarily or exclusively – as an art form, and on still, rather than moving, images. A wide range of eminent artist-photographers, of the generations that have come after the twentieth-century American ‘New Topographic’ movement – influenced by this, and by renowned practitioners such as Emmet Gowin and Richard Misrach – have considered Anthropocene environmental and socio-economic impacts from various points of view, and the book attempts to give some idea of the variety of approaches and practices they currently employ. Although images of people do not figure largely in most of this work, their traces and environmental impacts are everywhere.

Above: Richard Misrach from The Fires, in Richard Misrach and Reyner Banham, Desert Cantos, University of New Mexico Press, 1992

‘The model that I’m trying to build on [in my long-running work, The Cantos] is the epic model in literature [rather than that of the essay], which is something that is accumulating over time.’34 Richard Misrach, in conversation with John Paul Caponigro

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Surveying the Anthropocene Patricia Macdonald

The Anthropocene surveyed in variants of the ’realist’ and ‘documentary’ traditions The work of some of these practitioners, in variants and developments of what might still be called the ‘documentary’ and the ‘realist’ traditions, in the absence of revised terms to reflect ongoing debates – some of the latter tradition using combined or constructed images – emphasises the effect of anthropogenic impacts on the Earth and its atmosphere, or on specific living creatures or ecosystems, as well as on environmental justice (or lack of it) in human societies, particularly in relation to the mining, construction, oil and plastics industries, and to large-scale agribusiness, industrial forestry and environmental degradation: Benoit Aquin, Olaf Otto Becker, Daniel Beltrá (described here in an essay by Barbara Bloemink), Marilyn Bridges (celebrated by Willis E. Hartshorn), Edward Burtynsky (seen in new Above: Edward Burtynsky Skyline, Looking South, Republic Bank Center, Houston, Texas, USA, 1988

juxtapositions by William A. Ewing, and in images from his own 2018 global-scale project, with filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal and cinematographer Nicholas de Pencier, Anthropocene), Pedro David, Terry Evans, Tim Flach, Lorne Gill, Alexander Hamilton, Louis Helbig (with metrics by Bill McKibben), Chris Jordan (still images from the director of the 2018 film Albatross), Timo Lieber, Owen Logan, Patricia & Angus Macdonald, Pradip Malde, Gideon Mendel and Paul Souders. Some of the impacts portrayed are those caused by rapid industrial developments or disasters, and some are due to the processes of ‘slow violence’ as discussed earlier. Edward Burtynsky in particular, together with his long-time collaborators, has made the subject of the Anthropocene very much his own in his images, books and films. He has dramatically and ‘immersively’ drawn attention to the vast excavations and devastated environments and communities on the Earth’s surface which are due to the global activities of the extractive industries supplying (almost always) geographically distant construction projects of all kinds. For every steel and glass tower, packed with electronic devices, in the megalopolises of the ‘modern’ world, and every motorway that runs between them, there

Above: Edward Burtynsky Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia, 2007

are many such cavernous holes, and consequent pollution, disruption or displacement, intended and unintended, for the humans and other inhabitants of the source areas involved, and Burtynsky has exposed these often-hidden places to worldwide view. The powerful work of Louis Helbig, that of Daniel Beltrá, and that of the photographer/ writer Owen Logan, has severally made further important contributions in terms of the oil industry in North America and in Africa: its installations, accidents, and its complex costs to ecosystems and to human societies. Owen Logan has also, alongside his often digitally

‘For every steel and glass tower in the megalopolises of the “modern” world ... there are many such cavernous holes ...’

constructed or composite, realist photographic work, made wide-ranging textual critiques, relating both to the socio-politics of his chosen subject matter, and to current mainstream ‘documentary’ photographic practice, as discussed here in an interview with Patricia Macdonald. Olaf Otto Becker has provided highly effective bodies of imagery in terms of the destruction of primary, old-growth forests – and their ridiculous and gargantuan artificial ‘re-creation’ in a Singapore public park – as have, in terms of black carbon pollution, Timo Lieber, in his aerial studies of melting Arctic ice; and Alexander Hamilton, in his microscopic urban leaf studies. Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann have documented a ‘forlorn gesture’ to ‘save’ a melting glacier; Greg White has recorded an example of a more innovative and promising technology, that of the ‘ice stupa’; Benoit Acquin has conjured the miasmic realities of dustbowl agriculture in China, along with attempts to mitigate these;

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Pedro David has made a moving testament to ‘living ghost’ natural forests underplanted with and suffocated by commercial tree crops in Brazil; Terry Evans has documented the remnants of semi-natural prairie, in their current context of the agricultural land of ‘[human]-inhabited prairie’, in the USA; and Tim Flach brings us intensely face-to-face with individual endangered animals worldwide. And Chris Jordan, in both still photographs and film, has created unforgettably wrenching images of the consequences of plastic pollution on the lives of the calmly majestic albatrosses of a Pacific island extremely distant from any continental landmass. Pradip Malde and Gideon Mendel have movingly considered, in very different ways, very different aspects of the human cost of environmental degradation and anthropogenically amplified climate disasters, respectively: highly empathetic records of the slow evolution of regular practices – some of these being the daily, domestic minimalism of necessity, and others brutal and seemingly inhuman – of living in impoverished environments; and dramatic but respectful reportage of the current human realities of floods and rising seas. Human traces, and beyond – future natural? While those working in broadly ‘documentary’ and ‘realist’ traditions present the viewer with the evidence, on a range of scales, of anthropogenic destruction more-or-less directly, another more disparate group of artists use an array of practices to question and imagine both human and non-human scenarios or combinations of those categories. The work of artist-photographers like Thomas Struth (illuminated in an essay by Tobia Bezzola) considers a ‘mirror-view’ of human activities seen as part of ‘Nature’, exemplified here in powerful images from his two series Places of Worship and Nature & Politics. That of David Buckland uses light to project, on to melting and collapsing Arctic icebergs, terse, and sometimes Following page opening: Meryl McMaster On the Edge of This Immensity, 2019, Digital C-Print, 40” x 60”, Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

determinedly inadequate, environmental slogans, together with images of loved humans. An increasing number of innovative and boundary-crossing Indigenous artists from both the Americas and Africa employ a range of powerful performance-based interventions. The Native American (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara) Zig Jackson/Rising Buffalo deals with ‘contemporary issues of identity and representation, displacement, land rights, indigenous sovereignty, and the ambiguity of cultural boundaries’; and the Canadian/Plains Cree Meryl McMaster uses ancient, and firmly territorial, magic realism and a ‘fusion of private performance, costume drama and photography’ to present ‘an artist’s view of a hidden

On the Edge of This Immensity

world’ (see endnote 32). The work of Fabrice Monteiro, who considers himself ‘transcultural’ (being half Belgian, half Beninese), uses surreally costumed figures to highlight urgent

Travelling into unknown land. Birds as companions and guides. Retracing ancestral steps. On paths walked many times. Great migrations across land and water. Connecting with kinfolk. On journeys that lead here. Time passes by in cycles. On journeys leading to my being. Meryl McMaster

ecological issues all over the world, beginning his major project ‘The Prophecy’ in Senegal. The late Chris Wainwright (working with light-wand signalling systems in Japan), Aleksandr Kupny (whose dangerous explorations within the carcase of the exploded reactor building at Chernobyl are described in an essay by Kate Brown)35, and Jojakim Cortis & Adrian Sonderegger (who make and photograph studio-staged reconstructions of significant enviro-historical events), find ways of exploring nuclear issues, whether (unintended) disasters, as at Fukushima and Chernobyl, or the (intentional) detonation of the first atom bombs (the radionuclides from the ‘Trinity’ test of 1945 at Los Alamos, USA, and subsequent

Place: Gore Bay, Manitoulin Island, Ontario

detonations in the atmosphere in the same year and in the following decades, are likely to become the signal chosen to indicate the beginning of the Anthropocene).

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The respective work of Mandy Barker, of Pinar Yoldas and of Susanne Ramsenthaler considers, in different ways, the possible evolution of new creatures, some which are able to digest, or build their bodies from, plastic, or to thrive in polluted and now fish-less seas. That of cultural commentators making effective use of photographic images (by themselves or others), like Siobhan Lyons (writing on the recent genre of ‘ruin porn’ AKA ‘ruin lust’, the ‘de-industrial sublime’, and ‘rustalgia’), or Natasha Myers (in her piece ‘Edenic apocalypse meets gardens against Eden’), examine responses to currently existing dystopias which foreshadow possible futures and socio-ecological relations. Some works by Owen Logan might also be considered part of this strand of practice. All these artists, rather than employing traditional ‘documentary’ methods, adopt more oblique, ironic, speculative, fantastical or polemical artistic strategies of messaging that either re-consider the events of the past and present and the perception of these, or look at possible futures, many of them dystopian or apocalyptic, but some involving, in Myers’ words, ‘ways to dream athwart the lure of Anthropocene thinking’. Ideas of ‘the Wild’ and ‘the Unwild’ in ‘cultural landscapes’ George Monbiot (interviewed by Dan Bailey), in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’36, offers here an environmental analysis in a European setting of human-inhabited and modified (i.e. ‘cultural’) landscapes, and thoughts on new approaches to the natural world that humans share with Above: Patricia & Angus Macdonald ‘Wild land’: patterned-mire wetland ecosystem, North-west Scotland, 2019, from ongoing project Re:Wild

other living creatures. The existing so-called ‘wild’ – semi-natural, ghostly (or inhabited by ghosts), or imagined, or damaged or overlaid but still recognizable – in terms of processes and places, and in relation to cultural landscapes, is represented on the pages within and following that essay in the work of a range of artist-photographers: Patricia & Angus Macdonald (aerial imagery of ‘wild-land’ environments in Scotland from their ongoing projects Re:Wild and The Unwild); Susan Derges (who portrays natural processes, and contributes here an actual and metaphorical synthesis of pellucid water, river-life and sky); Thomas Joshua Cooper (from his ‘world’s-edge’ travels); the walking artist Hamish Fulton (represented in text-based work and in photographs made in the Cairngorms of Scotland); Alex Boyd (portraying human marks sited on the ancient rocks, and landscape of archaeological preservation, of Lewis in the Western Isles of Scotland); Anne Campbell (incorporating traces of uncanny songs, both traditional and recent, again in the landscape of Lewis); the several projects of Alicia Bruce, of Sophie Gerrard, and of Patricia & Angus Macdonald, each representing a different approach to the destruction of an important (once internationally protected but now necessarily slated for de-designation) coastal, movingsand-dune habitat and its communities (by Donald Trump’s ecologically destructive golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland); Matthew Dalziel + Louise Scullion with Patricia & Angus Macdonald (visiting a ‘city of birds’ – a thriving colony of gannets, a resilient bird species); Lorne Gill (looking at other species that are managing to survive – a murmuration of starlings around a crepuscular petrol station); Paul Souders, and also Tim Flach – whose intriguing images appear in this section and also at the beginning of the book, as the Frontispiece and opposite the Foreword – (considering the plight of wild species endangered by a range of anthropogenic threats, from unsustainable hunting to poisoning to climate change);

Above: Patricia & Angus Macdonald Burnt moorland, South-east Scotland, 2001, from ongoing project The Unwild

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and Katie Blair Matthews (looking closely at seedlings grown for a rewilding project by an environmental organization).

Examples of rephotography exploring change – in the various contexts of the maintenance or the ‘loss’, planned or unplanned, of ‘wild-land’ environments; ‘cultural landscapes’ in the broad sense; ‘rewilding’; the development of renewable sources of energy in a semi-wild setting; or a complex combination of these situations – have been selected from the work of Chrystel Lebas (from her series Re-visiting), of Patricia & Angus Macdonald (on overgrazing-related environmental degradation, and woodland regeneration under a new management regime, in Highland Scotland from the ongoing project Re:Wild), and of Jamey Stillings (on the construction of solar-powered, renewable-energy installations in a relatively pristine desert area in the USA). Each of these projects considers the current meaning of the term ‘wild’, and the changing ways in which ‘wild land’ may be viewed and valued.

After the Anthropocene The dystopic scenarios explored by artists and writers like Barker, Yoldas, Lyons, Myers Above and back cover: J.J. Harrison Buller’s Albatross Thalassarche bulleri at sea east of the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania, Australia

and Ramsenthaler represent deeply disturbing imagined futures for life on Earth. But other futures are possible. All of these involve a shift in human attitudes – as increasingly urgently discussed since the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic (terrifyingly portrayed by Antoine d’Agata from Paris in lockdown) by informed writers such as polymath geographer Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Collapse, and Upheaval)37 and environmental journalist Leslie Hook38, essays by both of whom appear here. The book concludes with a part-elegiac, part-inspirational essay by Adam Nicolson (author of The Seabird’s Cry)39, ‘Seabirds and the oceanic images of J.J. Harrison’, which offers a perspective, in terms of both text and images, on a possible – and, he argues, necessary – transition to an ‘age of empathy’ – a post-Anthropocene, or ‘Ecozoic’ future. It is a tragic irony that our scientifically validated awareness of the present global climate and ecological crises has been made possible by – among other things – the current level of human technological development, which is itself one of the main drivers of these crises. James Lovelock, co-originator with Lynn Margulis of the Gaia theory, suggests that the Anthropocene epoch may be followed by a cyborg-dominated epoch which he names

Below: Susanne Ramsenthaler from the series Hybrids, 2006 - 2010

the ‘Novacene’. Others, such as Richard Powers in his novel The Overstory, also envisage a (nameless) new time when life-forms move on to another level, and operate at a different pace, but in this version, they remain rooted in the entire evolutionary history of life on Earth. It remains to be seen what kind of name may be appropriate for that future time. But it is to be hoped that, meanwhile, the world’s human population and its governments may somehow find ways to adopt sustainable and more equitable behaviour patterns that will ensure – along with solving the current climate, ecological and social crises – that the time-interval now known to many as the Anthropocene is very short (and therefore extremely thin in the future record of the rocks).40 For now, despite widespread anthropogenic devastation of Earth’s processes and living communities, human and non-human, some of the world’s vast systems are still working, and some of the planet’s great seabirds – those exquisitely honed, iconic presences – still survive to continue their amazing global oceanic journeys.

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1. Baichwal, Jennifer, ‘Our embedded signal’, in Burtynsky, Edward, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicolas de Pencier, Anthropocene, Steidl, Göttingen, 2018, p. 219. See also film Anthropocene, available on DVD. 2. Lopez, Barry, interview with Edward Helmore on the publication of his book Horizon, (Penguin Random House: The Bodley Head/Alfred A. Knopf, London/New York, 2019), The Guardian, 7 May 2019. See also: Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA/London, 2011. 3. Chesterton, G.K., The Defendant, 1901 (Dover, 2012), Chapter 9. 4. The recommendation was made in 2016, following consideration over the decade and a half since the idea of the Anthropocene was first widely discussed in scientific circles in 2000. See, for example: Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Alan Haywood & Michael Ellis, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc., 13 March 2011, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2010.0339 (accessed April 2019); Lewis, Simon, ‘A force of nature: our influential Anthropocene period’, The Guardian, 23 July, 2009; Sample, Ian, ‘Anthropocene: is this the new epoch of humans?’, The Guardian, 16 October 2014; Carrington, Damian, ‘The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare new dawn of human-influenced age’, The Guardian, 29 August 2016; and Waters, Colin & Jan Zalasiewicz, ‘The Anthropocene and its “Golden Spike”’, in Burtynsky et al., op. cit. 5. Sagan, Dorion, ‘Beautiful monsters: Terra in the Cyanocene’, in Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters and Ghosts, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London, 2017. 6. Pratt, Mary Louise, ‘Concept and Chronotope’, in Tsing, Anna et al., op. cit., p. G170. 7. Lewis, Simon, and Mark Andrew Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, March 2015, Nature 519(7542): 171-80; Devlin, Hannah, ‘Was 1610 the beginning of a new human epoch?’, The Guardian, 11 March 2015. 8. Waters, Colin and Jan Zalasiewicz, ‘The Anthropocene and its “Golden Spike”’, in Burtynsky et al., op.cit., pp 213–6. 9. Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA/London, 2011; and Moore, Jason W., Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Kairos/PM Press, Oakland CA, 2016. 10. Latour, Bruno, ‘Agency at the time of the Anthropocene’, New Literary History, 45, pp 1-18, 2014, and Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, Polity Press, Cambridge/Medford MA, 2018 (first published as Où atterir? Comment s’orienter en politique, Editions La Decouverte, Paris, 2017); Morton, Timothy, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence, Columbia University Press, New York, 2016, and Being Ecological, Pelican Books, 2018 (see also, Collyer, Ben, ‘Why awareness matters: What does it take to dodge Anthropocene bullets’, New Scientist, 20 January 2018, pp 42-3 for an insightful review of the latter); Yusoff, Kathryn, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2018; Farrier, David, Anthropocene Poetics, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2019, and Footprints: In search of future fossils, 4th Estate, London, 2020; Clark, Nigel, ‘The Anthropocene’, in Kobayashi, Audrey, Ed., International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edn., Elsevier, Amsterdam, 2019 (see also, Clark, Nigel, ‘What can go wrong when people become interested in the nonhuman’, in Blok, Anders, Ignacio Farias and Celia Roberts (Eds), The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, Routledge, London, 2019); Chandler, David, Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An introduction to mapping, sensing and hacking, Routledge, Abingdon/New York, 2018, and Chandler, David and Julian Reid, Becoming Indigenous: Governing imaginaries in the Anthropocene, Rowman & Littlefield, London/New York, 2019. 11. Macfarlane, Robert, ‘Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever’, The Guardian, 1 April 2016. 12. Ghosh, Amitav, The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017. See also Anderson, Kayla, ‘Ethics. Ecology, and the Future: Art and Design Face the Anthropocene’, Leonardo Journal Vol. 48, No. 4, August 2015; published by MIT Press on the occasion of SIGGRAPH 2015. 13. Simms, Andrew, ‘“A cat in hell’s chance” – why we’re losing the battle to keep global warming below 2°C’, The Guardian, 19 January 2017. See also note 17 (a) below, and: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2865/a-degree-of-concern-why-global-temperaturesmatter/ (1 June 2019) (accessed 29 April 2020). 14. Waters, Colin and Jan Zalasiewicz, ‘The Anthropocene and its “Golden Spike”’, in Burtynsky et al., op. cit., p. 215. 15. Ibid., p. 216. 16. Ibid., p. 213. See also Steffen, Will et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet’, Science, 13 February 2015: Vol. 347, Issue 6223, 1259855. 17. See, for example, (a): UN: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5°C, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/; Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, 2019, https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/; and regular IPCC reports on climate change the most recent of which is the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), IPCC, 2021: Climate Change 2021, https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1; and

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(b): UN: Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), Global Assessment Report, 2019, https://ipbes.net/global-assessment (the most comprehensive study of life on Earth ever undertaken and subsequent reports), the UN’s Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 (GBO-5), 15 September 2020, https://www.cbd.int//gbo5. and the IPBES-IPCC co-sponsored workshop report: Biodiversity and Climate Change, 2021, https://www.dnr.de/fileadmin/Publikationen/2021-08-25-IPCC-IPBESworkshopreport-DNR_Poertner.pdf 18. See Meadows, Donatella, Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-year update, Earthscan, London, 2005, pp 21-22. 19. Gore, Al, (book) An Inconvenient Truth, Rodale/Melcher Media, 2006 (and film, available on DVD). See also: Mann, Michael E., Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, 1999, ‘Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties, and limitations’, in Geophysical Research Letters, 26 (6), pp 759-762, https://doi.org/10.1029/1999GL900070. The term ‘hockey stick graph’ was popularised by the climatologist Jerry Mahlman to describe the pattern shown in this reconstruction. See also: Weart, Spencer B., ‘Modern Temperature Trend’, The Discovery of Global Warming, 2020 (at American Institute of Physics (AIP), https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm; available as a PDF) (accessed 29 April 2020). 20. See note 17(a), and also www.co2.earth, and www.carbonbrief.org. 21. See note 17(b). 22. Carrington, Damian, ‘Warning of “ecological Armageddon” after dramatic plunge in insect numbers’, The Guardian, 18 October 2017. 23. As the renowned environmental writer Barry Lopez has said, ‘The first rule of everything is: pay attention.’ Interview with Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times, 31 March 2019.

Following page opening: A world on fire A version of a composite image from 22 August 2018 from NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Worldview application, which provides the capability to interactively browse over 700 global, full-resolution satellite imagery layers and then download the underlying data, essentially showing the entire Earth as it looks ‘right now’. Actively burning fires, detected by thermal bands, are shown as red points. Some are intentional, for agriculture, but such fires are increasingly out of control due to climate issues; many others are wildfires, which are becoming more extreme and frequent due to global heating, which they in turn exacerbate. Image courtesy: NASA Worldview, EOSDIS See: https://go.nasa.gov/ 2BRck1Z and https://www.nasa.gov/ image-feature/ goddard/2018/ a-world-on-fire (last accessed 24 August 2020)

24. See note 17(b); and also Watts, Jonathan, ‘Human society under urgent threat from loss of earth’s natural life’, The Guardian, 6 May 2019; Watson, Robert, ‘Loss of biodiversity is just as catastrophic as climate change’, The Guardian, 6 May 2019; ‘The Guardian view on extinction: time to rebel’ (Editorial), The Guardian, 7 May 2019; Vaughan, Adam, ‘Forgetting past wildlife’, New Scientist, 14 December 2019; and McCarthy, Michael, Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, John Murray, London, 2010. 25. ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’ Leopold, Aldo (edited by Luna Leopold), Round River: From the Journals of Aldo Leopold (1940s), Oxford University Press, New York, 1993, p. 165. 26. Vidal, John, ‘“Tip of the iceberg”: is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?: As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the coronavirus epidemic may be just the beginning of mass pandemics’, The Guardian, 18 March 2020. See also: Brown, Kate, ‘The Pandemic Is Not a Natural Disaster: The coronavirus isn’t just a public-health crisis. It’s an ecological one.’, The New Yorker: Annals of Inquiry, 13 April, 2020. 27. Sverdrup-Thygeson, Anne, in Carrington, Damian, ‘Humanity must save insects to save ourselves’, The Guardian, 7 May 2019. 28. Alison Green (supporter) and Gail Bradbrook (co-founder), respectively, of Extinction Rebellion (XR), quoted in Green, Matthew, ‘Rebels with a cause’, Financial Times: FT Weekend Magazine, 13/14 April 2019, pp 12-19. See also, on page 11 of this essay, an image of the very effective XR ‘hour-glass’ logo, superimposed on the amazing, first-ever photograph of a black hole (as published in report by Devlin, Hannah, The Guardian, 10 April 2019), [Extinction Rebellion] on Facebook (accessed 19 April 2019). 29. Nixon, Rob, op. cit. (see note 9), from ‘Introduction’, pp 3 and 14. 30. De Pencier, Nicholas, ‘Evidence’, in Burtynsky et al., op. cit., p. 218. 31. Tsing, Anna et al., op. cit. 32. See Jackson, Zig, in Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah J. and Veronica Passalacqua (Eds), Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photographers, C.N. Gorman Museum, University of California/Heyday Books, Davis/Berkeley, 2006, p. 31; and Watkins, Jonathan, Lucy R. Lippard and Lindsay Nixon, in Watkins, Jonathan (Ed.), Meryl McMaster: As Immense as the Sky, Birmingham, UK, Ikon Gallery, 2019, pp 3, 5-13 and 21-24. 33. Carlowicz, Michael, ‘Out of the Blue and into the Black: New Views of the Earth at Night’, NASA Earth Observatory, 5 December 2012. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/IntotheBlack (accessed April 2019). 34. See: Richard Misrach and Reyner Banham, Desert Cantos, University of New Mexico Press, 1992 and http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/photographers/conversations/richard-misrach (accessed 6 April 2020). 35. Brown, Kate, ‘Marie Curie’s fingerprint: Nuclear spelunking in the Chernobyl zone’, in Tsing, Anna et al., op cit., pp G33-G50. See also Brown, Kate, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future, Allen Lane, 2019, pp 216-224. 36. Monbiot, George, in conversation with Dan Bailey, ‘Walk on the Wild Side’: Rewilding, hillwalking and history for UKHillwalking.com, 17 December 2015, on www.monbiot.com (accessed May 2019). 37. Diamond, Jared, ‘Lessons from a pandemic’, Financial Times: FTWeekend, 28 May 2020. 38. Hook, Leslie, ‘What coronavirus can teach us about climate change’, Financial Times: FT Weekend Magazine 20/21 June 2020. 39. Nicolson, Adam, commissioned article by the author of Sea Room, HarperCollins, London/Glasgow, 2004; and The Seabird’s Cry, William Collins, London/Glasgow, 2018. 40. I first encountered this idea in Haraway, Donna, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin’, in Environmental Humanities, Vol. 6, 2015, pp 159-165.

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Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever Robert Macfarlane In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’. Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Wales, when he realised that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control. He proposed his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness. Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible. Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the present – we might think of John Clare as a solastalgic poet, witnessing his native Northamptonshire countryside disrupted by enclosure in the 1810s – but it has flourished recently. ‘A worldwide increase in ecosystem distress syndromes,’ wrote Albrecht, is ‘matched by a corresponding increase in human distress syndromes’. Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognisable by climate change or corporate action: the home become suddenly unhomely around its inhabitants. Albrecht’s coinage is part of an emerging lexis for what we are increasingly calling the ‘Anthropocene’: the new epoch of geological time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long-term signature in the strata record. And what a signature it will be. We have bored 50 m kilometres of holes in our search for oil. We remove mountain tops to get at the coal they contain. The oceans dance with billions of tiny plastic beads. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of rainforests for monoculture production sends out killing smog-palls that settle into the sediment across entire countries. We have become titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come. The idea of the Anthropocene asks hard questions of us. Temporally, it requires that we imagine ourselves inhabitants not just of a human lifetime or generation, but also of ‘deep time’ – the dizzyingly profound eras of Earth history that extend both behind and ahead of the present. Politically, it lays bare some of the complex cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other species, as well as between humans now and humans to come. Conceptually, it warrants us to consider once again whether – in Fredric Jameson’s phrase – ‘the modernisation process is complete, and nature is gone for good’, leaving nothing but us. There are good reasons to be sceptical of the epitaphic impulse to declare ‘the end of nature’. There are also good reasons to be sceptical of the Anthropocene’s absolutism, the political presumptions it encodes, and the specific histories of power and violence

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that it masks. But the Anthropocene is a massively forceful concept, and as such it bears detailed thinking through. Though it has its origin in the Earth sciences and advanced computational technologies, its consequences have rippled across global culture during the last 15 years. Conservationists, environmentalists, policymakers, artists, activists, writers, historians, political and cultural theorists, as well as scientists and social scientists in many specialisms, are all responding to its implications. A Stanford University team has boldly proposed that – living as we are through the last years of one Earth epoch, and the birth of another – we belong to ‘Generation Anthropocene’. Literature and art are confronted with particular challenges by the idea of the Anthropocene. Old forms of representation are experiencing drastic new pressures and being tasked with daunting new responsibilities. How might a novel or a poem possibly account for our authorship of global-scale environmental change across millennia – let alone shape the nature of that change? The indifferent scale of the Anthropocene can induce a crushing sense of the cultural sphere’s impotence. Yet as the notion of a world beyond us has become difficult to sustain, so a need has grown for fresh vocabularies and narratives that might account for the kinds of relation and responsibility in which we find ourselves entangled. ‘Nature,’ Raymond Williams famously wrote in Keywords (1976), ‘is perhaps the most complex word in the language.’ Four decades on, there is no ‘perhaps’ about it. Projects are presently under way around the world to gain the most basic of purchases on the Anthropocene – a lexis with which to reckon it. Cultural anthropologists in America have begun a glossary for what they call ‘an Anthropocene as yet unseen’, intended as a ‘resource’ for confronting the ‘urgent concerns of the present moment’. There, familiar terms – petroleum, melt, distribution, dream – are made strange again, vested with new resilience or menace when viewed through the ‘global optic’ of the Anthropocene. Last year I started the construction of a crowdsourced Anthropocene glossary called the ‘Desecration Phrasebook’, and in 2014 The Bureau of Linguistical Reality was founded ‘for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene’. Albrecht’s solastalgia is one of the bureau’s terms, along with ‘stieg’, ‘apex-guilt’ and ‘shadowtime’, the latter meaning ‘the sense of living in two or more orders of temporal scale simultaneously’ – an acknowledgment of the out-of-jointness provoked by Anthropocene awareness. Many of these words are, clearly, ugly coinages for an ugly epoch. Taken in sum, they speak of our stuttering attempts to describe just what it is we have done. The word ‘Anthropocene’ itself entered the Oxford English Dictionary surprisingly late, along with ‘selfie’ and ‘upcycle’, in June 2014 – 15 years after it is generally agreed to have first been used in its popular sense. In 1999, at a conference in Mexico City on the Holocene – the Earth epoch we at present officially inhabit, beginning around 11,700 years ago – the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen was struck by the inaccuracy of the Holocene designation.

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‘I suddenly thought this was wrong,’ he later recalled. ‘The world has changed too much. So I said, “No, we are in the Anthropocene.” I just made the word up on the spur of the moment. But it seems to have stuck.’ The following year, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer – an American diatom specialist who had been using the term informally since the 1980s – jointly published an article proposing that the Anthropocene should be considered a new Earth epoch, on the grounds that ‘mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years to come’. The scientific community took the Crutzen-Stoermer proposal seriously enough to submit it to the rigours of the stratigraphers. Stratigraphy is an awesomely stringent discipline. Stratigraphers are at once the archivists, monks and philosophers of the Earth sciences. Their specialism is the division of deep time into aeons, eras, periods, epochs and stages, and the establishment of temporal limits for those divisions and their subdivisions. Their bible is the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the beautiful document that archives Earth history from the present back to the ‘informal’ aeon of the Hadean, between 4 bn and 4.6 bn years ago (‘informal’ because vanishingly little is known about it). Being a geo-geek, I sometimes mutter the mnemonics of the ICS as I cycle to work, trying to get the sequences straight: Cows Often Sit Down Carefully. Perhaps Their Joints Creak? – Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous ... The Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy – a title straight out of Gormenghast – was created in 2009. It was charged with delivering two recommendations: whether the Anthropocene should be formalised as an epoch and, if so, when it began. Among the baselines considered by the group have been the first recorded use of fire by hominins around 1.8 m years ago, the dawn of agriculture around 8,000 years ago and the Industrial Revolution. The group’s report is due within months. Recent publications indicate that they will recommend the designation of the Anthropocene, and that the ‘stratigraphically optimal’ temporal limit will be located somewhere in the mid-20th century. This places the start of

‘“What will survive of us is love”, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic’

the Anthropocene simultaneous with the start of the nuclear age. It also coincides with the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’, when massive increases occurred in population, carbon emissions, species invasions and extinctions, and when the production and discard of metals, concrete and plastics boomed. Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the ‘Plasticene’. We currently produce around 100 m tonnes of plastic globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade, some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record. Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo bottles and deodorant caps – the strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. ‘What will survive of us is love’, wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic – and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.

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The Deutsches Museum in Munich is currently hosting ‘An Anthropocene Wunderkammer’, which it calls ‘the first major exhibition in the world’ to take the Anthropocene as its theme. Among the exhibits is a remarkable work by the American writer and conservation biologist Julianne Lutz Warren, entitled ‘Hopes Echo’. It concerns the huia, an exquisite bird of New Zealand that was made extinct in the early 20th century due to habitat destruction, introduced predators and overhunting for its black and ivory tail feathers. The huia vanished before field-recording technologies existed, but a version of its song has survived by means of an eerie series of preservations: a sound fossil. In order to lure the birds to their snares, the Maori people learned to mimic the huia song. This mimicked song was passed down between generations, a practice that continued even after the huia was gone. In 1954 a pakeha (a European New Zealander) called R.A.L. Bateley made a recording of a Maori man, Henare Hamana, whistling his imitation of the huia’s call. Warren’s exhibit makes Bateley’s crackly recording available, and her accompanying text unfolds the complexities of its sonic strata. It is, as Warren puts it, ‘a soundtrack of the sacred voices of extinct birds echoing in that of a dead man echoing out of a machine echoing through the world today’. The intellectual elegance of her work – and its exemplary quality as an Anthropocene-aware artefact – lies in its subtle tracing of the technological and imperial histories involved in a single extinction event and its residue.

‘We exist in an ongoing biodiversity crisis – but register that crisis ... as an ambient hum of guilt, easily faded out’

Anthropocene art is, unsurprisingly, obsessed with loss and disappearance. We are living through what is popularly known as the ‘sixth great extinction’. A third of all amphibian species are at risk of extinction. A fifth of the globe’s 5,500 known mammals are classified as endangered, threatened or vulnerable. The current extinction rate for birds may be faster than any recorded across the 150 m years of avian evolutionary history. We exist in an ongoing biodiversity crisis – but register that crisis, if at all, as an ambient hum of guilt, easily faded out. Like other unwholesome aspects of the Anthropocene, we mostly respond to mass extinction with stuplimity: the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is united with boredom, such that we overload on anxiety to the point of outrage-outage. Art and literature might, at their best, shock us out of the stuplime. Warren’s haunted study of the huia finds its own echo in the prose and poetry of Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson. Their work – sometimes jointly authored – is minutely attentive to the specificities of the gone and the will-be-gone. Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back. In ‘Succession’ (2013), Skelton and Richardson studied palynological records to reconstruct lists of the grasses and flowers that flourished in the western Lake District after the end of the Pleistocene. The area ‘is still inhabited by the ghosts of lost flora and fauna’, writes Richardson, of which there are ‘traces that even now, centuries later, can be uncovered and celebrated’. Diagrams for the Summoning of Wolves (2015), a purely musical work, shifts from celebration to intervention: it is intended as a performative utterance – a series of notes, rituals and gestures that might somehow enable ‘the return itself’.

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Generation Anthropocene: Robert Macfarlane

Rory Gibb smartly notes that the work of Skelton and Richardson is different in kind from conventional eco-elegy: it evokes ‘a more feral feeling of being stalked by ecosystemic memory’. Such a feeling is appropriate to the Anthropocene, in which we have erased entire biomes and crashed whole ecosystems. Their writing often moves back through the Holocene and into its prior epochs, before sliding forwards to imaginary far futures. They send ghost emissaries – foxes, wolves, pollen grains, stones – back and forth along these deep-time lines. Instead of the intimacies and connections urged by conventional ‘green’ literature, writing like this speaks of a darker ecological impulse, in which salvation and self-knowledge can no longer be found in a mountain peak or stooping falcon, and categories such as the picturesque or even the beautiful congeal into kitsch. Perhaps the greatest challenge posed to our imagination by the Anthropocene is its inhuman organisation as an event. If the Anthropocene can be said to ‘take place’, it does so across huge scales of space and vast spans of time, from nanometers to planets, and from picoseconds to aeons. It involves millions of different teleconnected agents, from methane molecules to rare earth metals to magnetic fields to smartphones to mosquitoes. Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent and its structures withdrawn. In 2010 Timothy Morton adopted the term ‘hyperobject’ to denote some of the characteristic entities of the Anthropocene. Hyperobjects are ‘so massively distributed in time, space and dimensionality’ that they defy our perception, let alone our comprehension. Among the Previous page opening: Wildfires in the Arctic

examples Morton gives of hyperobjects are climate change, mass species extinction and

Intense, uncontrolled wildfires like these, burning over vast areas of taiga (boreal forest) and tundra, in some of the coldest inhabited places on earth, are becoming more widespread and frequent due to climate change. The carbon they release into the atmosphere drives further global heating – what happens here affects the rest of the world.

they are ferociously, catastrophically real.’

Wildfires between the Aldan and Maya Rivers, Yakutia, North-eastern Siberia, July 2012 NASA image: courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) Rapid Response

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radioactive plutonium. ‘In one sense [hyperobjects] are abstractions,’ he notes, ‘in another

Creative non-fiction, and especially reportage, has adapted most quickly to this ‘distributed’ aspect of the Anthropocene. Episodic in assembly and dispersed in geography, some outstanding recent non-fiction has proved able to map intricate patterns of environmental cause and effect, and in this way draw hyperobjects into at least partial visibility. Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and her Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006) are landmarks here, as is Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014). In 2015 Gaia Vince published Adventures in the Anthropocene, perhaps the best book so far to trace the epoch’s impacts on the world’s poor, and the slow violence that climate change metes out to them. Last year also saw the publication of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, by the American anthropologist Anna Tsing. Tsing takes as her subject one of the ‘strangest commodity chains of our times’: that of the matsutake, supposedly the most valuable fungus in the world, which grows best in ‘human-disturbed forests’. Written in what she calls ‘a riot of short chapters, like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after rain’, Tsing’s book describes a contemporary ‘nature’ that is hybrid and multiply interbound. Her ecosystems stretch from wood-wide webs of mycelia, through earthworms and pine roots, to logging trucks and hedge funds – as well as down into the

flora of our own multispecies guts. Tsing’s account of nature thus overcomes what Jacques Rancière has called the ‘partition of the sensible’, by which he means the traditional division of matter into ‘life’ and ‘not-life’. Like Skelton in his recent Beyond the Fell Wall (2015), and the poet Sean Borodale, Tsing is interested in a vibrant materialism that acknowledges the agency of stones, ores and atmospheres, as well as humans and other organisms. Tsing is also concerned with the possibility of what she calls ‘collaborative survival’ in the Anthropocene-to-come. As Evans Calder Williams notes, the Anthropocene imagination ‘crawls with narratives of survival’, in which varying conditions of resource scarcity exist, and varying kinds of salvage are practised. Our contemporary appetite for environmental breakdown is colossal, tending to grotesque: from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) – now almost an Anthropocene ur-text – through films such as The Survivalist and the Mad Max franchise, to The Walking Dead and the Fallout video game series. The worst of this collapse culture is artistically crude and politically crass. The best is vigilant and provocative: Simon Ings’ Wolves (2014), for instance, James Bradley’s strange and gripping Clade (2015), or Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (2014), a post-apocalyptic novel set in the ‘blaec’, ‘brok’ landscape of 11th-century England, that warns us not to defer our present crisis. I think also of Clare Vaye Watkins’s glittering Gold Fame Citrus (2015), which occurs in a drought-scorched American southwest and includes a field-guide to the neo-fauna of this dunescape: the ‘ouroboros rattlesnake’, the ‘Mojave ghost crab’. Such scarcity narratives unsettle what we might call the Holocene delusion on which growth economics is founded: of the Earth as an infinite body of matter, there for the incredible ultra-machine of capitalism to process, exploit and discard without heed of limit. Meanwhile, however, speculative novelists – Andy Weir in The Martian, Kim Stanley Robinson in Red Mars – foresee how we will overcome terrestrial shortages by turning to asteroid mining or the terra-forming of Mars. To misquote Fredric Jameson, it is easier to imagine the extraction of off-planet resources than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. The novel is the cultural form to which the Anthropocene arguably presents most difficulties, and most opportunities. Historically, the novel has been celebrated for its ability to represent human interiority: the skull-to-skull skip of free indirect style, or the vivid flow of stream-ofconsciousness. But what use are such skills when addressing the enormity of this new epoch? Any Anthropocene-aware novel finds itself haunted by impersonal structures, and intimidated by the limits of individual agency. China Miéville’s 2011 short story ‘Covehithe’ cleverly probes and parodies these anxieties. In a near-future Suffolk, animate oil rigs haul themselves out of the sea, before drilling down into the coastal strata to lay dozens of rig eggs. These techno-zombies prove impervious to military interventions: at last, all that humans can do is become spectators, snapping photos of the rigs and watching live feeds from remote cameras as they give birth – an Anthropocene Springwatch.

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Generation Anthropocene: Robert Macfarlane

Most memorable to me is Jeff VanderMeer’s 2014 novel, Annihilation. It describes an expedition into an apparently poisoned region known as Area X, in which relic human structures have been not just reclaimed but wilfully redesigned by a mutated nature. A specialist team is sent to survey the zone. They discover archive caches and topographically anomalous buildings including a ‘Tower’ that descends into the earth rather than jutting from it. The Tower’s steps are covered in golden slime, and on its walls crawls a ‘rich greenlike moss’ that inscribes letters and words on the masonry – before entering and authoring the bodies of the explorers themselves. It gradually becomes apparent that Area X, in all its weird wildness, is actively transforming the members of the expedition who have been sent to subdue it with science. As such, VanderMeer’s novel brilliantly reverses the hubris of the Anthropocene: instead of us leaving the world postnatural, it suggests, the world will leave us post-human. As the idea of the Anthropocene has surged in power, so its critics have grown in number and strength. Cultural and literary studies currently abound with Anthropocene titles: most from the left, and often bitingly critical of their subject. The last 12 months have seen the publication of Jedediah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, McKenzie Wark’s provocative Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene and the environmental historian Jason W. Moore’s important Capitalism in the Web of Life. Last July the ‘revolutionary arts and letters quarterly’ Salvage launched with an issue that included Daniel Hartley’s essay ‘Against the Anthropocene’ and Miéville, superbly, on despair and environmental justice in the new epoch. Across these texts and others, three main objections recur: that the idea of the Anthropocene is arrogant, universalist and capitalist-technocratic. Arrogant, because the designation of the Anthropocene – the ‘New Age of Humans’ – is our crowning act of self-mythologisation (we are the super-species, we the Prometheans, we have ended nature), and as such only embeds the narcissist delusions that have produced the current crisis. Universalist, because the Anthropocene assumes a generalised anthropos, whereby all humans are equally implicated and all equally affected. As Purdy, Miéville and Moore point out, ‘we’ are not all in the Anthropocene together – the poor and the dispossessed are far more in it than others. ‘Wealthy countries,’ writes Purdy, ‘create a global landscape of inequality in which the wealthy find their advantages multiplied ... In this neoliberal Anthropocene, free contract within a global market launders inequality through voluntariness.’ And capitalist-technocratic, because the dominant narrative of the Anthropocene has technology as its driver: recent Earth history reduced to a succession of inventions (fire, the combustion engine, the synthesis of plastic, nuclear weaponry). The monolithic concept bulk of this scientific Anthropocene can crush the subtleties out of both past and future, disregarding the roles of ideology, empire and political economy. Such a technocratic narrative will also tend to encourage technocratic solutions: geoengineering as a quick-fix for climate change, say, or the Anthropocene imagined as a pragmatic problem to be

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‘Perhaps the Anthropocene has already become an anthropomeme: ... its presence in popular discourse ... just a virtue signal’

managed, such that ‘Anthropocene science’ is translated smoothly into ‘Anthropocene policy’ within existing structures of governance. Moore argues that the Anthropocene is not the geology of a species at all, but rather the geology of a system, capitalism – and as such should be rechristened the Capitalocene. There are signs that we will soon be exhausted by the Anthropocene: glutted by its ubiquity as a cultural shorthand, fatigued by its imprecisions, and enervated by its variant names – the ‘Anthrobscene’, the ‘Misanthropocene’, the ‘Lichenocene’ (actually, that last one is mine). Perhaps the Anthropocene has already become an anthropomeme: punned and pimped into stuplimity, its presence in popular discourse often just a virtue signal that merely mandates the user to proceed with the work of consumption. I think, though, that the Anthropocene has administered – and will administer – a massive jolt to the imagination. Philosophically, it is a concept that does huge work both for us and on us. In its unsettlement of the entrenched binaries of modernity (nature and culture; object and subject), and its provocative alienation of familiar anthropocentric scales and times, it opens up rather than foreclosing progressive thought. What Christophe Bonneuil calls the ‘shock of the Anthropocene’ is generating new political arguments, new modes of behaviour, new narratives, new languages and new creative forms. It asserts – as Jeremy Davies writes at the end of his excellent forthcoming book, The Birth of the Anthropocene – a ‘pressing need to re-imagine human and nonhuman life outside the confines of the Holocene’, while also asking ‘how best to keep faith with the web of relationships, dependencies, and symbioses that made up the planetary system of the dying epoch’. Systemic in its structure, the Anthropocene charges us with systemic change. In 1981 the research field of ‘nuclear semiotics’ was born. A group of interdisciplinary experts was tasked with preventing future humans from intruding on to a subterranean storage facility for radioactive waste, then under construction in the New Mexico desert. The half-life of plutonium-239 is around 24,100 years; the written history of humanity is around 5,000 years old. The challenge facing the group was how to devise a sign system that could semantically survive even catastrophic phases of planetary future, and that could communicate with an unknown humanoid-to-be. Several proposals involved forms of hostile architecture: a ‘landscape of thorns’ in which 15 m-high concrete pillars with jutting side spikes impeded access; a maze of sharp black rock blocks that absorbed solar energy to become impassably hot. But such aggressive structures can act as enticements rather than cautions, suggesting here be treasure rather than here be dragons. Prince Charming hacked his way through the briars to wake Sleeping Beauty. Indiana Jones braved wooden spikes and rolling boulders to reach the golden idol in a booby-trapped Peruvian temple. Sometimes I wonder if the design task should be handed wholesale to the team behind the Ikea instruction manuals: if they can convey in pictograms how to put up a Billy bookcase anywhere in the world, they can surely tell someone in 10,000 years’ time not to dig in a certain place.

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Above: Edward Burtynsky Uranium Tailings #5, Elliot Lake, Ontario, 1995

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from Ewing, William A., Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements Thames & Hudson, London, 2016

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Generation Anthropocene: Robert Macfarlane

The New Mexico facility is due to be sealed in 2038. The present plans for marking the site involve a berm with a core of salt, enclosing the above-ground footprint of the repository. Buried in the berm will be radar reflectors, magnets and a ‘Storage Room’, constructed around a stone slab too big to be removed via the chamber entrance. Data will be inscribed on to the slab including maps, time lines, and scientific details of the waste and its risks, written in all current official UN languages, and in Navajo: ‘This site was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Site) when it was closed in 2038 AD ... Do not expose this room unless the information centre messages are lost. Leave the room buried for future generations.’ Discs made of ceramic, clay, glass and metal, also engraved with warnings, will be embedded in the soil and the shaft seals. Finally, a ‘hot cell’, or radiation containment chamber, will be constructed: a reinforced concrete structure extending 60 feet above the earth and 30 feet down into it: VanderMeer’s ‘Tower’ made real. I think of that configuration of berm, chamber, shaft, disc and hot cell – all set atop the casks of pulsing radioactive molecules entombed deep in the Permian strata – as perhaps our purest Anthropocene architecture. And I think of those multiply repeated incantations – pitched somewhere between confession, caution and black mass: ‘leave the room buried for future generations, leave the room buried for future generations ...’ – as perhaps our most perfected Anthropocene text. This article first appeared in The Guardian, 1 April 2016. www.theguardian.com (last accessed 13 September 2020).

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Anthroposcenes

Human marks

Nature & Politics is the title Thomas Struth has chosen for the highly concentrated exhibition of his work from the past decade. What might be encompassed under this title? At first sight, the

Thomas Struth from Places of Worship and Nature & Politics

label ‘nature’ is not that problematic. There are an infinite number of forms of nature, of natura naturata, that can be represented, and this is indeed something photographers have done

Text: Tobia Bezzola from ‘Models, Possibilities: Thomas Struth’s Nature & Politics’

ever since photography was invented. However, one swiftly realizes that what Struth has in mind are not landscape images in the conventional sense. It is less evident whether and how you can show images of ‘politics’. Its institutions take material form as architecture and that can be photographed. And of course one can also portray

Above: El Capitan, Yosemite National Park, 1999 Opposite: Buksoe Dong, Pyongyang, 2007

42

the people active in politics. But it is equally clear that in such images ‘politics’ per se is not visible. In the case of a reflective artist such as Thomas Struth we can therefore assume that he understands the title Nature & Politics at a more fundamental level and that his work of recent years consciously seeks to dig deeper.

Nature and politics? The first question we must

means is not grasped simply by knowing what

On the other hand, these images do not simply

ask ourselves is how these images address the

it shows. For Struth is not engaging here

present themselves. They do not coquettishly

topic. Their sober precision forgoes any effects.

in documentary photographs that simply seek

ask what they can or cannot do. In other words,

What we see is what we see. Places where

to place something in an optimal light and are

the issue here is not the problems of photographic

science and technology are advanced, where

exhausted in the representation of the factual.

representation in rendering comprehensible the

research and experimentation take place, where

The factual, the subject matter, stands for

content shown, or in refusing to do just that. In

things get tested, examined, measured, monitored

something different.

this case, photography does not refer to itself,

and evaluated: laboratories, nature on science’s test bench. A basin with greenish yellow water, with smoke billowing over it, at the University of Edinburgh; a highly complicated measuring system at the Helmholtz-Zentrum in Berlin; a kind of robot workshop at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Struth’s images show us these situations and the captions point tersely to what it is we are seeing. However, as one swiftly discerns, the initial explanation given by the plain captions, the plausible grounds thus created, do not really get you much further. Which is also why Thomas Struth does not trust captions. What an image

At the same time, it immediately becomes clear that while we see something, and are given an explanation for it, we do not in so doing in any way understand what is being shown. We view something without grasping it. We take note of references, they possibly give us a rough sense of what is happening at these locations and what all these apparatuses do. Be that as it may, these photographs are never fit for a text book, they never serve the purpose of explaining the configurations presented. Their actual purpose is not to shed light on the ‘Who’, ‘When’, ‘What’, ‘How’, and ‘Where’.

either technically or semantically. This leads to a situation where it can superficially be construed as documentation because it serves up readily accessible images, does not create mysteries and eschews special effects. Struth’s images challenge us not only to look very closely, but above all to use our understanding, our approach to reading images, our customary habits of interpreting them and the signification we reflexively attribute to them. One thinks one knows what is supposedly being said to us when these things are shown to us in this way in this given context. Ever since the nineteenth century,

43

Human marks Thomas Struth Tobia Bezzola Left: Ride, Anaheim, 2013 Opposite: Stellarator Wendelstein 7-X Detail, Max Planck IPP, Greifswald, 2009

the achievements of scientific civilization have

Struth’s Nature & Politics. Because his approach

the question of what it focuses on always entails

been closely bound up with the history of

does not assert something, but rather inquires,

limitation. By seeking to explore a particular thing,

whether they could be visualized or not. For

explores, evaluates. With complete modesty,

almost everything else gets excluded. In other

almost two centuries photography has

almost humbly, a simple question is asked –

words, Nature & Politics not only asks the

accompanied the growth of industrial/

So what is the question?

question of how humans create their environment

technological civilization, and in the process has devised a vocabulary of description and a rhetoric of commentary with which we are all deeply familiar. One approach celebrates the scale and sublime nature of human achievement in an elegiac vein. The other approach opts to be purely objective and neutral, provides the filling for brochures, accompanies explanations, and gives homo faber a terse account of its activities. Another angle opts for a critical vein reminiscent of Rousseau as regards accusatory images; it bemoans the loss of originality and naturalness that the technological world inevitably entails. Anyone moving photographically outside these

One quickly sees that in these images the question as to what is nature is the question as to what is technology. These photographs do not focus on technology per se but only address it as it challenges nature, to the extent that technology articulates what humans can achieve when changing and shaping their world by scientific/technological means. Technology therefore revolves around our freedom, our freedom as individuals and as society. Here, ‘freedom’ means the freedom of humans to choose and define how they develop, what their goal is for themselves and for the world in which they live.

anew, but also the question of the extent to which humans, by doing so, always transgress beyond an existing environment, an existing nature, and destroy it. As regards their subject matter, these photographs thus always unite a respectful with a critical approach. As an artist Thomas Struth is essentially interested in the man as an artist, as an artist creating himself, as the only self-Creator (Pico della Mirandola), in man as ‘a work of an indefinite shape’. Placed in the world as our own creators, we determine, by virtue of our free will, how and where and what we want to be. Human greatness and dignity do not stem from the fact that man is not definable. Instead,

customary rhetorical patterns is left at best

How does one arrive at such an understanding

they stem from the fact that they have not been

with an ironic attitude toward all the highly

of these images? The subject matter: situations

defined, from our condition of having nothing

scientific/technological razzmatazz. By way of

where we witness how people carefully dare

of our own but at the same time being able to

escape those photographers who no longer wish

move out into the open, the free, the unknown,

appropriate everything.

to offer any sort of commentary can only grasp

the unproven, and experiment with it. One could

and depict what science and technology generate

also say that these are situations where we test

formalistically as the planet’s ornamental trappings.

whether and how new environments can be

All these readings, these received wisdoms on how to understand how that which we are shown is meant, are not really applicable to Thomas

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created and situations where opportunities arise. Because in a broader sense, all these images present experimental set-ups. And in the precise definition of an experimental configuration,

Thomas Struth’s works in Nature & Politics investigate exactly how humans conquer things beyond the given and defined, how they go beyond established borders, how they form and indeed create the world for themselves, and thus themselves anew. In this context, Struth is

especially intrigued by the fact that this does not

one has at least thought it, and it has therefore

or do not as the case may be. Such attempts

happen by simply combining the known and the

seen the light of day. Perhaps one notices that

to realize thought possibilities, to test whether

given in a different or new way. Rather it happens

something is impossible for certain reasons, but

they are actually possibilities, is what

in the Creation of Possibilities (we could propose

by that very act what has been imagined beyond

Thomas Struth’s Nature & Politics shows us;

this as a different title for Struth’s body of works).

the realm of the possible is given, and so one can

that is the subject matter.

These photographs explore the question of how

now try all the same to realize it. This is as true

new possibilities arise – How does one go

of a physical experiment as it is of a thought

beyond the boundary where the world ceases

experiment by Walt Disney, who recreated a

and where one should rationally stop and say:

memory of Europe in the Californian desert which

Everything else is impossible? All the photographs

has become a defining reality of the US mindset.

reach that boundary. And beyond it. But for that to happen someone must first have thought up new possibilities. One does not by chance simply stumble into the zone beyond the given. In all the situations which Struth shows us, exploring minds were first confronted by the impossible. Human will and its freedom to want to do something (the political) come up against limits, the given, the possible: Nature. But if one wishes for something or thinks something up, and is then forced to say that it is impossible, it runs against nature; if one thinks of a possibility as being impossible, then

It is striking that the actual subject of these activities, the creature that tests, that creates possibilities, that lives freedom – is absent: The images are devoid of humans. We do not see the king, we see the empty throne, something

The boundaries of what is in fact possible are

Byzantine art called hetoimasia: ‘Preparation of

not defined by the world of the given, but by

the Throne’ for the Second Coming of Christ.

our thought and our imaginings. From these,

Instead of the Judge of the World, we see the

humans develop models. Science needs its

representation of his throne, ready for his return.

models, technology creates models, society’s

Here, too, the images are aniconic. They show us

thinking needs models, culture gives it models,

the fantastic, the grand, the threatening and the

and individuals model their biographies to fit

awful sides to human freedom by showing us the

with their own ideas. And because models

places where the activity happens and by never

change, possibilities change. At the beginning

showing us a single human being.

there are not real possibilities; the beginning is always a matter of thought possibilities that prove their validity in the attempt to realize them,

This article formed the introduction to Thomas Struth, Nature & Politics, MACK, 2016

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Marked land Marilyn Bridges

The photographs of Marilyn Bridges function as

In the contemporary rural landscape, Bridges

both art and information, personal expression and

depicts the ‘timeless’ acts of farming and grazing.

documentation. For the past decade, Bridges has

Except for the occasional machine, these scenes

combined photography with her passion for flying

often appear as we might imagine our ancestors

in order to preserve what she refers to as ‘the

to have lived. When photographing our cities,

messages of humankind.’ Written on the earth

Bridges gives them a majesty and monumentality

and covering the reach of time from prehistoric to

that connect them with the architectural

the present day, these markings and monuments

achievements of ancient times. However, she

form a complex tapestry of human culture,

also shows us a contemporary landscape filled

recording both our sacred and secular lives.

with the evidence of industrialization. For Bridges,

Bridges's work has scientific value, but it is also driven by her personal vision and the exhilaration of flight. As the plane banks, she controls the

our factories and congested highways do not reflect progress, so much as our dislocated relationship to the earth and environment.

angle of her approach to retain details while

Marilyn Bridges, photographer, pilot and explorer,

revealing the larger complexity of the landscape.

illuminates the bonds between the mark-makers

Bridges prefers the light of early morning or

of 3,000 BCE and the builders of our modern

late afternoon when the sun creates long and

cities. Ancient or contemporary, Bridges's

distinctive shadows. These shadows enhance

landscapes serve the dual role of interpreting

the three-dimensionality of what lies below and

the power of extraordinary sites and creating

their patterns are integrated as defining elements

visual records that may prove to be the only

in the photographs.

means of preserving these sites against the

Many of the earliest earth works photographed

Above: Highway Emerging, Nevada, 1990 Opposite: Nazca, Arrows over Rise, 1979

eroding elements of time and neglect.

by Bridges are impossible to decipher from the

Bridges's work itself is about time, both geological

ground. By legend, they were not built to be seen

and human. Through her photographs she sketches

by the makers but by their gods. Others are the

the history of man. Yet, rarely do humans appear

result of ritualistic acts, meant to forge a

in her images. Rather, like an archaeologist, she

connection with the earth. These sites are

attempts to define a culture through the traces

mysterious places whose purpose and meaning

that remain. Some have great importance while

we may never know. Others are monuments to

other traces are without significant distinction.

the divinity of kings and the power of nations,

Yet, all reflect their creators' worlds and often

built to impress and inspire the earthbound.

the achievements of their physical, intellectual and spiritual powers. Willis Hartshorn, Director, International Center for Photography, New York City

47

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Habitat destruction: Prairie Terry Evans from Ancient Prairies and Inhabited Prairie

Since 1978, all of my work is connected by an abiding interest in and love for prairie. This interest began more than forty years ago when I photographed the Fent prairie, an 80 acre virgin prairie near Salina, Kansas, where I lived. I explored Fent and other prairies for the next eight years, which introduced me to the wondrous balance of an undisturbed ecosystem, and has informed all of my work to date. ... ... After spending eight years photographically exploring the fragmentary but still extant undisturbed prairie ... I [suddenly] realized that the inhabited prairie was part of the body of the prairie and I could not understand prairie if I didn’t look at the whole of it [and] I began to photograph the rest of the prairie. ... ... In Ancient Prairies, I’m visiting prairie remnants Opposite top: Spring bur oak, from Ancient Prairies Opposite below: Fent Prairie, from Ancient Prairies Above: Field Museum Cardinals, from Prairie Specimens

once again. Recently, in late May, I went back to the Fent prairie to photograph its intricate botanical complexity after having photographed the effects of fracking in North Dakota and petcoke pollution in Southeast Chicago, which both showed human disregard for land and its people. I’m deeply disturbed by our seeming inability to confront the current and impending disasters of our intensive fossil fuel overuse and the climate change our lives are provoking. This work is about remembering the wisdom and

Right: Oxbow, from Inhabited Prairie

beauty of intact prairies. It is about SEEING them. These prairies would not exist without human care, and Ancient Prairies serves as a tribute to the kinship between humans and nature. Terry Evans

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Habitat destruction: Forest

The Brazilian countryside is being filled with eucalyptus. The enormous emphasis given to steel exports, driven by successive governments, is only one of the several reasons for the deforestation of the Cerrado, the Brazilian savanna, and thus the Atlantic Forest, and even of the Amazon.

Pedro David from Hardwood

Several international steel companies established in the country purchase large pieces of land and replace the natural vegetation with eucalyptus, an exotic, fast-growing type of wood used to

Above: Suffocation #12

50

make charcoal, an important ingredient in the melting of iron ore needed to make steel.

The Cerrado is the most threatened biome.

In January 2012, travelling in the countryside of

These images do not simply have a documentary

Specialists says that soon it will no longer exist.

the state of Minas Gerais, I found a large eucalyptus

purpose, however. I have found that people feel

Eucalyptus depletes the environment due to its

plantation with some native trees still standing

something beyond the most basic meaning of

rapid growth: it consumes too much water and

inside it. I made further visits between 2014 and

these images when viewing them, perhaps

too many nutrients, leaving the soil exhausted

2017, and discovered that the State Forest Institute

identifying themselves with the encaged lives

and dry. The native fauna cannot survive in

had required the company to preserve some

of these native trees, struggling to survive, even

its vicinity and any other plant species struggles

specimens of native trees in order to obtain

suffocating, in an artificial, oppressive and

to grow inside the enormous plantations.

authorization to deforest (or ‘reforest’, in company

vanishing world.

Sometimes the authorities impose conditions

parlance) the area and plant the eucalyptus. I still

on the steel companies in return for allowing

cannot understand why, as the native trees would

them to deforest the land to plant eucalyptus –

not be able to live in those conditions.

including leaving a proportion of the original forest intact, or donating resources to research, environmental or social projects in the region.

Pedro David See: Sonter, Barrett, Moran & Soares-Filho (2015), ‘Carbon emissions due to deforestation for the production of charcoal used in Brazil’s steel industry’, Nature Climate Change 5: 359–363.

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Habitat destruction: Forest

My pictures are an attempt to report on what I’ve seen with my own eyes and what has deeply moved me. For many years I’ve been visiting places where human beings have encountered pristine nature, either directly or indirectly, and I’ve watched as these places have shrunk at an alarming rate.

Olaf Otto Becker from Reading the Landscape: Habitats

The power of our economic system has now become so extensive and so complexly amorphous that it is very difficult to grasp. Corporations tend to react to legislation and other attempts to control their actions simply by strategically shifting their position. There is now good reason to believe that this planet is being changed ever more quickly and uncontrollably by human overpopulation, high material expectations and general opportunism.

52

Humans destroy primary forests, which have been growing for millions of years, within decades. At the same time, humans create a version of nature according to their own imaginations in the megacities of the world, turning nature into a product. Reading the Landscape shows three states of nature in the primary forests of Indonesia and

Opp0site: Primary forest 03, Borneo, Malaysia, 10/2012 Above top left: Deforestation of primary forest, Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, 03/2012

Malaysia: intact nature, ravaged nature, and artificial nature. Altogether, the project documents a fatal ecological and economic process that has progressed beyond the point of reversibility. Olaf Otto Becker

Above below left: Slash and burn 04, Rangsang Island, Riau area, Sumatra, Indonesia, 10/2013 Above right: Supertree Grove, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore, 10/2012

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Habitat destruction: Dustbowl & remedial tree planting Benoit Aquin

Desert now covers 18 percent of China, and a quarter of this desert area has been caused by ecologically damaging human activities. Overexploitation of arable land, overgrazing and increasingly deep drilling for water are at the root of what has become the Chinese ‘Dust Bowl’, a phenomenon the likeness of which has not been seen since the 1930s, when the American Midwest and Canadian Prairies suffered from a devastating drought. China’s situation is quickly becoming the world’s most massive and rapid conversion of arable land into barren sand dunes. The resulting sand is picked up by the wind and transported in the form of giant sandstorms, all over China and into Korea, Japan – even all the way to North America. In an effort to reverse the situation, the Chinese government has initiated the largest environmental restoration initiative the world has ever seen, and has begun a mass exodus of ‘environmental refugees’, displaced by the advancing sand. Benoit Aquin

54

Left top to bottom: The motorbike, China, 2006 The World’s Longest Shelterbelt, Xilingol, Inner Mongolia, 2006: Farmers plant trees to protect cropland, at the border of Inner Mongolia and Hebei Provinces, on a stretch of the ‘Great Green Wall of China’, the longest forest belt program in the world, launched in 1978 to curb desertification. Storm at Hongsibao, China, 2007 Opposite top: Wuwei Oasis, Hexi Corridor, Gansu, China, 2006 Opposite below: Genghis Khan, China, 2006

Habitat destruction: pristine desert or renewables? Jamey Stillings from Changing Perspectives: The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar

Right: #26, 15 October 2010 Site of Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (Ivanpah) prior to commencement of construction, Mojave Desert, CA, USA Opposite top: #5490, 6 January 2012 Natural erosion gullies of alluvial slope overlap with boundary and service roads of Unit 2 Opposite centre: #11913, 1 October 2013 View north from the power tower of Unit 3 at dusk Opposite bottom: #14353, 3 February 2014 All three units of Ivanpah producing concentrated solar power

I am fascinated by the visual energy and tension

When completed in 2014, Ivanpah Solar became

created at the intersections of nature and human

the world’s largest concentrated solar thermal

activity. We are at a critical juncture in the

power plant with the capacity to produce

evolution of our species. How we choose to live

392 megawatts of electricity.

on Earth in the next few decades, with a rapidly growing human population and expanding consumption patterns, may determine not only our prospects for survival, but also the viability of the global ecosystem.

The issues surrounding energy production are global in nature. Renewable energy projects are being built around the world at a remarkable pace. I continue to transform Changing Perspectives into an international project with

The focus of my work is on renewable energy

recent work in Japan, Uruguay, and Chile.

development. The project began in 2010, with

By observing contemporary changes in the

a flight over the future site of Ivanpah Solar in

energy landscape, I create imagery relevant to

the Mojave Desert of California, USA.

our present-day collective consciousness and an eventual historical perspective of this era on Earth. Jamey Stillings

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57

Extraction: Minerals and Carbon: oil Edward Burtynsky from Essential Elements Text: William A. Ewing from Essential Elements

Previous page opening: Oil Fields, Bakersfield, California, USA, 2004 Right: Uranium Tailings #12, Elliot Lake, Ontario, 1995 See also: pages 38-39 Opposite: Silver Lake Operations #16, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia, 2007

In the past decade Canada’s Edward Burtynsky

For several decades the photographer has been

as a place of untrammelled natural beauty, but

has risen to prominence as one of the world’s

providing a constant stream of compelling proof:

Burtynsky was brought up in a heavily industrialized

most accomplished photographers. His large-

from vast piles of abandoned tyres to blasted

part of the country. His moment of epiphany came

scale works are both aesthetically engaging

rock faces that strip the vegetation off entire

not in some high mountain pass or remote lake,

and impressive in their lucid depiction of massive

mountains, to tracts of land denuded of flora

but driving through Pennsylvania, where he came

human interventions upon the landscape. Yet

and fauna and criss-crossed by rivers of waste.

upon a bleak place called Frackville. ‘I was

they never let the social and environmental costs

Burtynsky has been demonstrating just how

surrounded by hills of coal slag,’ he recalled some

slip out of sight. While Burtynsky respectfully

profoundly we are altering the face and body

years later. ‘White birch trees were growing up

acknowledges our collective accomplishments,

of our planet. That he manages to delight the eye,

through the black mounds, and ponds were full

he reminds us of the steep price we pay for

while simultaneously planting seeds of doubt,

of lime green water. It was surreal. Slowly I turned

unbridled material wealth. If Huxley’s warning

is a sign of his consummate skill as an artist.

360 degrees and in that entire horizon there was

of a ‘superlative catastrophe’1 fell on deaf ears in 1928 (after all, industry was roaring along, and the wealthy readers of the article in Vanity Fair were wallowing in dividends) Burtynsky’s stark picture of a ravaged Earth, coming almost a century later, should gain firmer purchase on minds alarmed by the mounting evidence of climate disruption.

60

As a member of the generation of photographers that followed in the footsteps of the ‘New Topographers’, Burtynsky decided early on that the kinds of photographs depicting pristine

nothing virgin. It totally destabilized me. I thought, is this Earth? The pictures I took in Frackville sat as contacts for almost a year. I kept looking at them and then I realized, this is what I have to do.’2

environments were simply anachronistic.

He also recognized that this alien-seeming place

The era of the sublime – at least in its natural

could hardly be unique. Such sites could be

manifestations – was over. Foreign tourists may

hidden from view, or simply so banal in their

think of Canada, the photographer’s birthplace,

aspect as to be unremarkable to passers-by,

but they could probably be found anywhere.

and an Australian mine (see following pages).

For those who like to think that the man-made

Early in his career Burtynsky realized that those

wounds of the earth are to be seen only here and

skyscrapers must have left correspondingly

there, are exceptions to the rule and blemishes

massive holes in the ground somewhere else on

probability, to be a temporary

rather than conditions, not much solace will be

the earth’s surface (the photographer likes to

found in Burtynsky’s photography. ‘When I first

think of some quarries as ‘inverted skyscrapers’).

and transient phenomenon.

started photography I was shocked at the scale

The contrast between the rough gouging of the

We are rich because we are

with which we drag out our natural resources,’

earth and the superhumanly smooth surfaces

living on our capital. The coal,

the photographer admitted. ‘I think it could be the

of the finished towers (and interiors) is striking.

paramount issue of the day – how far can we go

(As a student of anthropology myself, I look at

the oil, the phosphates which we

as a capitalist, consumer culture before the

these pictures and see, as if in a time-lapse film,

are so recklessly using can never

negative effects come back to haunt us.’3 In this

the human triumph in metallurgy beginning some

be replaced. When the supplies

statement Burtynsky is being characteristically

5000 years ago – a little more than 150 generations.

understated: his imagery shows us full well that

In other words, a chain of some few hundred

are exhausted, men will have

those negative effects have already come back

individuals, passing down their knowledge,

to do without ... It will be felt as

with a vengeance.

takes us from those first scratches on the earth’s

a superlative catastrophe.’1

Take the pairing of Houston Skyline and Silver Lake Operations #1, with a view of downtown Houston,

‘The colossal material expansion of recent years is destined, in all

surface to the gleaming skyscrapers of our newly baptized epoch: the Anthropocene.)

Aldous Huxley, 1928

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Minerals and Carbon: oil Edward Burtynsky William A. Ewing

Above: Silver Lake Operations #1, Lake Lefroy, Western Australia, 2007

Much has been written on the photographs of

‘Industrial Lyricism’, ‘Industrial Landscape Sublime’

Burtynsky. Looking at the ensemble of critical

(and the more positive pun, ‘Industrial Light and

texts is illuminating: they speak for the most part

Magic’, ‘The Beautiful Scar’). Doubt permeates

with a common voice, although inflected with

the writings: ‘Troubled Splendour’, ‘Awesome

Opposite: Skyline, Looking South, Republic Bank Center, Houston, Texas, USA, 1988

varying degrees of concern, sometimes even

Ambiguity’, ‘An Uneasy Contradiction’, ‘Troubled

bordering on anguish. An analysis of the titles

Waters’, ‘Deepwater Blues’, ‘Trouble in Paradise’

alone is revealing of this common sentiment.

... and ‘A Guilty Beauty’. Other titles are less

Environments are described as ‘compromised’,

ambivalent: ‘Beauty of the Beast’, ‘Beleaguered

‘ravaged’, ‘disfigured’ and ‘deformed’. Nature

Beauty’, ‘The Aesthetics of the Plunder’,

‘bleeds’. Landscapes are labelled as ‘unnatural’,

‘The Negative Sublime’, ‘Blighted and Beautiful’,

‘augmented’, ‘residual’ and ‘meta-industrial’ (two

‘A Contaminated Beauty’, ‘Contemporary Ruins’

articles are titled ‘Unnatural Beauty’ and ‘Unnatural

and, last but not least, in angry reference

Wonders’). Mention or echoes of the sublime are

to Edward Steichen’s mostly rosy vision of

everywhere: ‘A Melancholy, a Terrible Beauty’,

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mid-twentieth-century humanity (in his famous

conversely, as celebrating the dynamism of

(im)balance.’ ... In the end, what is the viewer left

Family of Man exhibition of 1955), ‘The Family

industry, and the conditions for resilience and

with? Images that intrigue with their formal

of Destruction’.

re-adaptation recently emphasised by, for example,

structure and sharp focus? Fascination with the

Karl W. Butzer. But Burtynsky is not willing for

anachronistic technology of the view camera

aesthetics to take a back seat, and this is key

documenting, in intense detail, the manufactured

to his force, especially when considering his work

landscapes of the twenty-first century? Are these

as a whole.

photographs ‘critiques of landscape degradation

5

Claude Levi-Strauss’s view, contemporaneous with Huxley’s, was that ‘the order and harmony of the West depend upon the elimination of that prodigious quantity of maleficent by-products which now pollutes the earth’, and Burtynsky’s

Angelika Pagel has usefully explored the question

imagery certainly doesn’t do anything to expel

of the tensions in Burtynsky’s work in her essay

that assessment.4 Indeed, Burtynsky’s images

‘The Industrial Sublime’, and she concludes:

could conceivably be edited entirely ignoring

‘The perpetual push and pull between beautiful

aesthetics, and in support of such a (currently

form and edgy subject matter is never resolved

intensifying) environmental narrative, or,

and purposefully left hanging in a precarious

and the cost of technological fetishism’ – or are they images of the industrial sublime? They are all of the above. The images are both fascinatingly beautiful and confusingly disturbing. There are no instant epiphanies, no calls to join Greenpeace, no appeals to return to a preindustrial utopia without mechanical and electronic gadgetry.

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Minerals and Carbon: oil Edward Burtynsky William A. Ewing

We are left with the slow and ultimately trenchant recognition that we are all complicit in the negligent stewardship of our natural resources,

1. Aldous Huxley. ‘Progress: How the Achievements of Civilization Will Eventually Bankrupt the Entire World’, Vanity Fair, 28 January 1928, pp 69 and 105.

landscapes, and urban environments – whether

2. Burtynsky in conversation with Michael Torosian, Residual Landscapes, Toronto, 2001.

we are inhabiting the planet in Shanghai, China,

3. Ibid.

or Breezewood, USA.’6

4. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, [1955], trans. John Russell, London, 1961, p. 39.

William A. Ewing

5. Karl W. Butzer, ‘Collapse, Environment and Society’, PNAS, no. 109, 2012, pp 3632-39. 6. Angelika Pagel, ‘The Industrial Sublime’, in Edward Burtynsky: The Industrial Sublime, Utah, 2011. from Ewing, William A., Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements, Thames & Hudson, London, 2016.

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Opposite: Pivot Irrigation, #39, High Plains, Texas Panhandle, USA, 2012

Above: Borromini #21, Vault, san Ivo della Sapienza, Rome, Italy, 1999

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Extraction: Carbon: oil Daniel Beltrá from Spill Text: Barbara Bloemink from ‘Sublime Melancholy’ in Spill

In a manner unique to photography, [Daniel]

substance over the sections of ocean blanketed

Beltrá’s Spill series exists as both an evocative,

by oil. In the end, over 1.8 million gallons of

aesthetically striking body of work, as well as

Corexit were used, despite its toxic nature. Beltrá

the factual documentation of a specific incident.

captures the prolonged effects of the oil and

On 20 April 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil

Corexit mix in his beautifully composed, poignant

platform, located 41 miles off the coast of Louisiana,

images. Sometimes using a polarising filter to

exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico.

avoid glare and the sun’s reflections, the

The result was one of the most destructive

photographer logged over 40 hours taking

environmental disasters in human history. The

aerial shots from a Cessna light aircraft flying

explosion released 210 million gallons of crude

at 3,000 feet.

oil into the ocean waters, causing a black tide covering 68,000 square miles of ocean and Above and previous page opening: Oil spill #24

spreading over 16,000 miles of coastline. The full consequences of this incident remain unknown – up to 33 percent of the oil from the

Opposite: Oil spill #7

disaster still remains thickly spread over miles of the ocean floor. In so doing it has destroyed unknown quantities of plant life, fish and dolphins.

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What is most interesting in Beltrá’s work is that it functions in the liminal area between art and documentary photography. Its ‘call to action’ is subtle and yet powerful; without any context, a viewer might linger and enjoy these works’ forms, colours and compositions, only discovering over time the underlying story from the barely distinguishable details. Today we consume the

Many strategies were used to attempt to clean

latest media so quickly that documentation of

up the oil. The most obvious were 411 controlled

even the most egregious acts is soon forgotten,

burns; some of these are visible in Beltrá’s

replaced by the next day’s news. By contrast,

photographs, where huge noxious plumes of inky

significant works of art, particularly those containing

smoke rise out of the red-hot fires on the surface

seductive elements of beauty, are intended to

of the water. But more controversial and ultimately

endure, be revisited, and bring to mind larger,

more destructive than the fires was the use of the

more complex ideas of the universal. So it is with

toxic chemical Corexit, originally used to break up

Beltrá’s work. As the artist acknowledges, the

the surface tension of the oil and help it disperse.

‘oil-stained blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico

Flying over the spill, planes dispersed between

swirl in my mind’s eye like a grotesque painting’.

23,000 and 25,000 gallons per day of the

Visually and metaphorically it is impossible to

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Carbon: oil Daniel Beltrá Barbara Bloemink

avoid a comparison between the materials and

of oil over their bodies. By covering their wings,

actions of painting with the literal subjects of

the oil prevents the birds from being able to fly,

these photographs. In both, chemicals are mixed

find food, or regulate their body temperature,

with oil to create extraordinary, unexpected

and they therefore usually die. In the photograph

colours. In some works in the Spill series, the

taken by Beltrá with a hand-held camera, the

greenish-yellow colours, resulting from mixing

pelicans have just been treated, causing the oil

the chemicals with crude oil and water, glow with

to wash off their bodies and drip onto the formerly

unnatural fluorescence. In others, the Corexit

white cloth beneath. On one hand, intervention

spreads across the work’s surface like long,

is helping alleviate a dangerous situation. On the

serpentine brushstrokes of rust red. As the

other, the photograph depicts only a handful of

photographs were taken from a great distance,

birds, calling to mind all of those the rescuers did

the vast scale makes the occasional ships that

not get to in time.

dot many of the works almost unrecognisable. In turn, the saturated, rich colours – and the interesting lines and forms they create – result in what appear, seen from a distance, like contemporary Abstract Expressionist paintings. Their singular beauty rewards extended and repeated study in the manner of fine art.

As Beltrá notes, ‘I find inspiration in the beauty and complexity of nature. The fragility of our ecosystem is a continuous thread throughout my work. My photographs show the vast scale of transformation our world is under from humanmade stresses ... by bringing images from remote locations where human and business interests

Taken as a whole, the works in the Spill series

and nature are at odds, I hope to instil a deeper

engender a kind of ‘sublime melancholy’,

appreciation for nature and an understanding of

a reflection of our current self-imposed alienation

the precious balance our lifestyle has placed on

and careless neglect of our natural environment.

the planet.’

In Beltrá’s work there is no sense of the natural world having vast potential for touching the sublime, for future positive expansion, or pastoral celebration. Instead, there is an implicit understanding that we cannot recover all that has been lost through human inattention and lack of caring. In the end, something essential has been lost beyond the plankton and fish: a sense of mystery and awe, and pride in our role as caretakers of the world. In the final, somewhat idiosyncratic photograph of the series, a group of pelicans huddle together, drenched with slick coatings

Opposite: Oil spill #20

As the Spill series so beautifully and engagingly demonstrates, unless we act quickly to preserve what is left and prevent such disasters from recurring, over time we risk our own future. If works of art can be transformative, perhaps through paying more attention to works such as these, we can learn to protect what remains of the planet on which we live. Barbara Bloemink From: ‘Sublime Melancholy’, in Beltrá, Daniel & Barbara Bloemink, Spill, London: Gost Books, 2013

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Extraction: Carbon: tar sands Louis Helbig from Beautiful Destruction

Louis Helbig’s images [of the Canadian oil /tar sands] are disturbing and contradictory in their rendered beauty of a controversial, environmentally destructive subject. The genius of his work is in his ability to hold the mirror up, forcing us to confront the seductive appeal of the fossil fuel addiction in which we are all implicated. These photographs are selections from Helbig’s book Beautiful Destruction, in which, building on the premise of engaging our imagination to create

Text: Bill McKibben from ‘Global warming’s terrifying new math’

space for constructive discourse, he provides a forum for essays from across the political spectrum of the subject matter. The result is a unique, multi-dimensional, courageous document where visual, political and cultural tension is masterfully choreographed.

Previous page opening: Louis Helbig Residual bitumen, Alberta, Canada

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‘The Alberta oil /tar sands are a place of

‘The exploitation of the oil/tar sands, like oil

superlatives, a place of awesome beauty and

pipelines, is a human project, with all the

destruction,’ Helbig says. ‘They are a kaleidoscope

contradictions and drama inherent in that. They

of contrasts, colours and patterns keeping time

are as good and bad, as beautiful and destructive

with the seemingly unstoppable movement of

as we are as human beings (although everyone

machinery, smoke and effluent. Their scale is

might not consider themselves part of that “we”).

otherworldly, the details peculiar and surreal.

I hope my artworks may open a window on that.’

‘In exhibiting this imagery I have discovered

Louis Helbig /occupy.com, 2012

Opposite: Boreal forest and mist, Alberta, Canada Above: Bitumen slick, Alberta, Canada

that my interpretation of the subject seems – more often than I could ever have predicted, or hoped – to transcend the shrill polarities that encumber this issue, and to provide a space for viewers, whatever their opinions or preconceptions, to reflect and engage their imaginations, themselves and each other.

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Global warming’s terrifying new math

The First Number: 2° Celsius:

Louis Helbig

Since I wrote one of the first books for a general

... So far [2012], we’ve raised the average

Bill McKibben

audience about global warming way back in 1989,

temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees

and since I’ve spent the intervening decades

Celsius, and that has caused far more damage

working ineffectively to slow that warming, I can

than most scientists expected. In fact, many

say with some confidence that we’re losing the

scientists have come to think that two degrees

fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most

is far too lenient a target.

Carbon: tar sands

of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in. To grasp the seriousness of our predicament, you just need to do a little math. This analysis ... allows us to understand our precarious position with three simple numbers.

The Second Number: 565 Gigatons: Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by mid-century and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. ... [But] even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another

Above: Muskeg forest island, Alberta, Canada Opposite: Construction crane, Alberta, Canada

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0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we’re already three-quarters of the way

to the two-degree target ... and study after study

We have five times as much oil and coal and gas

[predicts] that ... emissions will keep growing ...

on the books as climate scientists think is safe to

and we’ll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance

burn. ... [but] the big fossil-fuel companies have

[before 2030].

fought ... hard to prevent the regulation of carbon

The Third Number: 2795 Gigatons: This number is the scariest of all ... It describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies ... the fossil fuel we’re currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number ... 2795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher.

dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. What all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet [has] an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force in Earth. ... Bill McKibben From: ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’, quoted in Louis Helbig, Beautiful Destruction, Rocky Mountain Books, 2016

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Pollution: Carbon: particulates Alexander Hamilton Plants as effective bioindicators of urban air pollution Right: Plant pollution on a tulip flower, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh (cyanotype), 2002 Opposite: Plant pollution on a rose flower, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh (cyanotype), 2002

In 2002 I presented to the delegates at an

The idea of the exhibition was to focus on the

In the intervening years the concerns around air

international conference on Urban Air Pollution,

beauty of plants that we enjoy, oblivious to the

quality have gained international prominence.

Bioindication and Environmental Awareness at

danger that exists around us – smelling the plant,

‘Green’ buses in Edinburgh and other cities are far

the University of Hohenheim, images from an

while unaware that we are breathing in the

less polluting than in the past. But World Health

exhibition on pollution and plants that I planned

pollution particles. Princes Street Gardens is a

Organisation evidence – widely publicised in

at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, which

dramatically situated park, enjoyed by thousands

order to inform policy-making – shows that air

showed the impact of traffic on plants in Princes

of people each year, in a depression in the land

pollution at current levels in most European

Street Gardens, Edinburgh. The plant petals were

between Edinburgh Castle on its crag, and the

cities is responsible for a significant burden of

examined by an advanced electron microscope at

busy thoroughfare of Princes Street, [then, in

deaths, hospital admissions and exacerbation

the Department of Geology, Edinburgh University.

2002] full of diesel-powered buses throughout

of symptoms, particularly in the area of

This equipment enabled the viewing of fine diesel

the day. At that time most European governments

cardio-respiratory disease.

particles, located on the plant petals, which are

were in denial about the impact of air quality on

an unseen danger behind major health problems.

human health and the significant risks to life.

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The air we breathe contains emissions from motor vehicles, industry, heating and commercial

sources, as well as household fuels. Air pollution

including sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, ozone,

harms human health, particularly in those already

peroxylacetyl nitrate, halogens, and acid rain, can

vulnerable because of their age or existing health

damage plants, producing foliar symptoms or

problems. Exposure to air pollutants is largely

abnormal growth. Because plants cannot select

beyond individuals’ control and requires action

or move their living places, their use as

by public authorities at all levels. Ozone pollution

bioindicators has proved to be an effective,

causes breathing difficulties, lung and heart

reliable and low-cost tool for the detection and

diseases, triggers asthma symptoms, and is

monitoring of air quality by way of measuring

associated with about 21,000 premature deaths

grids in urban centres. Understanding this use

per year in the European region.

of plants is important if we are going to stem

Although the images here show diesel particulates on the surface of plant leaves and petals, a number of other air pollutants,

See: Klumpp, Andreas and Gabriele Klumpp, Report of International conference on Urban Air Pollution, Bioindication and Environmental Awareness, University of Hohenheim, 2004.

the current use of polluting materials that lead to serious consequences for human health and wellbeing. Alexander Hamilton 79

Pollution: Carbon: marine plastic Chris Jordan from Running the Numbers and Midway: Message from the Gyre

Above, right, opposite: from Running the Numbers II: Portraits of global mass culture, 2009 – current Stills from Gyre, 2009 (8x11 feet, in three vertical panels)

On Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, a remote

Depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world's oceans every hour. All of the plastic in this image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.

vast polluted Pacific Ocean.

Following page opening and front cover: Unaltered remains of a Laysan albatross fledgling, Midway Island, 2009 from Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2009

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cluster of islands more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent, the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. The nesting chicks are fed lethal quantities of plastic by their parents, who mistake the floating trash for food as they forage over the

For me, kneeling over their carcasses is like looking into a macabre mirror. These birds reflect back an appallingly emblematic result of the collective trance of our consumerism and runaway industrial growth. Like the albatross, we first-world humans find ourselves lacking the ability to discern anymore what is nourishing from what is toxic to our lives and our spirits. Choked to death on our waste, the mythical albatross calls upon us to recognize that our greatest challenge lies not out there, but in here. Chris Jordan

Pollution: Carbon: ingested plastic Chris Jordan stills from the film ALBATROSS; from Midway: Message from the Gyre; and Camel Gastrolith Here is a bizarre corollary to my work with the plastic-filled birds on Midway, from halfway around the world in the Arabian Desert. My scientist friend Marcus Eriksen mailed me this surreal mass of 500+ plastic bags and other shards of plastic, metal, and glass, from the lab of Dr Ulli Wernery, a veterinary researcher in Dubai who courageously studies the stomach contents of dead camels found in the nearby desert. My hope with this piece is to create a kind of vigil for one camel, who gave its life to contain this intolerable conglomeration of human detritus. I care about the bigger phenomenon of desert plastic pollution, and what it mirrors back to us about the insanity of our disposable culture. And equally important for me is the life of this camel, one innocent creature, who, like the albatross, cannot know what we know. Chris Jordan

Above left: from the film ALBATROSS' ‘In the heart of the great Pacific, a story is taking place that may change the way you see everything. ALBATROSS is offered as a free public artwork.’ See: https://www.albatrossthefilm.com

Left, previous page opening and front cover: Unaltered remains of a Laysan albatross fledgling, Midway Island, 2009 from Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2009 Opposite: Camel Gastrolith, 2016

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Environmental justice: Environmental destruction, political power, and self-promotion in the arts Owen Logan, in conversation with Patricia Macdonald Patricia Macdonald: In your socio-economic research projects on the politics of energy and development, Flammable Societies and Contested Powers1, you identified a number of problems with much of current mainstream photographic practice, particularly the widespread use of ‘pathos’, and the ‘legitimation of consumer sovereignty’. Could you summarise your critique regarding these topics and how they relate to environmental issues? Owen Logan: One of the measures which suggest that ecosystem damage has become a far more obvious and visible aspect of public discourse over the past decade is simply the amount of photography orientated towards the issue. Attention to ecosystem damage on the part of talented photographers and writers wins admiration and shows that institutions, the media and a free press are ‘paying attention’. While a large majority of those involved are utterly sincere in making and promoting this work, far from influencing the sort of socio-economic reforms required, we are now seeing a number of elected governments turning from ineffective policies towards more aggressively anti-scientific positions. But is this really a denial of science? Or is it, as the economics writer and broadcaster Paul Mason suggests in his book PostCapitalism2, that the costs of the precautionary principle concerning climate change are now the object of war-prone treaty negotiations? If so, one needs to consider what the concept of the Anthropocene means to those who view it from the perspective of the political far-right, which has recently been gaining influence and re-entering government in several countries. As radical scholars point out, liberalism has only survived by incorporating its alternatives from both the left and the right3. Liberalism itself no longer appears to be a coherent or self-contained doctrine and it is definitely not the same thing as substantive democracy. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that notwithstanding the broadcasting of dramatic ‘natural’ disasters in the mass media, most of humanity experiences environmental crisis as a set of related economic and political struggles. From a far-right philosophical standpoint there is no inherent need to deny the ecological factors – rather, the limits of nature are seen to impose an entirely natural struggle for human survival and inter-group supremacy. While most become losers in this struggle there will be some winners, no matter how small a minority. So, according to this elitist ideology, nature forces opportunities for individual and collective human transcendence. Although it belongs to a nihilistic competitive system, this insidious ideology must be taken seriously if it is to be properly opposed, rather than simply being ‘de-platformed’ or ignored. Moreover, environmental discourse in the hands of technocrats whose reform proposals preserve the status quo, often seems oddly compatible with the far-right outlook which might be said to honour a ‘dictatorship’ of nature above all else.

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In the studies you have mentioned, particularly in Flammable Societies, I examined the lack of realism in so much documentary and humanistic photography.4 Perhaps the main point I can make briefly here is that photographers contribute to ‘the spectacle’, which is to say that they feed a commerce of iconic images which, in this context, trades in pathos, and dwells on the victims and the damages to nature rather than on the underlying dynamics of power and ideology which already tend unpleasantly to implicate us. These dynamics are far more complex and fractured than they are usually portrayed, even in extended photo-essays. Moreover, many of these rather voyeuristic representations – often connected to Non-Governmental Organisations and Charities – actually articulate the logic of consumer sovereignty. The viewer’s abstract moral interest in some possibly distant territory and the viewer’s capacity to consume the information is all important, and makes them ‘sovereign’, so to speak. Nevertheless, political power systems and social contracts have been forged differently at other times, for instance through high levels of labour militancy in Scandinavia, or through the New Deal in the United States. And they continue to be forged differently in different countries with varied results. Flammable Societies and Contested Powers are scholarly contributions towards understanding more about the friction between overlapping ideas of sovereignty. PM: Would you say more about how you see consumer sovereignty in relation to photography? OL: The risk is that political consciousness is reduced to what we look at, read, or watch. To really understand this we need a sense of Western history which goes back to before the invention of photography. However, in the 1980s and 1990s the idea of consumer sovereignty came into its own as a result of information technology. Mainstream economic theory tells us that markets and consumer choices are a more effective means of achieving the public good than anything that elected politicians and civil servants can devise. This general idea was strongly promoted by Americans such as James Buchanan (1919-2013) and Walter Wriston (1919-2005), who argued that market expansions assisted by information technology were bypassing politics and moving power directly to the people. With a few exceptions, such as ‘snuff movies’, which actually reveal the emptiness of their theories, whatever wins the attention of the ‘despotic’ consumer is ultimately considered to be a signpost on a map to the public good for any society. Of course all this is challenged by other economists, but from a more cultural perspective the problem is that photography and all sorts of apparently virtuous information products lend consumer sovereignty the appearance of a universal moral sense that it actually lacks. It is true that the internet has greatly improved access to critical information about the world, but not access to the education and skills needed to really evaluate that information. And over the same period, high-finance and taxation have been very poorly regulated so we have ‘socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor’, while laws have also narrowed the scope of practical resistance in many countries. So, although civil society appears tirelessly talkative it is increasingly toothless. Effective ‘occupations’, for example, need to occupy strategic spaces, not necessarily public spaces. Most other non-violent political practices appear to be information wars which demand very little in the way of political or civic virtues at the level of lived experience. There is a tendency to look to whistle-blowers to be judicious and courageous on our behalf and,

87

Owen Logan, in conversation with Patricia Macdonald

at the same time, to regard the shared risks that underpin the strike weapon as outdated, as if by factors beyond normal grasp. Yet we have also reached a point where the total wealth of the poor half of humanity is reportedly matched by that of the world’s eight richest men. So perhaps, as Karl Marx suggested, history does repeat itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, and we are now, second time round, returning rather farcically to the eighteenthcentury conception of politics which informed and influenced fascism. To paraphrase Frederick the Great (1712-1786), we are again permitted to argue and posture as much as we like, so long as we obey on occasions when disobedience would actually matter. This was an overarching political concept in the period of so-called ‘enlightened despotism’, when patronage and an elite gift-economy shaped a public sense of powers, rights and virtues which were intended to outlive its originators and be passed down the generations. The cultural and educational institutions established in this period are still going strong and the elite gift-economy is no longer the preserve of European aristocrats. Yet the long-term aims of this section of society translate into a (visual) culture which is an essential part of the contemporary marketplace of ideas. Anand Giridharadas ably exposes the results in his book Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.5 Art-photography is very much part of this visual culture today. PM: Would you say more about why you are speaking about the eighteenth century? OL: Aristocratic patronage in the eighteenth century produced a new discourse concerning development, which helped guide the transition from serfdom and slavery to the expansion of markets and commerce. Rather confusingly for everyone coming later, these discussions of statecraft and human development were written rather esoterically and given the name ‘aesthetics’. Its theorists did not all view power in the same way, but the differences between thinkers like Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) are less important than the way in which they collectively created a new medium of ‘social courtship’ that eased communication between men and women and potential rivals, whilst resisting or postponing radical reforms. As Burke put it, the arts would be woven into a ‘veil’ of culture. And in keeping with the sexual aspects of this class-crossing courtship that brought rulers and intellectuals together almost as social equals, the notion of the Sublime in Western aesthetics also suggests that difficult political tasks can be transformed into pleasurable experiments or experiences. This is, in my opinion, a dangerously unrealistic developmental worldview. Nonetheless, it was intended to be handed down the generations and it has been, in the form of institutions, ideas, cultural practices and rituals. Even more worryingly, perhaps, one strand of the psycho-social tradition of twentieth-century scholarship associates the growing public awareness of environmental issues with cultures of narcissism in which people cannot really face the future and abandon this or any other sense of belonging to a succession of [human] generations.6 And instead of the sense of the future belonging to our children there are signs of a social pathology that turns children into possessions and validates their manipulation.7 So we are faced with a paradox: the very set of cultural practices and rituals that have been passed down to us from the eighteenth century according to a certain conservative sense of intergenerational solidarity seems to be

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bringing that sense of solidarity to an end. As a result we are now facing the aestheticisation of environmental destruction. Whether or not we have children, I think we should act effectively against these problematic historical influences instead of lending them credibility. The character of the political courtship that got underway in the eighteenth century means that far too many people have turned a blind eye to so-called green capitalism. The controversial Planet of the Humans documentary, by Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore, argues that directly or indirectly the environmental movement is ‘in bed’ with billionaires. Notwithstanding the film’s flaws, which include some inaccuracies and its failure to critique eco-fascist over-population ideology, the film shouldn’t be ignored, and certainly not censored as it was. PM: In the light of that critique, can you identify what you think is not being, but should be, done by ‘concerned photographers’, particularly in relation to environmental issues? OL: First of all, I must say that any society which has surrendered the ideological and practical capacities to organise effective industrial actions has already given way to a key trait of classical fascism and far-right governance. However, I know from the recent history of Nigeria that even full-blown military dictatorship there did not manage to impose this on the ‘labour aristocracy’ in the oil industry. The oil workers who wielded considerable economic power and who led a strike for democracy against military dictatorship complained to me of the lack of solidarity with their cause from people working in the media. In scholarly circles this professional inaction was effectively dignified by very weak theoretical arguments about the futility of strikes. Such theories only reveal a lack of practical thought about strategy and tactics. On the other hand, today in France, radio journalists and others have shown a remarkable level of solidarity with the strikes against the Macron government’s proposed pension reforms. It is hard to say whether this will be enough to make up for the practical problem of a shortage of trade-union strike funds, but I do think that everyone, including Marxist theoreticians, ought to be more morally reflexive about their literary abstractions. Perhaps I can usefully point to a couple of neglected structural issues to do with education and solidarity which photographers and others might think through, so as to avoid reinforcing consumer sovereignty and a simplistic sense of environmental politics. It must be said that many of the working practices of ‘concerned photographers’ contribute directly to environmental problems. Yet equally important to realise is the fact that most governments have latched on to the idea of ‘educating’ the public about their consumption habits, while being amazingly irresponsible about the non-discretionary use of energy and resources in ways over which individual consumers have no control. Were it not for our competitive structures, it would be in the interests of almost everyone – including the workers involved in those industries – to conserve finite energy resources. It is vital to slow down production rates, to raise costs and to invest in sustainable renewable energy and sustainable production generally. But that is easy to say, and a recent young protester’s placard put the problem crudely but perfectly – ‘where is the f***ing government!’

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Owen Logan, in conversation with Patricia Macdonald

So the short answer to the question above is that a lot of rethinking needs to be done as a matter of urgency. The more complicated issue is who is going to do it and why? Most political leaders are sticking with market logic and a narcissistic sense of business as usual. As I write this, helicopters are dropping snow on ski resorts in France. I suspect this mindless absurdity has something to do with the way photographers, artists, writers of various kinds, and far too many scholars, are – metaphorically and practically – doing the equivalent, and only paying lip service to the connections between social and environmental justice, even if they are not those primarily to blame. The first relevant structural problem concerns education. For example, with a remarkable degree of consistency, ideas of social and environmental justice are distanced from the way in which education is organised in most countries, serving to reproduce and reinforce inequality. Granted, the connections might not be obvious. In Flammable Societies, Bret Gustafson’s chapter entitled ‘Fossil Knowledge’ deals with the influence of the energy business on his own university in the US, and asks us to take a hard, unsentimental look at institutions and our own contributions to green-washing and, I think, more generally at a culture of Orwellian doublespeak. Nevertheless, what Bret was able to examine is the tip of an iceberg. From Adam Smith (1723-1790) onwards, elites have deemed it necessary and acceptable to manipulate public education and culture in their particular socio-economic and class interests. Semi-functional public education systems, by their historic nature, perpetuate inequality, in part by affording numerous exit rights for a fortunate minority. Any discourse of environmental justice that ignores this most fundamental social injustice is likely to fail because environmental policies, no matter how democratic, can exacerbate the socio-economic effects of educational inequality, and therefore provoke popular reactions against them. On the other hand, I would argue that countries which have achieved high levels of educational equality, such as those in Scandinavia, are much better placed to adapt socio-economically. I doubt that it is entirely an accident of history that Greta Thunberg is Swedish. The second structural problem that I think must be thought through relates to the geopolitical fractures and synthetic ‘solidarities’ fostered by consumer sovereignty. I cannot give a clearer example of the depth of the problem than the notion floated in US trade-union circles that strikes might be ‘out-sourced’ to ‘developing’ countries. The poorest and most vulnerable workers would then take the risks of industrial action, and trade unionists in ‘advanced’ countries would continue their practice of partnership policies which have been accompanied by massive declines in trade-union membership. Such imperialist perversions of solidarity are, of course, very depressing. There are, however, good examples of international solidarity articulated within and beyond trade unionism, and some of these have formed pincer movements that have hit the points of production and consumption in different countries at the same time. This kind of mutually reinforcing action was analysed in an important scholarly article by Terisa Turner and Leigh Brownhill: ‘Why Women are at War with Chevron: Nigerian Subsistence Struggles Against the International Oil Industry’8. I think these two issues I have highlighted deserve more consideration because neo-colonialism is promoted through a marketplace of ideas for improvements which, if looked at closely, are antagonistic to both educational equality and real solidarity.

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PM: A significant strand of your writing and photography has been concerned with environmental justice and ’slow-violence' connected to the so-called ‘resource curse’. Could you situate this work in relation to the distinctions you made between ‘naturalist’ and ‘realist’ and documentary practices in your interview with Julie Lawson for the 30th Anniversary Edition of Studies in Photography, the journal of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography (SSHoP)9? OL: The impact of the oil business on the Niger Delta is an example of the slow violence which degrades the environment, and traditional means of survival, and often provokes rapid outbursts of political violence. In recent times, many scholars and other commentators have described these and other problems in terms of a ‘curse’ that accompanies the possession of particular, abundant natural resources like oil and minerals. In Flammable Societies, John McNeish and I pointed out the problems with this sort of fatalistic analysis. By the time we were writing, the ‘resource curse’ thesis had become a fashionable academic alternative to historically-minded analysis of imperialism and of contemporary neo-colonialism and soft power. Marxist political economy and realism in the arts had provided important reflexive insights on neo-colonialism; by contrast, ‘resource-curse’ discourse offered a means of expressing ‘concern’ while appearing relatively un-implicated in the uses of power and the kinds of corruption the new scholars focused on. This abstraction is particularly striking in a country like Nigeria where it is almost impossible to live from one month to the next without being implicated in one way or another. The State is a free-for-all structure for the exploitation of both people and nature, backed up by taken-for-granted naked repression. The great challenge for realists is to move beyond expressions of indignation which show the pain or the damages, in order to tell us more about how these things are normalised, and how societies create their bystanders. Nonetheless, while such critical commentaries are undoubtedly a form of activism, the different socio-political activities they accompany are all strongly contested. And in this sense I think there is still an important distinction to be made between the mores of nineteenth-century naturalism and twentieth-century realism. These terms were more or less interchangeable in the nineteenth century: both were associated with core ideas of ‘democracy in art’. However, it was only in the twentieth century, when the workers’ movement took up photography and film, that this democratic claim made on behalf of realism could be seen as something more than artistic self-promotion. Towards the end of the 1914-1918 war a very large section of the workers’ movement in Britain re-inaugurated the Chartists’ struggle for an authentic free press. In the nineteenth century, this aspiration had become a commercial enterprise leading all the way to the dynamics of tabloid journalism and ‘click bait’ today. Nevertheless, even the commercial press saw a major international pluralisation in the readership of magazines and journals as a result of the 1914-1918 war, and some of these publications also became the vehicles for realist photo-essays which – by contrast with naturalism – revealed a scepticism about surface appearances. Some texts went so far as to suggest to readers just how deceptive or partial the photographs were.

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Owen Logan, in conversation with Patricia Macdonald

After 1945 such sceptical realism was substantially overturned by the marketable notion of ‘the decisive moment’, which arguably undermines realism in photography. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous idea of the ‘moment’ is an example of the kind of artistic discourse which is re-focused on appearances, instead of on the context of production and reception, and other more complex socio-economic factors. The decisive moment is the kind of artistic discourse that shifts discussion towards why an art work looks or sounds the way it does as a result of individual decision-making. The old idea of democracy in art is of course a much more explosive idea, and, given the numerous corruptions of the idea of democracy, a dangerous one too. Totalitarian artistic styles were, after all, developed through forms of collective decision-making performed in the name of the people. But liberals in most countries have exploited this danger to block egalitarian reforms and to make artistic individualism and narcissism appear attractive as a means of meritocratic advancement. There can, of course, never be a meritocracy without educational equality. Too many socialists in democracies outside Scandinavia have betrayed that radical goal, and many prefer to ‘talk up’ the arts as an area of progressive and utopian thought. Historically, fascist thought is just as embedded in the arts including the modern avant garde. PM: Could you describe the characteristics of your practice in relation to these problems, and some of the ways in which you try to avoid the pitfalls you have identified? OL: At the moment I am developing a public-centred research and exhibition project on ‘The Spirit of Fascism in the Arts’; there is, however, no general answer to your question. The constraints private investment and public funding impose on projects in the arts, or in socio-economic research, differ from project to project. However, I would say that, in general, photographers, artists and researchers – not to mention their families who have less of their attention as a result – submit to a complicated gift-economy that trades in voluntary labour and rewards intellectual narcissism. As I’ve suggested, in terms of the environment, even its destruction is converted into entrepreneurial opportunities for self-promotion of various kinds. The pitfalls cannot be totally avoided because what I am talking about are structural interconnections. But the deep, underlying connections between things like educational inequality and environmental injustice should be examined more and not glossed over. Beyond that, I can say that more heads are always better than one. Collaboration and cooperation based on meaningful discussions and arguments – as opposed to networking – are very important to me. As a photographer, I try to demonstrate these concerns in different ways depending on the primary audience I have in mind. For instance, in the case of the banners I made to accompany Flammable Societies, or the Contested Powers project, the significance of the photographs is related to all our texts and arguments represented by standfirst extracts. Putting all this onto a single banner with high reproduction values became much easier to do technically in recent years, and for me it was a solution to cherry picking and the way

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photographs are prised from the texts that should accompany them. However, it is vital for writers and photographers to understand that critical texts do not absolve us of the need to think carefully about visual language and visual culture as a whole. Generally speaking, my projects try to influence and respond to a relatively small audience, rather than making simplified appeals to a mass one, or searching for the increasingly restrictive approval of the art world. 1. McNeish, John-Andrew and Owen Logan (Eds), Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-economics of Oil and Gas, Pluto Press, 2012; and McNeish, John-Andrew, Borchgrevink, Axel, and Owen Logan (Eds), Contested Powers: The Politics of Energy and Development in Latin America, Zed Books, 2015. 2. Mason, Paul, PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Allen Lane, 2015. 3. For more on the problem of defining liberalism and neo-fascist threats of fascism within, rather than against, democracy, see: Landa, I., The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism, Brill, 2010; Schecter, D., Sovereign states or political communities? Civil Society and contemporary politics, Manchester University Press, 2000; and Habermas, J., The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historian's Debate, Polity, 1989. 4. Logan, Owen, ‘Where Pathos Rules: The Resource Curse in Visual Culture’, in Flammable Societies, op. cit., pp 98-130. 5. Giridharadas, Anand, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Penguin, 2020. 6. Shaw, Wendy S. & Bonnet, A. (2016) ‘Environmental crisis, narcissism and the work of grief’, Cultural Geographies, 1-15, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299521667 (last accessed March 2020). 7. Logan, O. (2019), ‘Children in the Fog of War: Responses to Parental Alienation’, The Journal of Dialogue Studies, Special Issue Vol. 7, available at http://www.dialoguestudies.org/journals/journal-of-dialogue-studies-special-issue-vol-7/ (last accessed March 2020). 8. Turner, Terisa E. and Leigh S. Brownhill, ‘Why Women are at War with Chevron: Nigerian Subsistence Struggles against the International Oil Industry’, in Journal of Asian and African Studies, 2004. 9. Logan, Owen and Julie Lawson, ‘Owen Logan: Interview with Julie Lawson’, in Studies in Photography, 30th Anniversary Edition, Scottish Society for the History of Photography, 2016, pp 60-63.

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Environmental justice: Resources Owen Logan from Flammable Societies

Right: Allegories inside the oil economy. The hunter as warrior, oil storage tank under construction, Port Harcourt, Nigeria. (digital image 2012) Opposite: Allegories inside the oil economy. HIStory of the never used Ajaokuta Steel Plant, from Masquerade: Michael Jackson Alive in Nigeria. (digital image 2014)

How are we to understand the impact of

concepts applied to oil-producing economies.

the oil and gas industry? At different times the

The apparent distance and discursive disjuncture

possession of natural-resource wealth has been

between the troubled production and the smooth

widely regarded either as a blessing or a curse on

consumption of energy appears to be

national development. However, looking critically

ideologically loaded.

and comparatively across varied socio-economic experiences, stretching from Northern Europe to the Caucasus, and from the Gulf of Guinea to Latin America, presents challenges to catch-all 94

Britain’s transformation under Margaret Thatcher into a supposedly post-industrial society, orientated towards consumer sovereignty, was paid for with revenues from the North Sea oil

industry, which remains out of sight and out

economic governance, institution building and

of mind for many British citizens. Drawing on

national sovereignty fail to comprehend the

extensive in-depth research, the authors of

problematic overlapping of different conceptions

Flammable Societies, who come from three

of sovereignty. At the heart of that problem the

continents, reflecting the geographical and

editors, McNeish and Logan, decipher the reality

cultural scope of their collective study, call into

of ‘resource sovereignties’ which tend to expose

fundamental question the political and scientific

failed social contracts and demand various

basis of international policy aimed at resource

radical alternatives.

governance. Standard Western models of

Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-economics of Oil and Gas is published by Pluto Press (2012). Key elements of the research are also illustrated in large-scale photo-essay banners designed by Owen Logan (as seen here above). Original banners 6m x 1m

Owen Logan 95

Environmental justice: Resources Owen Logan from Contested Powers

Right: Protester demanding freedom and autonomy for Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, 2009. Santa Cruz is an important business hub for the oil and gas industry and was a centre for opposition to the plurinational government of Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president, ousted from power in 2019. Opposite: Mosconi, Salta, Argentina, 2006. Conceptual development map of Mosconi, created by UTD (Unión de Trabajadores Desocupados), a social movement led by former oil workers campaigning for social and environmental justice.

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In the global North, the commoditization of

development as witnessed in Latin American

creativity and knowledge under the banner

energy politics and governance remains hindered

of a creative economy is presented as the

by a global division of labour and nature that puts

post-industrial answer to dependency on labour

the capacity for educational and technological

and natural resources. Not only does this promise

advancement in private hands. Coming from

a more stable future, but an economy focused

Latin America, Europe and North America,

on intellectual property is more environmentally

the authors of Contested Powers: The Politics of

friendly, so it is suggested. These fixes offered by

Energy and Development in Latin America reveal

the supposedly post-industrial model are bluffs;

a multi-layered understanding of sovereignty,

arguing that it holds the key to understanding

John-Andrew McNeish, draws attention to the

the relationship between energy resources,

conservative influences and authoritarian forces

socio-economic development and politics.

which remained in place during the twists and

This critical focus is crucial to wider debates

turns of resource sovereignty in Latin America.

on education, development, and sustainability.

Since the publication of Contested Powers,

By contrast with much of the literature exploring the left-turn in Latin American politics at the time, the concluding chapter, by Owen Logan and

these ultra-conservative forces have again come to the fore.

Published by Zed Books in 2015, Contested Powers is edited by John-Andrew McNeish, Axel Borchgrevink and Owen Logan. As with the Flammable Societies project, key elements of the research are also illustrated in large-scale photo-essay banners designed by Owen Logan (as seen here above). Original banners 6m x 1m

Owen Logan

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Environmental justice: Haiti Pradip Malde from The Third Heaven

Haiti has a centuries-long history of abuse and

opportunism and neglect, that seem to have

coercion, inflicted both from within and from foreign

played themselves out repeatedly in Haiti for over

interests. It is made distinct from other human

200 years. The problem of Haiti matters to all of us.

narratives by a counter-history of a particularly enduring sense of hope and political aspiration.

Much has been said, and photographed, about Haiti's trauma. This work looks sideways at trauma.

'[Haiti] is a country in search of itself' said Haitian

It is less about dramatic events than it is about

poet Syto Cavé. We need to pay attention to Haiti,

love, kindness and hope; less about solutions

but not just to save and shield – urgent and

than about a state of being – like heaven. But

humane as that need is – a desperate nation from

heaven, and beauty, cannot be considered without

traumatic events and selfishness. The global

hell and the sublime. Thus, this other space, not

community needs to pay attention to Haiti in order

the heaven of being, nor that of aspiration, but a

to understand globality, and to protect itself from

third one, that contains all, even itself. This third

the worst possible outcomes of environmental

heaven becomes both a window and a mirror. Pradip Malde

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Top left to right: 13 Roadside Trees, ii, Haiti, 2009 Mango Trunk. Posts. Saut Mathurin, Haiti, March, 2008 Schoolgirl, near Avenue Ste Christoff, Port Au Prince, Haiti, 2011 Left: Madame Denise Remi, Before Sunrise, Saut Mathurin, Haiti, 2008 Opposite top: Jean St. Pierre's back yard, latrine and fishing boat, Ville de Dieu, Port Au Prince, Haiti, 2011 Opposite below: Concrete Destroying Roots Destroying Concrete, Cange, Haiti, 2008

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Haiti Pradip Malde

Top right: Montrouis, Haiti, 2011 Below right: Sewage. Pedestrians. Port Au Prince, Haiti. December, 2010

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Top: Thérose Theomas sorting peas, Cange, Haiti, 2009 Below left: Coleb Laforest studying for a college entrance exam, Zanmi Lasante, Cange, Haiti, March 2007 Below right: 3:37 PM. Waiting at Outpatient Clinic, Zanmi Lasante, Cange, Haiti, 2009

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Environmental justice: kitchens Pradip Malde from Our Own Hungers

M.F.K. Fisher concluded her wartime book,

It reminds us of our center, of what must be held

These kitchens stand, dignified, as evidence of

How to Cook a Wolf, with a credo that the way

steadily. These photographs show us the dignity

the injustice of systemically being denied access

we 'reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and

of poverty, but also point to the offensiveness of

to environmental and economic security, and

war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with

injustice. To not have is a separate matter from

education, health and welfare services. A kitchen

all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing

being denied something. And yet, ‘not having’ and

brings together what otherwise may seem

enjoyment.'1 Whether on the fraying edges of or

‘being denied’ sit on the same fulcrum, and as

disconnected. It satisfies our own hungers,

cocooned from the crisis of the Anthropocene,

they become balanced further and further away

but also stands guard, so that never may our

humankind share this: the cooking space. In so far

from each other – if, for instance, we look at these

own hunger.

as it is a nodal place for nourishment, fostering

photographs from the distance of privilege –

community, and a cynosure of dignity, the kitchen

then the balance and its fulcrum collapses.

becomes a balance, like much that is beautiful.

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Pradip Malde 1. Fisher, M.F.K. ‘How to Cook a Wolf’, in The Art of Eating (50th Anniversary Edition), Hoboken: Wiley Publishing Inc., 2004, p. 350

Top: Kitchen, Kibondo, Tanzania, June, 2016

Opposite: Child's Seat in Kitchen, Between Peligre and Blanchard, Haiti. May, 2014

Middle: Kitchen near Mbalawala, Tanzania, August, 2017 Below left: Kitchen near Mbalawala, Tanzania, August, 2017 Below right: Street kitchen, near the Themi River, Arusha, Tanzania, 2016

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Environmental justice: a confrontation of cultures Zig Jackson/Rising Buffalo from series Entering Zig’s Indian Reservation and Kennecott Copper Mine

Referencing the Native American occupation of

The 18-month stand-off, though ultimately

Kennecott Copper Mine gives a nod, or maybe

Alcatraz, this series addresses a part of our story

unsuccessful, was an important show of self-

the finger, to Edward S. Curtis. Similar to his image

rarely found in history books. In 1969, a group of

determination by Native Americans. And it

of a chief on the banks of Crater Lake, minus the

Native college students sailed to Alcatraz Island

was the 1972 murder of the movement’s leader

romanticism, it shows me clad in a war bonnet

in the San Francisco Bay to reclaim ‘The Rock’

Richard Oakes, a charismatic Mohawk with

and gazing into the distance. But, from my perch

after its notorious penitentiary closed. Citing a

movie-star good looks, that sparked the

on the cliff, the view is different from what you

provision in the Ft Laramie Treaty of 1868 – that

following decade of Native activism.

might expect. Instead of a pristine lake or timeless

unused federal lands revert back to their original owners – the students occupied the island and covered its shores in graffiti: ‘Indians Welcome,’ ‘This land is our land,’ and ‘You are on Indian land.’

Entering Zig’s Indian Reservation picks up the torch, continuing this spirit of resistance and activism. Armed with a custom-made highway sign like those marking the entrances of Indian reservations, I travel around the country and occupy different sites. These include San Francisco City Hall, Golden Gate Park’s buffalo pasture, and the Marin Headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.

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Edenic world like that of Curtis’s image, mine shows a barren abyss – a manmade crater in an earth now depleted. Zig Jackson/Rising Buffalo

Opposite left: Entering Jicarilla Indian Reservation, NM, from Reservation Signs series, 1998 Opposite right: China Basin, San Francisco, CA, from Entering Zig’s Indian Reservation series, 1997

Above: Indian Man at Kennecott Copper Mine, Tooele, UT, from Degradation series, 2004 Right: Camera in Face, Taos, NM, from Indian Photographing Tourist Photographing Indian series, 1992

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Environmental consciousness: between worlds and times Meryl McMaster from As immense as the sky

The way we experience the passing of time

To confront this fear, I sought wisdom in the

shapes our relationship to and understanding

places of ancestral life, listening to the truths of

of our immediate world. My awareness of time

relatives, knowledge keepers and peoples who

comes from an overlapping of two distinct

have traversed this land before me. At the social,

approaches – one that is of a linear path and one

cultural and environmental contact zones of my

that is cyclical. This intersection of world views

Indigenous and European ancestors I set out to

has been part of my upbringing, a result of being

study and collect their knowledge and to animate

born into a family both Western (British/Dutch)

and re-tell it in a personally transformative

and Indigenous (Plains Cree).

process through photography.

Contemplating time and the countless cycles

Many places I visited hold particular meaning for

of life that have recurred around the ancient

my direct ancestors as they are sites of significant

landscapes of Canada left me in a state of

moments in their lives; I was drawn to the sites

wonderment, but also stirred within me a fearful

of ancient stories across Saskatchewan, Alberta

apprehension of our permanent and collective

and to the shores of early settlement in Ontario

Above right: On the Edge of This Immensity, 2019, Digital C-Print, 40” x 60”, Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

impact upon our beautiful world.

and Newfoundland. My aim was to reconnect

See also: pages 20-21

with those who came before me as a way of introducing myself to the land on which they lived. I came to see these landscapes as immense time capsules of buried knowledge. The resulting images are a blend and collapse of time into the present. The stories of long ago and the foreboding whispers of the future intertwine my body with the land, in the hope that we all maintain a long-term ecological equilibrium with the world around us. Meryl McMaster 106

Above left: Between the Start of Things and the End of Things III, 2019, Digital C-Print, 40” x 60”, Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

Opposite top: Edge of a Moment, 2017, Giclée Print, 60” x 94.4”, Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain Opposite below: Calling Me Home, 2019, Digital C-Print, 40” x 60”, Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Bulger Gallery and Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain

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Environmental consciousness: contemplating global crisis Fabrice Monteiro from The Prophecy

The Prophecy

The Prophecy Project

‘Mother and guardian of the sky and the earth, the

When the photographic project, The Prophecy,

The Prophecy is an ambitious attempt to bridge

volcanoes and the rivers, Gaia sustains the world

was conceived in 2013 in Dakar, Senegal, it

the gaps in environmental awareness, carrying

and its inhabitants. Wounded, exhausted and

reflected upon environmental issues and the

a direct message for the inhabitants of this land

horrified by the attitude of the humans and their

consequences of excessive consumption.

by relating environmental issues to culture and

lack of respect for the earth, Gaia summoned the

The work envisions new futures informed by both

traditional beliefs through art. To that end,

great spirits of Nature, her children and allies,

scientific and spiritual sensibilities. The Prophecy

Monteiro is creating a tale addressed to children

The Djinns:

contemplates global crisis in an era of climate

with the aim of fostering an environmental

change and environmental degradation through

consciousness in the new African generation that

a vision that is simultaneously terrifying and

was born and raised in this environmental chaos.

“My dear children, hear my call, the evil grows on our beloved planet earth. I built a world where life would be prosperous, where everyone would be free to breathe, to eat and to admire what Nature has to offer. Nevertheless I am dying. More numerous and more insatiable every day, the humans make excessive use of my wealth without thinking of the consequences. For many

beautiful. Composite figures, inspired by West African masqueraders, emerge out of oil slicks, garbage dumps and desiccated landscapes, yielding the startling, exquisite dances of our new millennium.

Following upon The African Prophecy, Monteiro’s intention is to take the concept around the world, creating a global prophecy in which all cultures and continents would be represented. Fabrice Monteiro

years they have remained deaf to my calls but you, my faithful Djinns, can reach them. Leave now, reveal your existence to the humans, and alert them to the danger that they are bringing down on themselves ...”’

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Above left: Untitled #2, 2013 The Prophecy

Opposite top: Untitled #9, 2015 The Prophecy

Above right: Untitled #8, 2015 The Prophecy

Opposite below: Untitled #1, 2013 The Prophecy

Nuclear; space-flight; oil: ‘stagings’ of iconic images Jojakim Cortis & Adrian Sonderegger

Above left: Making of ‘AS11-40-5878’ (by Edwin Aldrin, 1969), 2014 Above right: Making of ‘Exxon Valdez’ (by Natalie B. Fobes, 1989), 2016 Opposite: Making of ‘208-N-43888’ (by Charles Levy, 1945), 2013

Photographers Jojakim Cortis and Adrian

on the Moon; and the 1989 Exxon Valdez Arctic oil

Sonderegger began their ongoing collaborative

spill, one of the most devastating human-caused

work during their studies at Zurich University

environmental disasters.

of the Arts (ZHDK) in 2005. They conceive and manufacture surreal worlds in compositions of ‘staged’ photography, which relate to iconic historical photographic images; precisely because the iconic power of reference images is sacrosanct, they are suited to parody. Subsequently, in mischievous designs of deconstruction, the ‘staged’ models are again reduced to the photographic surface, a reproduced secondorder reality, in which World history degenerates into a playground, framed with the props from the studio, toolbox and archive.

by a clear aesthetic diction. Their image tricks are satirically created, ingeniously staged and metaphorically back-filled ... The trademark in their pictures is the fact that the impossible is nimble and playful, their photographic raw materials are simple fabrics, props and tools. The artificial structure with linkage and equipment, with reductions of foreground and background to [the] scenery [of an image], with light and smoke machines etc., is often made transparent at the edges of the image, reinforcing the message with

The main image seen here is a ‘staging’ of the

digital retouching ... [and] the two photographers

atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945; the

[thus] make themselves known as the true

stratigraphic ‘signal’ resulting from nuclear testing

inventors of their visual ideas.’

is likely to be selected to define the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch. The other images here also represent Anthropocene-related events: the 1969 spaceflight resulting in the first human step

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‘Cortis & Sonderegger”s works are characterized

Fritz Franz Vogel, Photohistorian, Editor, Curator

Nuclear: Fukushima (photo/performance works) Chris Wainwright from A Catalogue of Errors and What has to be done

Above left: from A Catalogue of Errors: Pause, at Minamisanriku, Tohoku Region, Japan, 2013 Above right: from: A Catalogue of Errors: Error, Tohoku Region, Japan, 2013 Opposite: What has to be done, Performance, Aldeburgh, Suffolk, UK, 2011

Chris Wainwright worked through photography

The 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami

and curating, addressing issues of power and

were catastrophic in terms of loss of life and

resource exploitation, in urban and rural

infrastructure, and evidence of the continuing

environments and in particular how we as humans

threat of geological disasters in that region that

through our lifestyles and increasing unregulated

goes back centuries. The famous image of

demands for energy consumption are leaving

The Great Wave of Kanagawa (1829-33)

a potentially catastrophic legacy for our future

by Hokusai is one of many testimonies to the

generations.

occurrence of tsunamis which are enshrined in

A Catalogue of Errors is a body of photo/ performance works derived from the semaphore signal for ‘Error’. Wainwright worked with semaphore as a semi-obsolete signalling system for a number of years and incorporated it into a series of photographic performances and actions. This approach to work was most significantly undertaken in the Iwate Prefecture in Japan after the 2011 ‘Great Eastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami’ in coastal areas that have been severely affected by the events of 3 March 2011. The work was made in conjunction with local populations in the area over five years as a collaborative and immersive process of engagement.

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Japanese culture. A key difference with the 2011 disaster was the additional and continuing environmental damage caused by nuclear contamination emanating from the coastally located Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power station. Six years on from the tsunami that destroyed one of the station’s three reactors, the levels of nuclear contamination remained at a dangerously high level. Recent levels of 530 sieverts an hour were recorded in 2017, compared with 73 sieverts an hour recorded in 2012 for instance. Building a nuclear plant on the coast in an area known to be affected by the occurrence of high magnitude earthquakes and tsunamis was clearly an error.

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Nuclear: Chernobyl revisited Aleksandr Kupny Text: Kate Brown from ‘Marie Curie’s Fingerprint: Nuclear Spelunking in the Chernobyl Zone’ It is hard to imagine entering a rabbit hole under the charred Chernobyl No. 4 reactor. Alexander Kupny did just that many times. He showed me photos he took during his expeditions underground into the reactor cavern. He would go with a friend on the sly without official permission. The explosion that occurred on April 26, 1986, thirty seconds after the reactor was shut down for an experimental safety test, blew off the building’s 4 million pound concrete roof as well as the upper walls and part of the machine room.1 The fire generated by the eruption burned at greater than two thousand degrees Celsius. The tremendous heat melted iron, steel, cement, machinery, graphite, uranium, and plutonium, turning it all into a running lava that poured down through the blown floors of the reactor complex.2 The lava eventually cooled into stalactites, black, sparkling, and impenetrable. One stalactite is called the ‘elephant’s leg’ for its thickness, gray shade, and deep furrows. In the months following the accident, scientists estimated (because it was too hot to measure directly) that the elephant’s leg emitted ten thousand roentgens an hour. To translate that measurement biologically, ten thousand roentgens means thirty seconds spent near the leg would cause dizziness and nausea for the rest of the week. Two minutes and cells would hemorrhage, four minutes would lead to diarrhea and fever, while five minutes would deliver to most people a fatal dose.3 In 1989, Kupny worked as a health physics technician at Reactor No. 3, which was paired with Above: Videographer Sergei Koshelev at the entrance to the Chernobyl sarcophagus Photograph by Aleksandr Kupny

Reactor No. 4 and still functioned after the accident. He had volunteered to go to Chernobyl, like tens of thousands of Soviet citizens in the late 1980s, because he believed it was his patriotic duty to help out after the catastrophe.4 He was also intrigued professionally. The smoking Chernobyl plant had radiation levels like nowhere else on earth. Chernobyl, Kupny said, ‘was the Klondike of radiation fields.’ He approached the blown reactor not with justifiable dread but with a sense of opportunity. Inside the ruined reactor, he had a chance to measure radiation at levels few others could experience. ‘I didn’t look at the Chernobyl sarcophagus with fear. I saw it as a phenomenon. You can’t study something you fear.’5 As the years went by working as a radiation monitor, Kupny had grown more and more curious about the invisible energy he was paid to measure. He wanted to experience firsthand the tremendous power of splitting a nucleus. As a monitor, Kupny had a pass to the hottest areas at the nuclear power plant, including the sarcophagus, the vast concrete tomb built around the smoldering reactor in the months following the accident. The sarcophagus had two entry points, which were cavelike openings used by workers after the radiation levels had cooled to access the crushed control and machinery rooms. Kupny had the necessary equipment – hazmat suits, gas masks, flashlights, and radiation detectors. He also possessed a camera. His friend Sergei Koshelev had a video camera.

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Kupny and Koshelev had no formal permission to take their cameras and headlights on their days off and crawl into the sarcophagus, but they knew the guards and the workers, and no one stopped them. ‘We went there as partisans,’ Kupny explained. ‘We took on the risk ourselves. The fewer people who knew about it, the better.’ The risks were considerable, though Kupny is cavalier about them. The caverns under the reactor are former rooms – the control room, a pump house, the turbine halls – but they are no longer in the same places or in the same order they were in when the reactor was operating. The basement of the turbine generator hall is filled with water. Planks thrown over it serve as flooring. Spilled oil, slimy and slippery, seeps everywhere. The men must step lightly around cables, potholes, and ankle-trapping crevices. ‘Just walking,’ Koshelev noted, is ‘a hazard.’6 In the heavy darkness of the cavern, it is easy to stumble over rubble and cables, to pitch into a ditch, break a leg or arm. Heavy doors could swing shut and jam, trapping them below until help came, if it did. Flashlight batteries are not reliable when exposed to radioactive decay, and they give out, not gradually, but suddenly with no warning. In a pitch of total blackout, the men would then have to feel their way out of the Above: The ‘elephant’s leg’, Chernobyl sarcophagus Unknown photographer

crypt, trying not to panic over the extra time spent exposed. The heavy hazmat suits are hot and make moving cumbersome. The lighter suits made of fabric easily tear, exposing skin and organs to the intense fields of radioactive isotopes. Gamma rays go through both kinds of suits. There are no methods for stopping gamma rays unless the men were to wear seventy-pound lead diving suits, and then they would hardly be able to move at all. All of this means that trip after trip, a body accumulates doses of radioactivity. They had a half hour, forty minutes max, to stoop, crawl, and wriggle into the underground chambers, take pictures, and get back above ground before they were overexposed. Despite the risk, the men did not bother with a radiation detector. ‘The radiation fields do not change much,’ Kupny remarked. ‘I knew what spots recorded single digits, and I knew where the numbers spiraled into the tens and hundreds.’ I asked Kupny why he did that, why he went down there. Was it the same motivation that drives people to climb Mount Everest, to go places where few have gone before? Kupny bristled. ‘I don’t do it to put a flag down and beat my chest. I went under to figure out what happened. I see nuclear energy as a natural force. I want to understand this force; the immense power behind the accident. You can start to understand the power by seeing how the reactor fell apart. Unless you go there, you can’t understand it.’ Kupny is not your usual disaster tourist, one who hopes to snap a photo of ruin and destruction as a metaphor for the larger folly of human societies. For Kupny, crawling into the belly of the burned-out reactor was as close as he could get to entering a mushroom cloud to see how nuclear power works. His life’s work has been to visualize and map this scarcely sensible phenomenon. He placed himself before a barrage of hazardous radioactive isotopes because he sought to grasp decaying radioactive isotopes as the elemental force burning at the center of the universe, the energy that gives life and can snatch it away.

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It might seem strange to see the Chernobyl accident as a ‘natural force’, but Kupny has a point. When, in the nuclear power plant, Soviet engineers created isotopes not found in nature – strontium, cesium, plutonium – these isotopes, once born, continued living their own ‘life’, following the ‘natural’ properties of radioactive decay, as observed by humans. Like other forces of nature, there is no stopping them until they have run their course. Most artists in the twentieth century concerned with the catastrophic and utopic promises of nuclear energy deployed the powerful visual stimulus of splitting atoms as metaphor. In his photography, however, Kupny does not dwell in the realm of metaphor. Instead, decaying isotopes are the raw material of his photography. Kupny is like the geologists of the future who, one thousand years from now, will be able to trace the beginning of the Anthropocene, the epoch in planetary history in which humans dominate, by locating in the earth’s strata the first man-made radioactive isotopes, dating from about 1942. Kupny captures on his film what geologists will locate in sedimentary rock and soil, the same decaying particles, still beating strongly thousands of years from now. For Kupny, a man who came of age and lived most of his life as a loyal Soviet citizen, the power of decaying atoms still holds so much promise. In his fascination with the generative potential of nuclear energy, Kupny is not unusual. He comes from a long line of scientists and technicians who have venerated nuclear power, while silently calculating how best to avoid being destroyed by it. And that tradition has a particular history. It grew roots at the end of World War II and flourished in the heavily fertilized soil of the Cold War arms race. Without the Cold War, civilian nuclear power reactors like Chernobyl would never have made sense. The technology for civilian nuclear power generation was borrowed from bomb-producing reactors, yet, even with free designs and blueprints, the reactors were not cheap to build, and they were extremely risky to operate. In fact, constructing power reactors to produce slow chain reactions for electricity at a time when oil was flowing cheaply and voluminously from reservoirs in the Middle East makes no sense unless you factor in the Cold War contest, in which each side of the Iron Curtain rushed to assert the supremacy of capitalism over communism (or vice versa). The big bomb producers, in other words, needed a peaceful atom as an antidote to the skin-melting horrors nuclear war presented. From the first days of the war’s end, American propagandists, led by the atom-enthusiast William Laurence of the New York Times, denied the fact of radiation-related health effects in Japan and worked to rebrand the destructive ‘atom’ into peaceful ‘nuclear’ power that would generate the ‘white city’ with clean, abundant energy.7 Promoting nuclear power’s benefits for science, medicine, and technology became the chief vehicle for purification of the image of the United States as a nation bent on reducing the globe to an irradiated ruin. In pursuit of this cause, one of the first two films Hollywood distributors sent to occupied Japan in 1946 was an MGM biopic called Madame Curie. The fact that US occupation officials chose to show Madame Curie, about the first scientist to grasp the power of radiation and celebrate it, in Japan, the first country to suffer en masse from the radioactive effects

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of nuclear warfare, says as much about US officials’ desire to repurpose the atomic bomb as about their insensitivity to survivors. The film, made in 1943, issues an innocence and naivety that became more difficult to sustain after August 1945. It shows the Curies in their ramshackle lab at the moment of discovery. In a soft focus shot, Pierre Curie looks at the empty space behind Marie’s shoulder and evokes the now limitless metaphysical horizon: ‘If we can prove the secret of this new element, then we can look into the secret of life itself deeper than ever before in the history of the world.’ The deep secret at the center of the atom was power, raw and unvarnished. Civilian nuclear reactors became the key to harnessing and utilizing that power. In 1953, after the public started to question the safety of fallout from accelerating nuclear bomb tests, the US National Security Council resolved that ‘economically competitive nuclear power’ must become ‘a goal of national importance.’8 President Dwight Eisenhower, genuinely alarmed himself by the quick tempo of the nuclear arms race, unveiled the Atoms for Peace program, dedicated to using nuclear power for medicine and to generate electricity ‘too cheap to meter’. In his speech, Eisenhower offered to share American nuclear technology with other countries.9 With that salvo, a race began between the Cold War superpowers to outproduce each other not only in bombs but also in civilian nuclear power plants. American companies, prodded on by generous federal subsidies, geared up. General Electric led in building up a ‘nucleonics’ division with fourteen thousand employees in the late 1950s. By 1957, US officials had signed forty-nine agreements with countries and had plunked down twenty-nine small research reactors abroad, some in states that had trouble providing general education and medical care to their populations. Soviet leaders gamely joined the race with the Americans. In 1954, Soviet engineers plugged in the world’s first nuclear power–generating reactor in Obninsk, a nuclear research city near Moscow. The reactor produced all of five megawatts for the grid, but the propaganda value of juxtaposing the peaceful Soviet atom against the martial American atom was immeasurable. In the decades to follow, Soviet engineers built reactors outside of major cities and in countries of their East European allies, and in the late 1970s, they started gearing up for a major reactor complex north of Kiev to service the western sections of the country. Soviet society welcomed nuclear power and accepted the idea, blasted from billboards, that the ‘Soviet atom was a worker, not a soldier’. Selling the idea of nuclear power in Japan, however, was not as seamless. In 1954, an American test in the Bikini Atoll went disastrously wrong and contaminated a Japanese fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon, with a thick coating of black fallout. By the time they reached port in Japan, the ship’s sailors were already suffering radiation poisoning. The public panicked on learning that the ship’s radioactive catch was making its way through Japanese fish markets. A few months later, the antinuclear film Godzilla hit Japanese theaters. Nine million Japanese paid to see the sci-fi horror film depicting a deep-sea prehistoric monster wakened by oceanic nuclear tests.10 The confused and angry beast

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pulverized Japanese cities with his radioactive breath in ways that looked much like the atomic bomb-flattened Hiroshima. As protests against nuclear testing erupted in Japan, Japanese and American leaders quickly settled in closed-door meetings on a deal to transfer US nuclear designs and fission products to Japan. Among Japanese leaders, who were eager to secure an independent power source for industrial expansion, the choice between the two competing visions of nuclear power – that of Madame Curie or of Godzilla – was easy. Alexander Kupny came of age in this intellectual and social current. He grew up in the shadow of civilian reactors. His father was a nuclear engineer who rose to become the director of a large nuclear complex in the Russian Urals and then later in southern Ukraine. Kupny didn’t study well in school and never managed to get a university degree, but he knew reactors. He settled into a series of blue-collar jobs as a radiation monitor in reactor cities throughout the USSR. I met him in a leafy café terrace in Slavutych, Ukraine, the city built to house nuclear plant operators and cleanup workers after the abandonment in 1986 of the city of Pripiat next to the Chernobyl power plant. He moved to Slavutych the year it was founded, in 1989, after volunteering to work on the cleanup. Kupny, in short, spent his career in intimate contact with the mysterious and elusive power of radioactive decay. It had been his lifetime study. I teased him, ‘How can you study something you can’t sense?’ ‘The most common truism about radiation is that humans cannot sense it’, Kupny replied, ‘but that is not true. With a dosimeter, you can hear radiation. With a camera, you can see it. If the levels are high enough, you can taste it on your tongue. It tastes metallic.’ ‘And feel it?’ Kupny nodded in affirmation. After forty years in radioactive fields, he said, he can sense decaying atoms. The photos Kupny snapped inside the sarcophagus look like an episode from Planet of the Apes. Wrecked machinery and dated equipment lie upended amid peeling paint and rusting, twisted steel. Clouded, frozen control room dials rest amid wires dangling from fuse boxes. Scattered everywhere are cement blocks tossed on end. Yet the most haunting aspect of Kupny’s already-haunting photos is the snowfall of tiny crystalline flakes that float through every scene of silent ruin, lending the photos a deep-sea feel. In one photo, two tiny, streaking comets mysteriously light up the corner of a room that Kupny experienced as cast in total darkness. The tiny orange flecks and flashing lights are not an aberration in Kupny’s film. As Kupny snapped photos, the multitude of photons of radioactive energy swarming around him imposed their image on his film. Imperceptibly, as he pressed his shutter button, the effervescence of the decaying reactor fuel jeweled the atmosphere in the buried chamber,

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lighting it up like an elaborate, spidery chandelier. These points of light are not representations. They are energy embodied. The specks are none other than cesium, plutonium, and uranium self-portraits. In 1946, David Bradley, a radiation monitor for Operation Crossroads, sliced open a puffer fish he caught in the warm waters of the Bikini Atoll a few days after American generals used the chain of islands and coral reefs as a nuclear testing ground. Bradley had pulled the fish from an irradiated lagoon, and after cutting it open, he placed the fatty tissue down on a photographic plate in a darkroom. He was reproducing an 1896 experiment by Antoine Becquerel, who accidentally burned an image of a copper cross onto a glass plate he had left in a drawer with rock containing a uranium sulfur compound. Inadvertently, Becquerel captured uranium’s energy in the form of light illuminating the cross’s outline. Bradley sought to have the puffer fish, which he figured absorbed an appreciable dose of radiation, serve the same function of radioactive source as had uranium in Becquerel’s test. He returned to the darkroom several hours later to find that the fish’s contaminated bones, organs, and not-yet-digested last meal had burned their images onto the photographic paper to create what art historian Susan Schuppli calls ‘a new kind of photo-synthesis’, Schuppli relates the puffer fish’s radioautograph to the silhouettes of residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that were etched into concrete and stone after the August 1945 blasts. To leave the world as a shadow meant that the bodies of the victims, not their family members, crafted their own, last memorial. Schuppli believes that radioautographs undercut the idea that humans have a monopoly on image making. They show that matter can write its own history by generating knowledge of itself.11 But that can only happen when bodies switch places in the darkroom drawer with specimens of uranium. A radioautograph is the opposite of an x-ray, with radioactive energy emanating out of rather than into a body. The work that goes into retrieving uranium from underground depths, isolating it, refining it, and setting up the conditions for sustained and controlled or explosive and uncontrolled chain reactions that then emanate energy that is then absorbed into bodies is behind both the self-portrait of the puffer fish’s skeleton and the raw, pure crystals of light in Kupny’s photographs. Marie Curie knew that work intimately. Over the course of five years, she and her husband-collaborator Pierre distilled eight tons of pitchblende down to a few grams of radium. They did so by boiling and condensing the pitchblende, a uranium compound, in huge vats. The indefatigable Marie Curie would stay at the lab late into the night to stir the mixture with poles taller than she. She breathed in the vapors. Her clothes became soaked in it. She heaved buckets, pouring and sometimes spilling compounds on her hands, where burns developed. Over time and through her labor, her body and that of the isotopes in the pitchblende joined.

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Above: Points of light: Radioactive energy imprinted on an image of ruins of Reactor No. 4, Chernobyl Photograph by Aleksandr Kupny Below: Flash of light: Radioactive decay, in reactor underground Note the sparks of light in the right corner Photograph by Aleksandr Kupny Opposite: Photographer Aleksandr Kupny in the ruin of Reactor No. 4, Chernobyl Photograph by Aleksandr Kupny

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The film Madame Curie made a big impression on Japanese audiences. It triggered a widespread interest in nuclear science and in the scientist herself. After Curie died from aplastic anemia, a blood disease often brought on by exposure to doses of radiation, Japanese collectors purchased some of her papers, which ended up in a Tokyo library. In the early twenty-first century, manga artist Erika Kobayashi went to take a look at one of Marie Curie’s notebooks. It was not exceptional, just a sketchpad for her notes and observations. But in the library, Kobayashi pulled out a Geiger counter and held it close to the notebook. She watched the needle rise. Kobayashi was amazed to find that, seventy years after her death, Marie Curie’s radioactive fingerprint still registered. Curie never visited Japan, but the touch of her finger emits energy in Japan, the only country in the world to experience the disasters of both martial and peaceful atoms.12 Without images, we have a hard time imagining disaster. Marie’s radioactive fingerprint ended up precisely where nuclear disaster played out in human history in spectacular and visual form. But Marie wasn’t thinking about catastrophe and destruction when she left her fingerprints on her notebook. Her dream was to create a source of energy that would heal wounds and relieve human want and misery. What Curie began, the hopes she invested in achieving a pure source of radiant energy, Kupny carries along. He lives just outside the abandoned Chernobyl Zone, which is a vast wastescape generated by global economies hungry for energy and global political powers craving ideological preeminence. Kupny believes that a lot went wrong at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but what he has in mind when he discusses mistakes is not the accident but its aftermath. He argues vehemently that the remaining Chernobyl reactors should never have been shut down in 2002. They were perfectly safe and still had many years in them, he believes. He disagrees with the decision to halt the construction of reactors that were being built when Reactor No. 4 blew. And he wrote a series of articles about how the new French-built stainless steel shelter going up over the aging sarcophagus is wasting money and will not work. Kupny is convinced that nuclear plants offer an acceptable and minimal health risk. I asked him how much of a dose did he think he received during his spelunking expeditions into the sarcophagus. Kupny said he didn’t know. ‘The first few times we went below,’ Kupny said, ‘I recorded my dose and wrote it down, but then Sergei [Koshelev] asked me why I did that. “What good will it do you to know? The less you know, the better you will sleep.”’ ‘I thought about it and stopped recording my dose,’ Kupny continued. ‘Any health problem I got, I would question, “was it because of my dose?” That is how people do it. They know they were exposed and they want to pin every illness or injury they have on that fact.’ Kupny pointed to his head. ‘Those who are sick a lot – it comes from the mind. They torture themselves.’

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Certainly exposure to radiation doesn’t seem to have been a problem for Kupny personally. At age sixty-eight, he is a decade past the average male life expectancy in Ukraine. Nor does he look anywhere close to the grave. He appears to be ten years younger, is lithe and agile, with a brisk step and quick mind. ‘As it does with food,’ he told me with a smile, ‘radiation works on me like a preservative.’ Kupny’s intellectual influences follow a straight line directly from the nuclear industry where he spent his career. Officers, especially in nuclear navies, where sailors live in close contact with tiny submarine reactors, frequently refer to ‘hormesis’, the idea that exposure to radiation or a toxin in small doses has favorable biological effects. Scientists working for nuclear agencies often focus on psychological stress as the chief health concern for civilian populations exposed to low doses of radiation. Populations show higher rates of disease, these researchers believe, because of worries over exposure, not from the exposures themselves. These ideas are controversial, and a great deal of evidence suggests that small doses of radioactive isotopes and toxins are more, rather than less, dangerous than large doses, and that low-dose exposure to radiation can cause a host of nonmalignant diseases.13 The concepts of hormesis and radiophobia work well, however, as long as a person is healthy. You can then believe, as Kupny suggested, that those who were anxious brought on their poor health. Kupny speaks for a lot of people locally who would choose the risk of possible contamination down the road in exchange for jobs and energy independence in the short term. In fact, in 2014, few Ukrainians thought much about the Chernobyl accident or the Zone it left behind. In Ukraine, in the midst of a civil war, people were worried instead about a drastic drop in the value of the Ukrainian gryvnia, about the uncertainty of the national government, and about renewed incursions from their Russian neighbor. Anxieties about invisible, intangible radiation were luxuries only foreigners could afford. That’s what foreigners do: they go to the Chernobyl Zone to imagine disaster. They pay money to do that. Kupny took the risk of crawling under the sarcophagus for the cause as a ‘partisan’, Partisans fought during World War II and sacrificed to defend the Soviet Union. As a radiation monitor, Kupny was a member of the working class. At a nuclear power plant, radiation monitors do not do heavy lifting like construction crews, plumbers, or janitors, but their jobs are nonetheless ‘dirty’, Radiation monitors responded to emergencies. They were called in for suspected spills or leaking pipes. They inspected barrels, jumped down into trenches, and canvassed the edges of cooling ponds. Monitors were, in other words, on the front lines, patrolling and securing the borders of human contact with radioactive isotopes. After spending a lifetime trying to visualize and map radiation, it makes sense that Kupny fell a bit in love with his subject and wanted to get closer to know more. By calling himself ‘a partisan’, Kupny was also signaling that he was a Soviet man who had faith in the socialist version of high modernism generally and, specifically, in the regenerative force of nuclear power.

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Kupny’s respect for the Soviet project is not unusual. He is a well-known local writer and artist in Slavutych. His ideas are shared commonly among his fellow citizens for reasons that are not mysterious. In Kupny’s lifetime, Soviet socialist modernization delivered a great deal. It put an end to illiteracy, epidemics, and famine, while cleaning up daily life with indoor plumbing, public bathhouses, and central heating. Socialism also enriched life with pensions, paid vacations, affordable housing, free health care and education, and an impressive network of libraries, theaters, concert halls, and clubs. The socialist state lavished this attention foremost on trained, urban, blue-collar workers like Kupny, while outwardly focusing political rhetoric on equality and the ascendance of the working class. The contrasts in 2014 with the past were stark. In postsocialist, post shock-capitalism society, working classes have been left to chronic poverty and joblessness, while pensions have evaporated, paid vacations are a nostalgic memory, and equality – well, no one thinks about equality anymore. On this panorama, the achievements of the Soviet technocratic planning state look better and better. Kupny’s faith in the socialist version of high modernism, in the ability of man to invent machines to continually improve life, ecology, the animal world, and virtually everything else, is particularly striking because he witnessed firsthand the worst missile the technomodernist experiment tossed at the globe. The Chernobyl disaster took apart faith not only in nuclear safety but in convictions about risk management, disaster relief, and the capacity of states that are powerful and organized enough to produce nuclear reactors but too weak, indecisive, and financially strapped to contain them or clean them up afterward.14 Yet even after watching Chernobyl unravel, Kupny maintains confidence in human ingenuity, which, as much as it makes a mess of things, goes in search of new technologies to clean up, move on, and, hopefully, improve. I had imagined that kind of optimism was reserved for the young, but not in Kupny’s case. Though it would be easy to despair, he does not shrink from hope. Choosing the good atom, the worker atom, over the destructive, soldier atom is one way he maintains that hope. There is another way that Kupny is a ‘partisan’. Partisans were loyal Soviet subjects. From the first steps into preschool, Soviet citizens were exhorted to act as role models for others in the Soviet Union and around the world. As the fortunate minority to be part of a socialist society, they had a duty to sacrifice themselves to keep socialism going, to see that it was strong and spreading to others less fortunate. Partisans, at the same time, were not regular army. They did not take directions from superior officers or wait for orders. They acted on their own. Sneaking into the sarcophagus like a burglar is a bit like carrying out a raid. He took a portion of radiation, which he didn’t measure, much like a factory worker who pockets some metal to make a toy to bring home to his child. This kind of creative, spontaneous labor, for which Kupny, the artisan, takes no payment, announces his freedom.15 In Marxist terms, he is taking ownership of the means of production, for nothing in a nuclear reactor is so essential to production as the spinning, bouncing, decaying

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isotopes Kupny brought home on his film. Kupny is self-activated to understand his world, grasp its source of power, and he does so in the context of a society that has turned its back on the accident and on the promises of a society that saw nuclear power as the solution to most basic human problems of food, heat, and medicine. He redirects our attention to the source. He wants us to visualize those flickering, falling leaves of energy lit with autumnal light as a way of seeing his lost world of socialism with all its possibilities and promises. 1. Baranovskaia, N.P., Chornobylska trahediia: Narysy z istoriï (Kiev: Instytut istoriï Ukraïny NAN Ukraïny, 2011), documents 54, 79. In a report of the Secretary of the Kiev Communist Party (Komparty) to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, dated April 26, 1986. 2. Hill, Kyle, ‘Chernobyl’s Hot Mess, “the Elephant’s Foot”, Is Still Lethal,’ Nautilus, December 4, 2013, http://nautil.us/blog/chernobyls-hot-mess-the-elephants-foot-is-still-lethal. 3. Ibid. 4. Baranovskaia, Chornobylska trahediia, documents 103, 128, Information of the Communist Party of Ukraine, May 12, 1986. 5. Alexander Kupny, interviewed with the author, Slavutych, Ukraine, June 14, 2014. 6. Aleksander Kupny, Zhivy poka nas pomniat (Kupny: Kharkov, 2011), 83. 7. Hales, Peter Bacon, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1999, 346–51; Spencer R. Weart, The Rise of Nuclear Fear, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012, 81. 8. Weart, Rise of Nuclear Fear, 82. 9. Nelson, Craig, ‘“The Energy of a Bright Tomorrow”: The Rise of Nuclear Power in Japan’, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective 4, no. 9 (2011), http://origins.osu.edu/article/energy-bright-tomorrow-rise-nuclear-power-japan. 10. Kushner, Barak, ‘Gojira as Japan’s First Postwar Media Event,’ in In Godzilla’s Footsteps: Japanese Pop Culture Icons on the Global Stage, ed. William M. Tsutsui and Michiko Ito, New York: Macmillan, 2006, 42. 11. Schuppli, Susan, ‘Dirty Pictures: Toxic Ecologies as Extreme Images’, paper presented at the Radioactive Ecologies Conference, Montreal, March 15, 2015; Schuppli, ‘Radical Contact Prints’, in Camera Atomica, ed. John O’Brian, 277–91, London: Black Dog, 2014. 12. Marie Curie’s papers in France’s Bibliothèque National are stored in lead-lined boxes. Researchers have to sign a waiver to work on her papers. Eoin O’Carroll, ‘Marie Curie: Why Her Papers Are Still Radioactive’, Christian Science Monitor, November 7, 2011. 13. The best synthesis of work on nonmalignant health effects from Chernobyl radiation is A.V. Iablokov et al., Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1181 (Boston: Blackwell on behalf of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009). 14. For the state’s failures in cleaning up nuclear disasters, see Brown, Kate, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 282–338. 15. Hatherly, Owen, Landscapes of Communism, London: Penguin, 2015, 532.

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Ruin lust/Ruin porn? What ‘ruin porn’ tells us about ruins – and porn Text: Siobhan Lyons Images: Bryan Debus and Timm Suess Ah, porn. Few words come with as many

The allure of ruin remains prominent in tourism

pre-loaded connotations and assumptions –

and popular culture, including abandoned

the promise of titillation, the thrill of taboo, the

amusement parks such as Sydney’s Magic

inherent air of seediness. Think poverty porn.

Kingdom park, Germany’s Cold War-era Spreepark,

Think food porn. Think good-old fashioned

and Japan’s Takakanonuma Greenland in the

porn-porn.

Fukushima district. Photographers who capture

So what are we to make of ‘ruin porn’, the work of photographers and artists who aim to communicate the romantic frisson – as they see it – of run-down buildings? The term has cropped up with increasing regularity in the last few years. The ruins of Chernobyl, the Holocaust, Detroit’s

social media platforms. These images represent not only economic failure, but ideological failure, representing a break with modernised conceptions of cultural innocence and everyday enjoyment. The term ‘ruin porn’ has been met with great

parks have become havens for ‘ruin photographers’.

criticism for its exploitative nature and use in

In his recent book The Cambridge Introduction to

trivialising the causes of destruction and urban

Postmodernism (2015), US theorist Brian McHale

decay. In 2013, art critic Richard B. Woodward

claims that artist Robert Smithson’s work acts

argued that: ‘Ruin Porn is a phrase so immature

as a precursor to ruin porn. He argues that the

and gawky it isn’t sure how seriously to take itself.

photographic documentation of ruin ‘arguably

Like its linguistic relatives “animal porn”, “shoe

begins with Smithson’s deadpan photographs of

porn”, “food porn”, “real estate porn”, and “fill-in-

modern industrial wastelands in his conceptual-

the-blank porn”, it’s a smirking neologism that

art project A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,

may or may not aspire to be a social critique.’

into ‘an abundant photographic record of urban decay and ruin in the wake of the deindustrialisation of North American “Rust Belt” cities’. These ruins, he notes, are self-inflicted, rather than the result of warfare and international conflict, as with 9/11.

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and many keep diaries of their discoveries on

urban decay, and even abandoned amusement

New Jersey’. This, he argues, has since proliferated

Opposite: Dequindre Cut Greenway expansion at Wilkins Street, Detroit, Bryan Debus, CreativeCommons (CC BY-ND 2.0)

these sites have a name, ‘urban explorers’,

The fascination with Detroit’s urban decay is the direct result of economic failure, specifically the downturn of the motor industry in the 1970s. Its ruins have since been the subject of much obsession, including numerous articles,

This celebration of ruin and destruction was evidenced in the 2014 exhibition Ruin Lust at London’s Tate Gallery, which featured art works from the seventeenth century to today, all of which engaged in imagery of ruin, war, or apocalypse. There were photographs of decayed Nazi bunkers and artist J.M.W. Turner’s sketches of decayed abbeys. The exhibition sought to chronicle society’s continued obsession with ‘the ruin’ within the inevitable narrative of decay.

photographic essays and online galleries.

[continued on page 130]

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Ruin lust/Ruin porn? Siobhan Lyons Bryan Debus and Timm Suess

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Images from Pripyat and the ‘red forest’ in the Chernobyl zone of exclusion, Timm Suess, 2009, CreativeCommons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) Top: Lenin Square, view from Hotel Polissya, Pripyat, near Chernobyl Below left: Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, site of the Chernobyl catastrophic nuclear accident, 1986, seen from Hotel Polissya over the roofs of the ghost city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl (then in the Ukrainian SSR, now Ukraine) Below right: Radioactivity warning sign in the highly contaminated ‘Red Forest’ area near Chernobyl Opposite: Gas mask floor found in a school, Pripyat, near Chernobyl

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Ruin lust/Ruin porn? Siobhan Lyons Bryan Debus and Timm Suess

While giving the exhibition a good review,

For Apel, part of the allure of these sites and

But the discrepancy between melancholic

Jonathan Jones at The Guardian stated that the

the ‘deindustrial sublime’ stems from the act

fascination with ruins and actual arousal ought

term ‘lust’ was essentially misleading:

of ‘tempering the anxiety of decline’. Jones,

to be made clear. Kate Brown, in her book

‘So many things vanish. Yet ruins remain in the

moreover, notes that our fascination is more to

Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not

landscape, reassuring the mind that death might

do with the concept of time. ‘Ruin porn is a kind

Yet Forgotten (2015), shrewdly distinguishes

not be the end. Is it “lust” to linger in those places?

of time travel to the future within the present’.

between ruin porn and what she calls ‘rustalgia’.

The joy this exhibition insists on may in reality be more of a sweet sorrow’. In the same vein, in 2013, Kate Abbey-Lambertz of the Huffington Post wrote: ‘Some have expressed frustration at the way decline is glamorized or exploited – it’s called ruin porn for a reason – rather than seen as part of the city’s larger ills. While some think iconic buildings should be preserved for their historical significance, others [see] them as eyesores, havens for crime or obstacles to the city’s renewal’.

Indeed, ruin sites provide something of a realistic glimpse into post-apocalyptic life for humanity, and hence provoke our engagement with ruin while we are still alive. Toronto-based academic Tong Lam, in his 2013 book Abandoned Futures: A Journey to the Posthuman World, argues: ‘In a way, we are already post-apocalyptic.’ Ruins appear to confront society’s faith in anthropological endurance. Decaying buildings signify the inevitable process of history, to which we, too, will eventually succumb. Essentially,

Criticisms of ruin porn stem from the suggestion

as Jones suggests, ‘ruin porn’ is a kind of time

that these photographs are bereft of any sort of

travel to the future within the present.

socio-economic context regarding their cause

As US academic Jason McGrath wrote in his 2014

and aftermath, and are dismissive of the broader

paper ‘Apocalypse, or, the Logic of Late

failures of modern economic life. Yet as Dora Apel

Anthropocene Ruins’:

writes in her recent book Beautiful Terrible Ruins:

‘The posthuman gaze at modernist ruins reminds

Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline:

us that, no matter how many new objects we

‘Even if we take the term “ruin porn” at face value

produce, consume, and discard, those objects

and see the objective of ruin imagery as the

will in many cases far outlive us and the purposes

production of pleasure or arousal, to condemn

to which we put them’.

the massive proliferation of ruin images on this basis leads to no new insight or knowledge. The more productive questions are how ruins images please, move, or arouse and what purpose this serves.’

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Noting that there are those who find beauty in decay but also danger for those who inhabit it, she argues, in a similar manner to Jones: ‘Some will be fascinated from the outside, producing more ruin porn. Others will speak in mournful tones of what is lost, what I call rustalgia. As opposed to ruin porn, rustalgia can help show how sketchy is the longstanding faith in the necessity of perpetual economic growth.’ For certain people, ruin remains a concept, not a reality. While ruin porn greatly trivialises the social and psychological implications of decay, it can be understood more broadly as something of an antidote to the bleak reality of inevitable, complete destruction – something more depressing than beautiful. This article was originally published in 2016 on The Conversation www.theconversation.com See also: Lyons, Siobhan (Ed.), Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

Climate Change

‘A cat in hell’s chance’: why we’re losing the battle to keep global warming below 2°C Andrew Simms A global rise in temperature of just 2°C would be enough to threaten life as we know it. But leading climate scientists think even this universally agreed target will be missed. Could dramatic action help? It all seemed so simple in 2008. All we had was financial collapse, a cripplingly high oil price and global crop failures due to extreme weather events. In addition, my climate scientist colleague Dr Viki Johnson and I worked out that we had about 100 months before it would no longer be ‘likely’ that global average surface temperatures could be held below a 2°C rise, compared with pre-industrial times. What’s so special about 2°C? The simple answer is that it is a target that could be politically agreed on the international stage. It was first suggested in 1975 by the environmental economist William Nordhaus as an upper threshold beyond which we would arrive at a climate unrecognisable to humans. In 1990, the Stockholm Environment Institute recommended 2°C as the maximum that should be tolerated, but noted: ‘Temperature increases beyond 1°C may elicit rapid, unpredictable and non-linear responses that could lead to extensive ecosystem damage.’ To date [2007], temperatures have risen by almost 1°C since 1880. The effects of this warming are already being observed in melting ice, ocean levels rising, worse heat waves and other extreme weather events. There are negative impacts on farming, the disruption of plant and animal species on land and in the sea, extinctions, the disturbance of water supplies and food production and increased vulnerability, especially among people in poverty in low-income countries. But effects are global. So 2°C was never seen as necessarily safe, just a guardrail between dangerous and very dangerous change. To get a sense of what a 2°C shift can do, just look in Earth’s rear-view mirror. When the planet was 2°C colder than during the industrial revolution, we were in the grip of an ice age and a mile-thick North American ice sheet reached as far south as New York. The same warming again will intensify and accelerate human-driven changes already under way and has been described by James Hansen, one of the first scientists to call global attention to climate change, as a ‘prescription for long-term disaster’, including an ice-free Arctic. Nevertheless, in 1996, a European Council of environment ministers, that included a young Angela Merkel, adopted 2°C as a target for the EU. International negotiators agreed the same in 2010 in Cancun. It was a commitment repeated in the Paris Climate Accord of 2015 where, pushed by a new group of countries called the Climate Vulnerable Forum, ambitions went one step further, agreeing to hold temperature rises to ‘well below 2°C’ above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5”C.

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Is it still likely that we will stay below even 2°C? In the 100 months since August 2008, I have been writing a climate-change diary for The Guardian to raise questions and monitor progress, or the lack of it, on climate action. To see how well we have fared, I asked a number of leading climate scientists and analysts for their views. The responses were as bracing as a bath in a pool of glacial meltwater. Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has an important place in the history of climatechange research. Hansen was its director from 1981 until 2013. Donald Trump is set to strip the institute of funding for climate research. Its current director, Dr Gavin Schmidt, is categoric that we are no longer likely to stay below 2°C. ‘The inertia in the system (oceans, economies, technologies, people) is substantial and ... so far the efforts are not commensurate with the goal’. he says. Sabine Fuss, of Germany’s Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, says emissions are currently ‘not aligned’ with the 2°C target and will need to ‘come down more quickly’. Joanna Haigh, co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment, thinks there is ‘no chance whatsoever at current levels of carbon emissions’, and her Grantham Institute colleague, Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, is not ‘confident’ that temperature rises can be held below 2°C. Prof Andrew Watkinson of the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia thinks it ‘unlikely’ and Prof John Shepherd, a physicist at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, calls it ‘not very likely at all’. Stuart Haszeldine of the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh says we have ‘very little chance’, and Prof Piers Forster, director of the Priestly International Centre for Climate at the University of Leeds calls it, ‘on the fanciful edge of plausible’. Glen Peters, senior researcher at Norway’s leading climate change centre, Cicero, is unambiguous, saying: ‘We have emitted too much already.’ And these sentiments are echoed by Prof Alice Larkin, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University, and Dr Chris Vernon, a glaciologist and former scientist at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Science. Only one influential scientist preferred their comments to remain anonymous, but they too said we were off-target, because the ‘international negotiating process is disconnected from national policymaking’. In short, not a single one of the scientists polled thought the 2°C target likely to be met. Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, is most emphatic. ‘My personal view,’ he says, ‘is that there is not a cat in hell’s chance.’ The most positive response came in the guarded words of Chris Jones, head of the Earth system and mitigation science team at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, who says that current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere ‘don’t preclude’ successfully achieving the target. Prof Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, would ‘only confirm that it is still possible to keep global warming below 2C’. The last point, however, is contentious, for precisely the reason the target exists. Namely, to prevent global warming from feeding off itself by triggering long-term, potentially irreversible environmental domino effects, such as ice loss and forest die-back, and the weakening ability of things such as our oceans to absorb carbon. ‘The open question for me is not whether we will breach the 2°C target,’ says Prof Barry McMullin of Dublin City University, ‘but how soon.’

[continued on page 136]

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‘A cat in hell’s chance’ Andrew Simms

In addition, the temperature target is a global average, and local variations matter. In November 2016, the Arctic was already experiencing extraordinary anomalies. Temperatures were 20°C above normal. A global average rise of 2°C implies higher temperatures still for the Arctic, sufficient to push long-term ice loss and trigger other potentially uncontrollable climate changes. At the other end of the world, a development more bizarre than extraordinary is touching the Antarctic. Gambling with our future used to be largely a metaphor, but it is now possible to place bets on when the next giant iceberg will detach itself from the Larsen C ice shelf. At the time of writing, betting company PaddyPower is offering odds of 7/2 in February 2017 or 12/1 in August. Hoskins says: ‘We have no evidence that a 1.9°C rise is something we can easily cope with, and 2.1 is a disaster.’ But Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh, one of the countries most vulnerable to warming, warns in stark terms of the failure to stick to a much lower target: ‘The consequences of failing to keep the temperature below 1.5°C will be to wilfully condemn hundreds of millions of the poorest citizens of Earth to certain deaths from the severe impacts of climate change.’ ‘I think we actively chose to forgo the carbon budgets for a likely chance of 2°C many years ago,’ says Kevin Anderson, currently professor of climate change at Uppsala University in Sweden. ‘Judging that rate at which our emissions would need to be reduced was too politically challenging to contemplate.’ The one thing agreed by all the climate scientists was the need for immediate and dramatic transition to a low-carbon economy, at a scale and speed we have not yet remotely approached. And the truly striking thing is that a huge number of the actions we need to take are things that bring enormous economic, social and environmental benefits. Rationally, we would be choosing to do them anyway. Where there are challenging shifts in behaviour required, they mostly affect only a small, wealthy proportion of society. Take flying, for example: 70% of all flights by UK residents are accounted for by just 15% of the population. So, what scale of change are we looking at to stay below 2°C? Being optimistic about what might be achieved in terms of saving forests from being cut down and cleaning up industry, especially the production of steel and cement, Anderson estimates globally we can afford to emit around 650 bn tonnes of carbon dioxide in total from energy systems. Currently, the world pumps out about 36 bn tonnes every year alone. Starting from today, and assuming that poorer and industrialising nations see a peak in the emissions from energy use by 2025 and go zero carbon by 2050, Anderson calculates that this leaves a rich country such as the UK with the challenge of cutting its emissions by around 13% per year. Previous page opening: Timo Lieber THAW #11 An image that, in a way, is THAW. It starts with solid ice that then calves and breaks to pieces before melting into a deep blue lake: a beautiful pattern and an incredible, almost ethereal, palette.

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Chris Goodall charts the remarkable rise of renewable energy and its equally dramatic falling costs. But renewables have to substitute for fossil fuels, not merely add to overall energy supply. In the meantime, it matters as much that we reduce our total energy use. You will hear a lot of talk about technologies to capture carbon from the burning of fuel and prevent it entering the atmosphere. Most of the climate models used to project what will happen to our atmosphere rely heavily on the assumption that they will be used at large scale. While most climate scientists see these so-called ‘negative emissions technologies’ for carbon capture and storage (CCS) as essential parts of the toolkit to tackle climate change,

many are sceptical of hope being placed in them. It is easier not to burn the carbon in the first place. ‘There is no guarantee that CCS will work at a sufficiently global scale’, says Dr Hugh Hunt, a Cambridge specialist on climate engineering. ‘These technologies will take decades to reach any meaningful scale.’ Tellingly, as an engineer, he argues that our top priorities are to stop burning fossil fuels and for the biggest consumers to live less extravagantly. And, it seems, moderate shifts by the most profligate could yield huge climate dividends. Currently about half of all global emissions are the responsibility of just one in 10 of the global population. If just this group reduced their carbon footprints to that of the average, barely impoverished European, argues Anderson, global emissions would be cut by around one-third. There are many ways to reach a 2°C world, according to Prof Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, of the Central European University. ‘Their common characteristic is that they all require rapid and transformational action’, she says. Small, incremental changes won’t do it. Retrofitting existing buildings in rich countries can save 70-90% of the energy used to heat and cool them, she adds. And such a move also tackles fuel poverty, creates local jobs and reduces deaths from cold. Switching transport from fossil fuels to electricity power by renewables cuts emissions but also removes the air pollution that is responsible for an epidemic of lethal respiratory disease. In Europe alone, about half a million people suffer premature deaths each year due to air pollution. In November 2016, many, mostly low-income countries, from Bangladesh to Tanzania and Guatemala, committed to switching entirely to renewable energy by 2030-50 at the latest. Costa Rica, aided by favourable geography, has already managed to power itself for extended periods, relying just on renewables. Portugal has managed the same for shorter periods. But great leaps forward are happening elsewhere, too. China is installing more new wind energy capacity in a single year than the UK has in total. So, adding to the prevailing global strangeness, the edifice of international climate policy rests on a target that no one believes it is likely can be met. And some think even that insufficiently ambitious. Yet, among climate scientists, there is a consensus that swift action is vital, and with it the target remains, at least, possible. With the amount of carbon burned by humans, we have now created a climate not experienced on Earth since the Pliocene era, 2 m-5 m years ago. We are daily rolling the climate dice with the odds stacked against us. But we are also clever, quick and innovative when we want to be. Now that we understand the game better, the question we face is whether we will choose to change it, fast and enough, so that we can all have better lives. This article first appeared in The Guardian, 19 January 2017; A fully annotated version of this essay may be found at: www.theguardian.com (accessed 13 September 2020). Some recent research indicates that keeping the temperature rise below 2°C may be ‘not yet a geophysical impossbility’ (translated by one of the authors as ‘just doable’) if the world acts quickly and appropriately: Miller, R.J. et al., ‘Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C’ (NatureGeoscience: DOI: 10.1038/NGEO3031), although its conclusions have been widely questioned (as summarized by Michael Le Page: ‘Meeting that 1.5°C [Paris Agreement] goal could be a pipe dream’, New Scientist, 23 September, 2017, and see also Raftery, A.E. et al., ’Less than 2°C warming by 2100 unlikely’, Nature Climate Change, Vol. 7, September 2017/www.nature.com/natureclimatechange.); page 24 above, note 17(a) for IPCC Reports; and https://www.2degreesinstitute.org (accessed 29 April 2020).

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Climate change: Ice Timo Lieber from THAW

THAW is a collaboration between photography and science which explores the human interaction with nature and the complexity of its impact. I visited the Arctic polar ice cap, working alongside several scientists who study it, and was overwhelmed by the scale of the landscape and the enormity of associated problems. All of which I brought together in THAW. THAW highlights the rapidly growing number of blue lakes and rivers that form on the Greenland ice cap – one of the most inaccessible areas on earth. Here, in the pristine landscape, stripped to the bare minimum of colours and shapes, the dramatic impact of climate change is more obvious than anywhere else in the world. The Greenland ice sheet is not just a stark and frigid wilderness perched at the top of the globe; it is a vast frozen reservoir of fresh water that offsets seven metres of coastal flooding around the planet. In the past two decades, that reservoir has shifted from a steady state in balance with its climate, to one in which it is now losing an estimated 380,000,000,000 tonnes of ice annually. The project was two years in the planning, with the assistance of Prof. Alun Hubbard of Aberystwyth University and Prof. Julian Dowdeswell and Dr Poul Christoffersen at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. Timo Lieber

Above: THAW #1 Global warming looking right back at us Opposite: THAW #5 Melt lakes tend to be an interconnected system

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It is incredibly difficult to make compelling

that is unfolding at an alarming rate in the polar

photographs of the Arctic icecap.

regions. The fact that Timo’s narrative is

The compromised beauty of the place has attracted photographers by the score but all too often the results are pretty confections that collapse into cliché. Timo Lieber’s photographs

underpinned by a clear understanding of the science involved punches home the importance of what he has to say. It is a story that we ignore at our peril.

skilfully avoid that trap. They are beautiful objects,

Michael Benson

of course they are, but they also have something

Founding Director of Photo London,

important to say about the environmental disaster

Director of Candlestar and Director of Prix Pictet

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Climate change: Ice Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann from Shroud

Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann made these pictures on the Rhône Glacier in southern Switzerland which is disappearing at a colossal rate. Because there is a small shop there that carves an ice grotto into the glacier and charges tourists to experience inside the blue ice, it has been worth their money attempting to stop the glacier’s retreat. They have invested heavily in a special thermal blanket that has kept about 25 m (in depth) of ice from disappearing and has kept the ice grotto in business. After a few winters on the mountain, the blanket is starting to show the effect of the harsh climate up there. ‘We came up with a special light, using a helium balloon; top lit, sepulchral. We wanted to recreate the same light you get over a mortuary slab. But it is the gesture that fascinates; There is something insane about trying to reverse the inevitable. It has only been done here because this is a working glacier. (It is not scaleable: we cannot do this to all the world’s ice.) The gesture is as forlorn and doomed as the glacier itself and intimates the colossal costs that will be run up in dealing with climate change's consequences.’ Simon Norfolk and Klaus Thymann

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Climate change: Ice Greg White from Ice Stupas

The Himalayan desert of Ladakh is home to this majestic tower of ice, known as an ice stupa, after the domed Buddhist buildings. It is effectively an artificial glacier, created by local people to store water and designed to start melting when they need it. In winter, temperatures in Ladakh rarely rise much above -40°C, and can fall below freezing even on summer nights. The area receives little rain, so local people rely on melting glaciers to obtain water for irrigation and livestock. But climate change has caused the glaciers to shrink and the flow of their meltwater to become erratic. To get around this, in late summer, local people catch glacial meltwater in underground pipes. The water is sprayed onto a domed structure (constructed crudely from branches and stems) at night, where it freezes. No power or pumps are required, simply the forces of nature in that water will rise to the level it came when siphoned off at source. The ice stupa starts to melt in March and will continue to do so until around July, when rainfall is at its lowest. Its conical shape shields much of the ice from the sun. This means the tower, which can reach 50 metres in height, melts slowly, feeding surrounding streams. The following summer, the cycle repeats. Greg White with Jason Arunn Murugesu

142

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Climate change: Ice David Buckland from Cape Farewell in the High Arctic

Climate is Culture - our complex societies are built on a bedrock of burning fossil fuel for cheap energy which in turn has led to an unprecedented attack on the ecological balance of the natural systems that govern our lives and our planet’s wellbeing. On these pristine High-Arctic landscapes of ice, these awesomely beautiful statements of nature’s purity, I projected humanity’s statements of excess and our own threatened purity – a pregnant woman, a baby. These artworks are not about 'what we stand to lose' – romantic photographs of nature’s wild places – but a direct attack on humanity’s mindless addiction to self-greed and self-love. The three images here are part of a series of over 40 artworks, each projected onto our disappearing ice, that were made during the Cape Farewell expeditions into the High Arctic between 2003 and 2010. After ten thousand years of the Holocene we have entered the age of the Anthropocene. We humans have created a force equal in power to the natural systems that govern our habitat, and we need to shape up quickly to recognize the responsibility that comes with creating something so powerful. These human expressions projected onto the wild beauty of ice are a call to our unconscious as it grapples with the reality of an uncharted future. David Buckland

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145

Climate change: Flood Gideon Mendel from Drowning World

Above left: Jeff and Tracey Waters, Staines-upon-Thames, Surrey, UK, February 2014 Above right: Mushaq Ahmad Wani and Shafeeqa Mushtaq, Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, October 2014 Opposite: Public Phone, Rio Branco, Brazil, March 2015

Drowning World is a visual attempt to capture

that have resisted the power of waters are

the magnitude of climate change through

reminders inscribed on wiped out streets and

portraits of flood survivors taken in deep

empty houses. These narratives take the form

floodwaters, within the remains of their homes,

of writings on boards or pictures on walls. Mendel

or in submerged landscapes, in the stillness

draws our attention to abandoned or lost photo-

of once lively environments. Keeping their

graphs to which he lends a second lease of life

composure, the photographed subjects pause

as found images, still lives, or objects containing

in front of Mendel’s camera, casting an unsettling

anonymous memories. A disastrous element,

yet engaging gaze. These images, taken across

water also contributes to the creative process.

the world, bear witness to a shared experience

Washed out pigments create new painterly

that erases geographical and cultural divides.

patterns, damaged films produce soft tones and

They invite the viewers to reflect on our impact

mysterious haze, while architecture and landscape

on nature and ultimately, on our own attachment

are reflected in the sparkling natural mirror.

to our homes and personal belongings. Beyond the documentary aspect of this project,

of senses between the sight of landscapes of

Gideon Mendel’s work subtly treads on the

desolation and the attractiveness of colours and

aesthetics of portraiture, a genre of which he

compositions. It seeks to examine the tension

pushes the boundaries by setting its décor

between drama and picturesque, and the fine

in unlikely environments. Each portrait isolates

line between documentary and artistic imagery.

individuals, couples or small groups that would otherwise be reduced to statistics. They also reveal their personalities and status through their clothes, style, even elegance. Likewise, traces

146

[Drowning World] highlights the confusion

Christine Eyene Curator, from Introduction for the Tiwani Contemporary Show

147

Climate change: Flood Gideon Mendel

Found images: lost photographs from flooded areas

148

Above: Found on Goburra Street in Rocklea: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, January 2011

Top: From the home of Muskan and Javed Ahmed: Lady in red, Mahjoor Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, September 2014

Top: From the home of Shirley Armitage: Wedding, Moorland Village, Somerset, UK, February 2014

Below: From the home of Mushaq Ahmad Wani and Shafeeqa Mushtaq: Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, October 2014

Below: From the home of Comrade Abdul Rashid: Group of people, Bemina, Srinagar, Kashmir, India, October 2014

149

‘Wild’/’Unwild’/’Rewild’ and Rephotography

Opposite: Patricia & Angus Macdonald from the long-term, ongoing project Re:Wild ‘Wild land’: the wild wetland ecosystem of a patterned mire, Ardnamurchan, North-west Scotland, 2019

Walk on the wild side: Rewilding, hillwalking and history George Monbiot interviewed by Dan Bailey

Dan Bailey: What would a natural upland habitat have looked like in Britain before humans started having the dominant influence? George Monbiot: This is a particularly interesting question, because we have two completely different baselines in Britain. The more recent one is the situation that prevailed after the ice retreated, and a temperate climate returned. I’m talking about parts of the Boreal and Atlantic stages, roughly between 9000 and 5000 years ago. It seems that during this period, Britain was more or less covered by closed canopy rainforest from top to toe. I’m using the term rainforest precisely: to denote forests that are wet enough to support epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants. Wherever you see polypody, the many-footed fern, growing along the branches of a tree, it’s a reminder that you are looking at a rainforest fragment. Hardly any land in this country would have been treeless at this time. With the exception of the summits of the Cairngorms, Ben Nevis and one or two other mountains, there is nowhere here that is too high for them to grow. Our bare and rocky hills are an artefact of deforestation, heavy grazing and the subsequent loss of soil. But even that state arguably reflected the dominant influence of humans. To see what the land would have been like without them, you would have to go back to the previous interglacial period, the Eemian. At this time, the climate was almost identical to ours, but for some reason the people driven out by the previous ice age appear not to have returned to this country. At this stage, there was plenty of forest, but it seems that it was not continuous. The closed canopy rainforest was punctuated by more open forest, as well as wood pasture and savannah. Why? Because humans had not wiped out the dominant species. During the Eemian, Britain had a fairly similar collection of wildlife to the one we know today. You know: foxes, badgers, hedgehogs, deer, robins, jackdaws, elephants, rhinos, hippos, scimitar cats, hyenas and lions. Ah yes, not the same in all respects. Like everywhere else on earth, we had a megafauna, and this shaped the ecosystem. The large herbivores were driven out of Britain by the ice, then driven to extinction in southern Europe about 30,000 years ago when modern humans arrived. (The hyenas and lions, incidentally, persisted throughout the ice age, hunting reindeer across the frozen tundra, and it seems that they survived here until about 10,000 years ago, when Mesolithic hunters turned up). DB: What does a typical British upland habitat look like now, and how does it differ from uplands in Mainland Europe? GM: In almost all other European countries (Ireland is an exception), the pattern of tree cover is what you would expect to see. The lowlands, where the land is worth farming, are largely 152

treeless. The uplands, where the land is infertile and the climate is harsh, largely forested. This is why Europe has an average forest cover of 37%. In Britain, the lowlands are largely treeless, as you might expect, but the uplands are even barer. This peculiarity explains the fact that Britain has only 13% tree cover. Instead of a rich ecosystem in the hills, a mosaic of trees, scrub and glades (which is what would occur now, on our depleted soils, if the land were allowed to recover), the uplands are almost entirely treeless, and therefore remarkably poor in birds, insects and all the other lifeforms you might expect to find there. The parts of the country which would otherwise function as our great wildlife reserves – those places, in other words, where hardly anyone lives and there is almost no economic activity – have even less wildlife than the places that are intensely inhabited and farmed. DB: What are the people and processes responsible for keeping our hills bare in England and Wales? Who’s more to blame in Scotland? GM: In England and Wales, the cause is simply stated. Sheep, which originated in Mesopotamia, are wildly, disproportionately destructive. In many of our hills, they are kept at densities of no more than one per hectare or even less. But because they selectively browse out tree seedlings, they ensure that no recovery can take place. Even where remaining woods exist, they are often dying on their feet, because there are no young trees with which to replace the old ones. In terms of food production, upland sheep farming makes a minuscule contribution. It is hard to think of any industry where there is a higher ratio of destruction to production. The denuding of our hills by sheep is supplemented by the burning of grouse moors, a fantastically destructive activity carried out for the benefit of a very small number of exceedingly rich people. These two activities ensure that in England and Wales there are scarcely any trees above around 200 m. Both are also important factors in Scotland, but in the Highlands the dominant cause of destruction is the deer-stalking estates. By keeping the numbers of red deer very high, so that a banker waddling up the hillside in tweed pantaloons is almost guaranteed to make a kill, these estates have a similar effect to sheep farms. Like sheep, deer seek out the seedlings, and when their numbers rise above five or ten per square kilometre, they ensure that no forest can grow. So why the difference between Britain and the rest of Europe? The answer seems to be the size of land holdings. Because, unlike most other European countries, Britain never had a successful revolution, we have, on one estimate, the second highest concentration of landholding in the world, after Brazil. This grants landowners inordinate power. It also Following page opening: Patricia & Angus Macdonald Into the Unwild from series The Unwild

leads to the situation I’ll describe in the next answer.

‘Wild land’ ecologically degraded by long-term overgrazing, Glen Etive and Glencoe from above Rannoch Moor, Scotland.

economic terms, sheep are ornamental. Sheep farming throughout our hills is a loss-making

DB: Where does subsidy farming come in? GM: People farming the uplands claimed to make their money by raising sheep. But in activity, and persists only as a result of public money, that takes the form of farm subsidies. We pay £3.6 billion a year in this country to have our watersheds destroyed and our wildlife wiped out. The reason why the hills are kept bare here but not in the rest of Europe is that

[continued on page 156]

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Walk on the wild side George Monbiot interviewed by Dan Bailey

the landholdings in Britain are big enough to make subsidy harvesting a worthwhile activity: you are paid by the hectare. The more land you own, the more public money you receive. Some people take millions of pounds in these benefit payments every year. It’s extraordinary, when such restrictions are placed upon the ordinary recipients of social security, that this situation has not yet become politically explosive. DB: And culturally – how does our idealised view of the upland landscape feed into land management? GM: Our idealised, romanticised view of sheep farming, that bears almost no relationship to reality, but that is constantly drilled into our minds by programmes like Countryfile, makes it hard for us to see what is really going on. It’s because of this view that we fail to grasp a vast and obvious fact. That by denuding our hills, this economically-tiny industry has done more damage to our ecosystems and wildlife than all the building that has taken place in Britain. DB: Can you explain, in a nutshell, what you mean by rewilding, and why you’d like to see it in the British hills? GM: Rewilding is the mass restoration of ecosystems and the re-establishment of missing species. I’m not arguing for the blanket rewilding of our hills by any means. But I believe that Britain would be greatly enriched, in terms of both wildlife and human experience, if significant areas were allowed to recover; if trees were allowed to grow in some of our denuded places, and some of the wonderful species we have lost were permitted to return. In particular, I’m thinking of beavers, boar, lynx, wolves and species that we retain in small numbers but that were once widespread, such as wildcat, pine marten, capercaillie, eagles and goshawks. The other great benefit of allowing trees to return to the hills is the restoration of watersheds. In one study in Wales, the soil beneath woodland was found to absorb water at 67 times the rate of the soil beneath sheep pasture. The rain flashes off sheep pasture as if it were concrete, instantly causing floods downstream. Trees hold back the water and release it gradually, smoothing out the cycle of flood and drought. DB: Could you talk us through the stages of a habitat restoration process that could take a bare hillside and return it to woodland? GM: Many of our hillsides have been so thoroughly sheepwrecked that there are now no remaining seed sources. In these circumstances, we would need to plant islands of trees, using seed taken from the nearest surviving pockets of woodland in order to sustain local genetic diversity. Short of greatly reducing stocking levels or temporarily keeping herbivores off altogether, there is not a lot more that needs to be done. In some places, all that is required is temporary exclusion of grazing animals. DB: What is a trophic cascade, and how is this idea relevant in the British context? GM: A trophic cascade is an ecological process that tumbles from the top of the foodchain to the bottom. It turns out that in many places, large carnivores regulate the entire ecosystem; ecosystems that retain them behave in radically different ways to ecosystems from which they have been lost. This presents a powerful challenge to British models of conservation, as we have lost all our large carnivores here, with the result that ecological processes, and their dynamic and ever-shifting successional patterns, have been curtailed.

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Following page opening left: Patricia & Angus Macdonald Overgrazed upland, North-west Scotland, 2016 from series The Unwild Heavy grazing and browsing over a very long period of time – in earlier centuries by numerous domestic livestock (cattle, sheep and goats), and more recently by semi-wild deer (their numbers kept high – in the absence of the earlier-exterminated top predators, the wolf and the lynx – by the management priorities considered necessary by many landowners in the recent past, and often still today, for the business of recreational killing – ‘deer-stalking’), have led to ecologically degraded, treeless landscapes in which remnants of once-widespread native woodland and other biodiverse habitats are only found on steep, rocky slopes, or in deep gullies like the one seen here. Following page opening right: Patricia & Angus Macdonald Burnt moorland: grouse-moor, South-east Scotland, 2000 from series The Unwild Repeated, intensive burning of moorland, for commercial, driven ‘sport shooting’ of red grouse, maintains treeless landscapes – in which wildlife persecution often further reduces biodiversity – and is detrimental to the public interest in terms of the costly effects – such as flash-flooding and poor water quality – on watercourses downstream.

DB: Critics sometimes suggest that proponents of rewilding are advocating turning the clock back to an arbitrary point in history and then keeping things permanently fixed in this state. Is that fair? GM: It is precisely the opposite. Our current model of conservation fixes ecosystems at an arbitrary point and then keeps them in a state of arrested development through extreme management of the kind that everywhere else on earth we recognise as destruction, not protection: namely cutting, burning and grazing. There is no intelligible reason behind the choices that have been made by conservationists of the ecosystems and species they choose to maintain by these means. Rewilding, by contrast, has no fixed outcomes. It seeks to restore ecological processes by bringing back some of the key elements of ecosystems and the key drivers: species that trigger trophic cascades. To the greatest extent possible, it then seeks to stand back and allow natural processes to take their course. DB: What would a healthy population of deer look like? How about sheep – do you have a figure for environmentally supportable grazing densities? GM: In the infertile uplands, it is roughly 5 per square kilometre (in other words per 100 ha). Beyond that point, there is almost no regeneration of trees. DB: The debate often seems to be framed in absolute terms – either we rewild everywhere, and get rid of all the farmers and deer, or not at all. How big would be big enough to please you? Are you talking about reforesting every hill, moor and mountain, from valley to summit? GM: The aim of the group Rewilding Britain, that I helped to found but do not run, is to allow natural ecological processes and key species to return to at least one million hectares (4.5%) of Britain’s land and 30% of our territorial waters over the next 100 years. It would like to see at least one large rewilded area to connect both land and sea – descending from the mountaintops to our coastal waters. DB: In somewhere as crowded as Britain are vast re-created wildernesses a viable prospect, or would it be more realistic to go for smaller scale projects in which rewilding is just part of a mixed land-use picture – projects such as Wild Ennerdale perhaps, where habitat restoration is being managed in conjunction with forestry, leisure, water extraction and livestock? GM: The British population is highly concentrated. Some parts of the country are exceedingly crowded; others remarkably empty. Most British uplands have a far lower population density than many parts of Europe in which wolves, lynx, bear and other species are found. Wolves have even been appearing in countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, where there is very little land that is unsuitable for intensive farming, and the rural population density tends to be much higher. Their arrival has been greeted by most sectors of society with delight. DB: Many hill-goers will recognise your picture of the degraded upland environment, but some may simply be making a different aesthetic judgement to you, valuing the barren wide open spaces for the experience they provide. If they just happen to prefer grass and heather landscape on some romantic level, and don’t much care about botany and wildlife, how might you seek to convert them?

[continued on page 160]

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Walk on the wild side George Monbiot interviewed by Dan Bailey

GM: I believe we should have both. At the moment those who value a wild, self-willed landscape have nowhere to turn in Britain. We have to travel abroad to find it and to experience magnificent encounters with wildlife. I believe this deprives us of the wonder and delight that can enhance our lives and of choice and freedom. We have nowhere in which to escape the order and control that governs all other aspects of our lives. DB: Hillwalkers and climbers have fought long and hard against vested landowning interests for our right to roam. There is a worry that conservation could be used to curtail these freedoms, and some evidence to support that concern. What place does public access on open upland have in a rewilded landscape, and which would take precedence – amenity or conservation? GM: I was heavily involved in campaigns for the right to roam, through another group I helped to found, The Land Is Ours, and I would be dismayed by any scheme which sought to keep people out of the hills. I believe that rewilding and access are entirely compatible. While it may be necessary in some places temporarily to fence out grazing animals, the fencing required is no different from that which is already found across the uplands, and exactly the same arrangements can be made to cross it as are used today. My hope is that in some places, as a result of rewilding, there will one day be no fencing at all: in other words it will mean better access than there is today. DB: On a related note, could public support for rewilding have unintended consequences? Might it, for instance, be a gift to landowners and conservation bodies with priorities quite other than public access? GM: I would be surprised if there were no unintended consequences. But if problems arise, the policies should be modified. No good policy emerges from the egg mature and complete. It must be constantly assessed and adjusted to head off any problems that emerge. DB: What sort of reception have your ideas met from folk in rural communities such as hill farmers and shooting-estate workers? Opposite: Patricia & Angus Macdonald Blanket bog and felled forestry plantation (with higher-level ‘trial plots’ above), the Great Glen, Highland Scotland, 1987, from Macdonald, Patricia, Shadow of Heaven Aurum/Rizzoli, London/New York. 1989 The felled forestry plantation on the hillside seen here was, sadly, later replanted exactly as before, up to the straight contour line of the earlier level, thus losing the opportunity to create improvements in environment, landscape and biodiversity.

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GM: I think it’s fair to say that they have been mixed. There has been a fair bit of hostility from some farming and shooting groups, but also support from surprising quarters, including landowners’ representatives and a large number of individual farmers and estate owners. In the wider countryside, there is often strong support. We would do well to remember that farmers are a very small minority even of the rural population, though this often gets forgotten because of their powerful influence on policy. DB: Can you offer a fully thought-through transition from sheep farming and shooting to an alternative model for the rural economy, one in which rural residents still have a secure place in a rewilded countryside? Can you understand people’s aversion to risking this? GM: I certainly can understand people’s concerns. But there is going to be a major transition in the countryside before long, with or without rewilding, when farm subsidies are either scrapped or greatly reduced, as they inevitably will be. When essential public services are being cut, giving €55 billion a year from the public purse across the EU to landowners, while helping to destroy both human communities and ecological resilience, is surely as unsustainable politically as it is environmentally. So what are farmers whose livelihood is sustained only as a result of farm subsidies going to do?

Walk on the wild side George Monbiot interviewed by Dan Bailey

I have two proposals. The first is that we start campaigning for the retention of some subsidies, whose purpose would be changed to that of ecological restoration and the support of communities. Landowners and tenants would be paid to restore watersheds, woodlands, rivers and wildlife. It’s hard to see how else continued subsidies could remain publicly acceptable. Rewilding could be a way out for struggling rural communities. The second proposal is to start investigating means by which rural people can enhance their livelihoods by enhancing the ecosystem. There are plenty of examples from around the world of eco-tourism and associated activities reviving communities by generating income and employment. Given that the traditional industries have manifestly failed to sustain jobs and incomes, in some cases it will not be hard to show that alternatives might work better. But more research is needed, and we have to remember that the same approach is not going to work everywhere. Different local circumstances demand different strategies. DB: ‘We have an incredibly narrow and restrictive vision of cultural heritage and cultural landscapes’ – your words. What would a broader vision look like? GM: I would love to see rural culture becoming more inclusive. It’s often highly hierarchical, with the landowners and farmers sitting at the top of the pyramid, dictating policy. In some respects, democracy is a stranger to the countryside; the old, landed powers still wield disproportionate influence over the lives of others. But I don’t want to invent a new culture. I believe that democratisation and pluralism creates its own cultures, that will evolve and develop independently in different places. I’m calling on people to challenge cultural hegemony in the countryside – perhaps we could call it agricultural hegemony – and for a much wider range of voices to be heard. DB: Farming and shooting are supported by the current dominant countryside culture. But wouldn’t a shift to rewilding simply be replacing this set of special interests with another, a sort of cultural colonisation of the countryside by urbanites? GM: That’s certainly not how I see it. And this has nothing whatever to do with the presumed urban-rural divide. Many of rewilding’s most ardent proponents live in the countryside, perhaps unsurprisingly. We are repeatedly told that the countryside is at war with the towns and vice versa. But I see no evidence of this. What I see is certain dominant interests in the countryside in conflict with other rural interests. And those dominant interests often have either one or both feet in the cities. A few years ago there was an article in The Telegraph that sought to characterise authentic rural people. These people apparently don’t care about ‘newts, trees and bats’: such matters are of interest only in London. It described David Cameron as ‘at heart, a rural Tory’, who ‘still grumbles to his wife about what, for him, are “banned activities” – notably shooting’. Authentic rural people, in other words, spend their adult lives in Notting Hill and drive out to their second homes for a shooting party at the weekend. People who live in the countryside and care about wildlife, on the other hand, are, ‘at heart’, Londoners. The rural-urban divide, as characterised in such papers, has nothing to do with location. It’s really about class.

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DB: What chance is there of significant progress being made in the current funding climate? You’ve recently written about the ‘toothless’ Environment Agency in this regard. Given the squeeze on public bodies would it be more effective to promote the out-sourcing of rewilding to non-governmental organisations, private philanthropists and large corporate landowners such as water companies? GM: There is a real problem here. Government agencies are being gutted and re-centralised. Cameron’s devolution agenda is a con: he is even more of a micromanager than Tony Blair was. The current [as at December 2015] environment secretary, Liz Truss, has put her department’s head on the block, volunteering for early execution. Statutory bodies like the Environment Agency are now, in terms of what they can do, almost dead. But the crazy situation that prevails today might not – should not – last forever. It is true to say however, that we cannot rely on government alone to deliver these changes, whatever form a government might take. DB: Are our National Park Authorities a help or a hindrance? GM: At the moment, they are a real drag on progress. This is partly because of policy, such as the Lake District National Park’s application for World Heritage status, which, as currently framed, will ensure that destructive practices are locked in (and continue to contribute to flooding). And it’s partly because of the way they frame the issues. They go to great lengths to persuade us that current land management is not only compatible with the protection of nature, but actually essential to it! All their brochures and display boards and websites create the impression that these ecological disaster zones are rich and thriving ecosystems, so people are constantly misled and misdirected. They are led to believe that all is well in our national parks, that these wastelands, which are in most cases little more than sheep ranches, are magnificent wildernesses. Our national parks are a disgrace, a shame upon the nation, and park authorities with an ounce of intellectual honesty would recognise this and seek to address it. DB: Rewilding seems to be moving up the agenda of the large conservation organisations, and gaining a space in the public discourse. Do you see grounds for optimism? GM: It certainly is. Before [my recent book] Feral was published, I visited all the principal conservation groups, and received responses that varied from mild interest to outright rejection. The change over the past three years has been astonishing. Rewilding appears to have moved from the fringe to the mainstream, and I’m delighted to see how these Following page opening: Patricia & Angus Macdonald from long-term, ongoing project Re:Wild Abundant growth of Scots pine saplings below veteran ‘granny’ trees in Glen Feshie, Cairngorms, Scotland, 2016, taking place after a recent reduction in deer numbers, as a result of new management priorities, has lessened browsing pressure on tree seedlings.

groups have begun to pick it up and engage with it. There’s still a long way to go, and plenty of daft practices still in play, but change among the conservation groups is certainly happening, albeit slowly. We will see rewilding in this country. The question is how far and how fast it will go. George Monbiot, interviewed by Dan Bailey for UKHillwalking.com, 11 December 2015; a fully referenced version may be found on www.monbiot.com (accessed 14 September 2020).

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Natural process Susan Derges from Spawn and Recycling Lucifer’s Fall

Spawn: Light sensitive paper immersed beneath the surface of an icy pond of frogspawn and willow leaves in late January, exposed to a full moon. Recycling Lucifer’s Fall: The turbulent flow of a river cascading beneath the stars at night, illuminated by a microsecond of flashlight onto paper unrolled into the water.

The below mirrors the above in terms of points of singularity unfolding over time into forms of increasing complexity, giving rise to consciousness and the possibility of the world knowing itself through us. But that consciousness also seems to separate: ourselves from nature, from other, from self even, to the point of destruction. Are we able to evolve, or more urgently, make the quantum leap into a new state of awareness, that recognises our complete interdependence with the self-regulating processes of the natural world? Or will we continue with the delusion of being somehow special, separate entities, entitled to use nature for our own purposes? These questions lie behind the making of the work, which is a ritual enactment of a desired state of belonging in the world. Susan Derges

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Opposite: Spawn, 1998. 169 X 61 cm. Dye destruction print Courtesy of the artist and Purdy Hicks Gallery Left: Recycling Lucifer’s Fall, 2008. 170 X 61 cm. Dye destruction print Courtesy of the artist and Purdy Hicks Gallery

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Wildness: the World’s edge Thomas Joshua Cooper from series The World’s Edge

‘The world has no name, he said. The names of

As Alan Harkness suggests in his essay

the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist

‘Sojourns in the Archive: Photographs of the

only on maps. We name them that we do not lose

Atlantic Basin’: ‘The Atlas project is an indexical

our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to

mapping project, and archive of witness. It is

us already that we have made those names.

about place and memory, about historical identity

The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And

and contemporary hopes and fears – and finally

it is because these names and these coordinates

about silence and slowness’.2

are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again.’1 Cormac McCarthy. The Crossing – Volume 2 of The Border Trilogy. I am a long-term practising artist, whose primary interests revolve around issues of the landscape, historical and cultural geography, cartography, and the problems of picture-making. Making photographic work is important and central to both my work and my research. During the last 30 years, I have been making and assembling a large, thematic body of work developed out Above: An Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity Map of The Continental Atlantic Basin – the Arcs of the Work (Map from The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World) (Completed expeditions shown in blue; Expeditions to complete in red)

Opposite: Thomas Joshua Cooper: Looking towards Scotland, Darien and Caledonia - failure and alienation, Bahia Escocese, Puerto Escocés, San Blas Tribal Territory, Panama, Central America, 2004/2015 Silver gelatin print, hand toned & printed by the artist. Edition of 4. 70 x 100 cm (print size); 108 x 145cm (framed). Image courtesy the Artist and Ingleby, Edinburgh.

of the physical act of pictorially mapping the cardinal extremities of the immense region described as the Atlantic Basin. This project is called The World’s Edge – the Atlantic Basin Project – An Atlas of Emptiness and Extremity and it involves, to date, three completed sections of photographic work: ‘Point of no return’ (from the cardinal extremities of furthest North, West and South of the continents of Europe and Africa); ‘Ojo de Agua’ (from furthest North, East and South of the continent of South America) and TRUE (from the North and South Poles to their respective Polar Circles).

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Thomas Joshua Cooper October 2017 1. McCarthy, Cormac, 1994, The Crossing (Vol. 2 of ‘The Border Trilogy’), London: Picador. 2. Harkness, Alan, ‘Sojourns in the Archive: Photographs of the Atlantic Basin’, New Linear Perspectives: https://newlinearperspectives.wordpress.com/ photography/sojourns-in-the-archive-photographs -of-the-atlantics-edge/ (accessed 6 October 2017).

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‘Wild land’: Walking Hamish Fulton

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A Walking Artist Contemporary art historians emphasise 'works

live as equals with what they call ... 'all our

of art', whereas I take a step back and attempt to

relations'. Awareness that ‘the economy is

consider 'the way we live today.' They will not refer

in conflict with the environment’ is not new.

out and beyond, to any recent research into the

'We abuse land because we see it as a

diverse benefits of walking, the ever increasing

commodity belonging to us.'

human need to 'spend time' in nature, the

(Aldo Leopold, 1949)

importance of respecting the many non-human forms of life on this planet, or that 'we' can learn from Indigenous Peoples and their struggle to

Above and opposite: Installation shots of exhibition at Galerie Stadtpark, Krems, Austria, 2019

Therefore, I wish no association with Land Art. Land Art contradicts Walking Art.

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‘Wild land’: Walking Hamish Fulton

The 'practical' and the 'unrealistic'? Over the years, I have visited the Cairngorms

In other words, today when the deer cull

quite a few times and as a self employed walking

is mentioned as helping to reduce climate

artist have been free to practice the philosophy

change by protecting the Caledonian Pine, the

of Leave No Trace. Although the region is a

debate is seldom prefaced by clearly stating that

'managed landscape', I nevertheless feel that

it was men's deep hatred of the wolf that caused

it is a European and national 'treasure'.

the imbalance in the first place. I doubt a woman

But, as Mark Cocker comments in his book,

killed 'the last wolf' in Scotland.

Our Place (2018): 'We have somehow contrived to discount land as a significant subject for public debate'.

Hamish Fulton Above: A Tree at its Birthplace A Boulder at its Resting Place, 2017 Opposite: Foot Path, 2014

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Not so wild? Human traces Alex Boyd from Stacashal

Rising above the North Lewis peat land, Stacashal is surrounded by small lochans, long deer grass, and the many long-vacated shielings which lie ruined on its gentle slopes. With a prominence of 700 ft (213 m), Stacashal is no Munro, but the views from the summit across the moors are impressive, with clear views to Muirneag in the North of the island, and Cailleach na Mòinteach (The Old woman of the Moors) to the South, her elegant form clear on the horizon. From the exposed summit I watched the slow approach of black clouds, and the fragile rays of light which worked their way across the landscape. Soon I would be in the middle of the passing downpour. Standing beside an ancient chambered burial cairn, I decided to make my images of the moorland, using the points of the compass to help guide my eye over the ever-changing landscape. This work documents the island's heart of gneiss and peat, and was made using the photogravure process, an ongoing exploration of early photographic processes used in Scottish photography. This series in particular owes much to the work of James Craig Annan and is part of a wider series documenting the Outer Hebrides. Alex Boyd

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Above: Stacashal View East The cairn which crowns the summit of Stacashal, with a walking stick belonging to the father of artist Anne Campbell, who spent his life working on these moors.

Above: View South The view south features a large chambered burial cairn, a familiar feature of this landscape. Beyond lie the hills of Harris, and in the distance the curved form of Cailleach na Mòinteach.

Below: View North The view North takes in the Butt of Lewis, and Muirneag, the most prominent hill of the North of Lewis, a significant landmark for ships approaching the island. Sun breaks through the rainclouds.

Above: View West The view to the Atlantic is blocked by Ben Bragar, the large low hill which takes up much of the horizon.

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Not so wild? Songs of the moorland Anne Campbell from Astar: Glen Tolsta These images are based on a journey on foot across the moorland centre of Lewis, from Bragar to Glen Tolsta. The moor feels at its most dangerous when travelling outwith one’s own familiar territory, and I incorporated text from some of the more sinister songs of the moorland into this work. ‘Gheall mo leannan dhòmhsa cìr, Gheall e siud dhòmh ’s iomadh nì Coinneamh a chumail rium sa frìth Dreiseag mun èireadh a’ ghrian.’ ‘My love promised me a comb, he promised me that and many things, to meet me in the deer

Opposite top: Gheall mo leannan dhòmhsa cìr. Silver gelatin photograph with text from the song ’Ille Bhig, 'ille Bhig Shunndaich Ò (www.tobarandualchais. co.uk, Track ID: 79470)

forest, a little before sunrise.’ This is an extract from a fairy song, composed by a girl who was in love with a each-uisge, or water-horse. ‘Air bhi dhòmhsa gu ciùin riut ’S mi bhi tionndadh gu dlù riut Bha d’ fhuil chraobhach a’ brùchdadh Tromh d’ lèine. Bha t’ fhuil chraobhach a’ sileadh ’Si gun dòigh air a pilleadh ’S tu bhi marbh ann an innis Na sprèidhe.’ In this song a man describes turning to his sweetheart to find blood gushing through her shirt, with no way of stopping it: she has been murdered in the pasture of cattle. Anne Campbell

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Opposite below: ’S tu bhi marbh ann an innis na sprèidhe. Silver gelatin photograph with text from A. Macdonald. ‘Songs of the Shieling’, The Celtic Magazine 12:115, 1887

Rephotography: an ecologist’s archive Chrystel Lebas from Re-visiting

In 2011 the Natural History Museum London

Walking, searching, GPS in hand, I attempted to

first appears. I gathered evidence from Salisbury’s

commissioned me to make new work inspired

find the exact locations where Salisbury stood

photographic records and his notes, local

by a collection of anonymous glass negatives

when he took his photographs at the beginning

information, botanical sources and topographic

depicting the British landscape, from the

of the 20th century. I was not so much concerned

evidence.

beginning of the 20th century. After extensive

with a literal comparison between the landscape

research, a name scratched on a glass plate

as it was then and as it is now, but more with

revealed the identity of the photographer, the

defining my own role and vision as an artist

famous British botanist and ecologist

alongside that of the scientist Salisbury.

Sir Edward James Salisbury (1886–1978). E.J. Salisbury journeyed through Great Britain with a notebook, a vasculum and a camera, meticulously documenting landscape and its flora with utmost precision. In these photographs,

a bird might be carrying a seed from A to B, hence a new species might appear in an unfamiliar habitat). Is all this valuable information

moving image work that highlight complex issues

enough to account for what has happened to

in relationships between humans, plants, and

these landscapes in the intervening years?

environment in Salisbury’s time and now. Visiting the places Sir Edward James Salisbury

of Scotland and Norfolk appear rugged and

photographed between 1914 and 1933 in

empty, just as one might imagine these places

Scotland, Norfolk and Devon, I looked at how the

to be, though in actual fact, nature in these places

landscape has changed over nearly ninety years.

is under active management of public and private

A complex quest as nothing is as simple as it

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climate, humans and/or animals (for example,

Re-visiting combines photographs, texts and

the endless pine forests, the ‘wandering dunes’

conservation and environmental organizations.

Changes in the landscape can be caused by

Chrystel Lebas

Top: Edward James Salisbury. From 1237-1249-Aviemore. Pinus silverstris [illeg.] Plate n°1245

Opposite top: Edward James Salisbury. From 1237-1249-Aviemore. Culbin Sands Dunes Plate n°1248

Left: Re-visiting Pinus silvestris [illeg.] Plate n°1245, Aviemore, Rothiemurchus, October 2011 57°8.713’ N 3°50.290’ W

Opposite below: Re-visiting Culbin Sands dunes Plate n°1248, Culbin, December 2013. 57°39.365’N 3°37.883’W

Below: Re-visiting Pinus silvestris [illeg.] Plate n°1245, Aviemore, Rothiemurchus, August 2012 57°8.691’ N 3°50.304’ W

All works courtesy of Chrystel Lebas; The Sir Edward James Salisbury photographs have been printed from the original glass plate negatives by Chrystel Lebas,

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Habitat destruction: dunes or golf? Sophie Gerrard from The Dunes, Menie, Scotland

‘Sophie Gerrard’s project The Dunes, is about a Site of Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Aberdeenshire that Donald Trump has turned into a golf course; but it’s not just about that. Depicting local people whose lives and livelihoods have been irrevocably changed by Trump International Golf Links, it’s also a story about the power of money and the lack of regard for the environment. ‘Foveran Links used to be home to an enormous, shape-shifting network of sand dunes; constantly moving, it created the unique community of plants and animals that made it an SSSI. This designation should have ensured it was protected, and initially Trump’s planning application was refused. Then the Scottish Government, lured in by the 6000 jobs the American billionaire was promising to create, intervened. The jobs have not materialised but the golf course has, riding roughshod over local people; those who have refused to sell up and move on have found their houses boxed in behind giant bunkers of earth and screens of thick spruce and pine.

Susan Munro’s home is situated in the middle

‘These people are not happy but there’s little

of the Trump development. The ground in front

left they can say – they can’t afford to fight Trump

of Susan’s house has been raised and levelled

and the army of lawyers he can fund. In Scotland

and a large pile of sand now blocks the view

this story has special resonance, recalling the

from her kitchen window.

Highland Clearances and the depopulation forced by landowners; it also recalls China’s famous holdouts, single houses standing firm against developers. These disenfranchised locals can’t speak out, Gerrard’s images eloquently tell their story.’ Diane Smyth Deputy Editor, British Journal of Photography, first published on Photomonitor, October 2012.

‘Bringing up children here, two little boys, they just had everything you could want growing up here. It was 2 minutes down to the beach, and it was the busiest house in the summer, full of kids, happy children all the time. So many happy memories and now that's come to a halt.’ Susan Munro Menie resident, 2011. Sophie Gerrard See also interviews with Sophie Gerrard on page 184

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Above: Raised embankment which now blocks the view from a home, Menie Estate, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, from The Dunes 2011

Opposite top: Snow on the Menie dunes, Menie Estate, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, from The Dunes 2011 Opposite below left to right: Balmedie Dunes, Aberdeenshire coast, Scotland, from The Dunes 2011 Marram grass planting to enable dune stabilisation at the Trump International Golf Links on the Menie Estate, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, from The Dunes 2012

Habitat destruction: dunes or golf? Alicia Bruce from Menie: TRUMPED 2010 – present In 2006 Donald Trump announced plans to build

The series ‘Menie: Before Trump International

what he claimed would be ‘The Greatest Golf

Golf Links Scotland’ features eighteen photographs

Course in the World’, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.1

of the Menie dunes taken from 1 pm – 10 pm one

Alicia Bruce witnessed a beach and SSSI from

day in August 2010 as construction began on

her childhood become an area of conflict and

the controversial development. The project also

has since documented and campaigned in

includes re-stagings of well-known paintings, one

collaboration with the residents of Menie to

of these being James Guthrie’s To Pastures New

create a humane portrait of people and place.

in Aberdeen Art Gallery. ‘They depict a scene of natural beauty with its lights going out. Playing on ordnance surveys, Bruce maps this coastal terrain which faces imminent destruction, ‘Trumped’ over by the proposed golf course and hotel complex. The posts are evidence of the encroaching commerce that will swamp the area. But the tides are strong and many of the posts are already beginning to bend as metaphors of surrender.’ Dr Catriona McCara, 2010 Alicia continues to document the area and in 2013 was recognised in a Scottish Parliamentary motion: ‘That the Parliament congratulates the award-winning Aberdeenshire photographer, Alicia Bruce, on her ongoing photography project about Menie, an area of outstanding natural beauty on the Aberdeenshire coast; understands that her photographs from this

Above: Molly Forbes: Paradise, 2010 Right: James Guthrie To Pastures New, 1883

series have gained international acclaim and have been published in The Times, The Scotsman and several arts magazines; and that two of the portraits have been acquired by the National Galleries of Scotland; and welcomes that Alicia's photographs, many of which restage compositions from celebrated paintings, have helped to tell the story of the residents of Menie, whose homes came under threat due to what it considers the bullish golf course development of Donald Trump, and to portray a side of that story that otherwise might have gone unheard.’ Scottish Parliament, Motion S4M-05749 https://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/ 28877.aspx?SearchType=Advance&ReferenceNumbers= S4M-05749&ResultsPerPage=10 1. Shoumatoff, Alex. ‘The Thistle and the Bee’, Vanity Fair (May 2008): http://www.vanityfair.com 'Menie: TRUMPED' has been published, collected and exhibited internationally and features in the widely seen documentary film You’ve Been Trumped, 2011, directed by Anthony Baxter.

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Right: Menie: Before Trump International Golf Links Scotland, 2010

Habitat destruction: dunes or golf? Patricia & Angus Macdonald from The Play grounds series: bunkered terrain, Menie, Scotland

By turfing and stabilising the dunes to make the

‘The unique sand dune landscape at Menie

Trump International Golf Links, as seen here in

on the Aberdeenshire coast was once one of

the recent aerial views, a unique landscape that

the very few remaining true ‘wilderness’

was once an important environmental asset for

environments of the UK. The landscape was

Scotland, for the UK, and for Europe, has now

quite unique to the UK and unrivalled in Europe.

lost its principal scientific value, as well as the

As the sand dunes [at Menie] moved with the

‘wild’ scenic qualities that were valued by both

winds and the weather, they revealed the

residents and visitors.

surface across which they moved: [it was]

Patricia Macdonald ‘The great importance of the sand dome was that it was mobile, it was a great shifting system,

a constant process and what you [had was] an ecological succession being continued as the sand dune [moved] away. That succession no longer exists and the dynamism is gone.

it wasn’t fixed. So if you plant it, if you try and

‘In the future, with continuing changing climatic

stabilise it you … ruin the very aspect which made

conditions, it is unknown how sand dune systems

it unique. If you halt the progression of these

will react to climate change. The loss of the dunes

dunes by planting them, you’re effectively

at Menie is the loss of one of our best models

sterilising the entire dynamic system.’

which may have shown us what we might expect

Jonathan Hughes,

in the future.

Scottish Wildlife Trust

‘The original idea of golf in Scotland in the

(now CEO, UN Environment World Conservation

18th and 19th centuries was that it was a ‘wild’

Monitoring Centre (UNEP–WCMC))

pursuit, and as the land [moved] so too [did] the

(interviewed by Sophie Gerrard in 2011)

greens. The problem here is [that] what has been built is a highly manicured golf course which might be better suited to California.

Top left: Balmedie Dunes, Aberdeenshire, 1993, prior to the Trump International developments. This so-far unmodified area is now also under threat from an extension of these operations, with a new application for planning permission having been recently approved by Aberdeenshire council. Below left and opposite: Trump International Golf Links on the remains of the dunes at Menie, Scotland, 2015

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‘Vast, shifting sand dome systems of Sahara-like unvegetated sands are extremely rare. The example at Menie was the jewel in the crown of such sites in the UK and we’ve just turned it into a golf course.’ Dr. Jim Hansom, Geomorphologist, University of Glasgow (interviewed by Sophie Gerrard in 2011)

Natural regeneration: Ecological disturbance and resilience Patricia & Angus Macdonald Travel by Google Earth at an altitude of 1500

its post-ice-age biodiversity. The original woodland

of the glen, a burgeoning phase of multi-species

metres to 57° 00’ 25” N, 3° 54’ 15” W and you will

(pine, birch, rowan, alder, juniper and willows) was,

regeneration, which includes returning ground

see a remarkable location far up a glen in the

over millennia, cleared for livestock, exploited for

flora and bird life, promises well for an enhanced

Cairngorms of the Highlands of Scotland. Arrival

timber on an industrial scale and subsequently,

environment that is diverse and robust enough

there on foot requires a long walk from any public

until the early twenty-first century, prevented from

to survive, and perhaps even benefit from, future

road. The land here in the glen itself is a cultural

regenerating naturally by browsing deer, their

episodes of ecological disturbance.

landscape used by people over millennia, and

numbers kept high – in the absence of the earlier

therefore not truly ‘wild’ but it is nevertheless

anthropogenically exterminated top predators,

an exciting place to glimpse momentary views

the wolf and the lynx – by the management

of ecological processes in action.

priorities considered necessary by the then

A dramatically braided river runs through the glen. The River Feshie drains the rainfall, snowmelt and

landowners for the business of recreational killing – ‘deer-stalking’.

It is even possible – as research in Yellowstone National Park, USA, following the re-introduction of wolves as top predator, has recently suggested1 – that the behaviour of the river may eventually be changed as the ecology is strengthened, stabilising the banks and reducing

gravel sediment from an enormous catchment

Late last century, this forest was in an almost

some of the braiding and unpredictable flash-

of the highest and wildest land in Scotland. Water

terminal condition: the remaining veteran

flooding. As the American conservationist

levels can rise and fall markedly even within a few

(‘granny’) pines – the essential seed source –

Aldo Leopold famously stated: ‘... just as a deer

hours, with storm-related flash-floods common,

were dying; outside fenced exclosures (some

herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does

and huge trees torn from the eroding banks and

placed by government conservation scientists

a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer’2.

carried downstream, or beached and forming

around small stands – or even individual trees –

In Scotland, people currently perform – or not –

new islands. The aerial images of the river made

to demonstrate the scale of the problem (see

the role of top predator in the ‘trophic cascade’

between 1988 and 2016 (following pages)

later pages)), very few seedlings survived to

and the wolves remain absent. But due to the

demonstrate this rapid aspect of the endless

continue the life of the woodland. An extensive

recent changes in land management, the

flux of the natural world.

ecological research programme was carried

increasingly robust and diversifying web of life

out in the mid- to late-twentieth century which

in Glen Feshie already has a much wider range

demonstrated the need to substantially reduce

of possible futures, for both its human and its

deer densities so as to enable natural

other living inhabitants.

Glen Feshie is also a place where another less rapid, but equally interesting, and politically more significant, environmental change is currently taking place and transforming the landscape: a magnificent remnant of Caledonian pine forest

regeneration of the woodland, but this course of action was resisted by the then owners.

here is coming back to life – an example of long-

However, recent changes in management

term ecological resilience following centuries

under new ownership – here and elsewhere in

of degradation of the natural environment and

the Cairngorms and nearby (notably at Creag Meagaidh and at Abernethy) – have reduced deer numbers, and a burgeoning pulse of natural

Opposite: Burgeoning growth of pine, birch and rowan saplings around deadwood in Glen Feshie, 2016, below veteran ‘granny’ pines, taking place after a reduction in deer numbers has lessened browsing pressure on tree seedlings

regeneration of trees is now springing up. A miniforest of seedlings has appeared on some of the gravel bars and banks of the River Feshie, as seen in the most recent of the aerial views shown here (next pages, 2016), although this may not survive the next flood. Elsewhere on the floor and sides

Patricia Macdonald Versions of this article have appeared in The Nature of Scotland: Winter 2016 (Scottish Natural Heritage/NatureScot), and in Edwards, Ian (Ed.), After the Storm, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, 2016. 1. For a very short introduction to these (still controversial) ideas, see: How Wolves Change Rivers, Sustainable Human, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q (accessed 8 March 2020); and also a critical response: https://www.earthrisingblog.com/2015/07/27/ how-wolves-dont-change-rivers/... debate continues ... 2. Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches from Here and There, var. edns, first published 1949.

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Natural regeneration Patricia & Angus Macdonald

Above: The same braided section of the River Feshie, at 57° 00’ 25” N, 3° 54’ 15” W, seen from the air, over c. 3 decades

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Left to right: 1988, 1995 and 2016, showing the large changes that continually take place in the size and position of the river

channels, and dense natural regeneration of pine on the gravel bars in the most recent image from 2106, at far-right

1988

1995

2016

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Natural regeneration Patricia & Angus Macdonald

Right: Protective demonstration exclosures around individual pine seedlings, Glen Feshie, 1992 Right and opposite: Two views at Ruigh-aiteachain (the Place of the Junipers) in Glen Feshie in 1992 [left] and 2016 [opposite] In the earlier image, there is no visible natural regeneration of pine, birch or other trees due to high deer browsing pressure; in the later image, natural regeneration of pine, birch, juniper, and heather is well established after reduction in deer numbers. The pine saplings in the individual exclosures – the leading shoots of which have been browsed off, although the trees themselves have survived as ‘bonsais’ due to the protection – do not recover from the damage suffered early in their lives, and have been rapidly overtaken in height by younger seedlings which have not experienced such early browsing damage.

Above: Ruigh-aiteachain, Glen Feshie 1992 Opposite: Ruigh-aiteachain, Glen Feshie 2016

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Rewilding: tree nursery Katie Blair Matthews from Propagation

Influenced by the notion of the seed bank, Propagation archives the next generation of Scotland’s common and rare native tree species in their infancy. The series also signifies their momentous role as a seed vessel to aid the survival and regeneration of Scotland’s dwindling Ancient Caledonian Forest. Trees for Life, one of the many organisations devoted to protecting and restoring the forests, nurture the trees in the safety of the nursery until they are ready to be individually planted by hand. To ensure appropriate genetic sourcing, the trees are returned to the location in which their seeds were formerly collected. The importance of this task is easy to understand simply by looking at the landscape. The decaying ‘granny’ Scots pine trees have become ornamental features in the largely treeless Highland landscape and are a striking indication of not only the woodland that existed before, but the lack of younger generations of trees to replace them. Once rich in bio-diversity, the Caledonian forest now remains in 35 scattered remnants and at less than 1% of the 1.5 million hectares that originally covered the Highlands. Centuries of land use for the benefit of agriculture, warfare and industrialisation present a more complex history of our relationship with the landscape than the romantic one we often imagine. Today, a growing deer population prevents, through overgrazing, the survival of unprotected saplings and subsequent recovery of the forest. Human action becomes vital in restoring balance to this fragile ecosystem. Katie Bair Matthews

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Above: Digitalis purpurea, Foxglove, Part of a series documenting both native and non-native plant species in Glen Nevis, Scotland. The series was produced on residency at the Outlandia artist studio hut in Glen Nevis. 2017

Opposite: The series Propagation

Betula nana

Betula pendula

Betula pubescens

Corylus avellana

Juniperus communis

Pinus sylvestris

Populus tremula

Quercus petraea

Salix aurita

Salix lapponum

Salix phylicifolia

Ulmus glabra

Survival/Extinction: survivor species Dalziel + Scullion/Patricia & Angus Macdonald from Gannet City: a city of birds

Birds can affect us in different ways; they glide

Such a population loss among humans would

into our consciousness and interrupt our business

be recognized as catastrophic and would lead

if we let them. We see them in our day-to-day

to (human-initiated) environmental and political

lives, they come and go throughout the year, and

regime changes, but on land and at sea, the

some raise families alongside ours, but with few

pressure on bird populations goes largely

means or materiality. They are a part of our world

unnoticed by many people.

yet they seem like agents from a more expansive field of intelligence, each highly adapted to ‘fit’ their location. Their resilience is astonishing, but their ability to cope with the speed at which their Above left and previous page opening: Patricia & Angus Macdonald the Bass Rock, Firth of Forth, Scotland, Top 1986 Below 2015

environment is changing is not.

The very successful gannet colony has expanded over the last thirty years to occupy all the space on the top of the Rock.

just 1.64 billion in 2009. While changes to modern

Other photographs above right and opposite: Dalziel + Scullion: Images from the Bass Rock, Firth of Forth, Scotland, 2016

sources for seabirds to migrate to sea areas

In the last thirty years, the bird populations of Europe have been devastated. After studying 144 species, scientists concluded that their numbers dropped from a little over 2 billion birds in 1980 to agricultural methods have had a large impact on habitat and food availability, so too has climate change, causing much of the ‘traditional’ food further north.

The gannet colony on the Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth is one of the few current ‘good news’ stories, with consecutive years of successful breeding. As such it presents a truly spectacular sight, but one that for all we know may be short lived. The recent aerial image of the Bass seen here and on the previous pages – in which the present-day gannet colony has now expanded to occupy the entire upper surface of the rock – is part of one of the ongoing environmental time-series projects, extending over 30 years, of artist-photographers Patricia & Angus Macdonald. Scottish artists Dalziel + Scullion recently made a trip to the rock where the individual nesting images seen above were made together with the sea feeding images to the right. Dalziel + Scullion with Patricia & Angus Macdonald

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Survival/Extinction: survivor species? Lorne Gill from The Ultimate Flock

Throughout the world many species are in

Starlings are well adapted to their surroundings

evolved to feed fast and in groups, which gives

decline, as it’s simply not possible for them to

but despite this they have been in decline – their

them an advantage over similar sized birds.

relocate elsewhere when their habitat undergoes

numbers in the UK fell over 80% between 1987

During the winter months, the UK population

dramatic change due to a warming planet.

and 2012. This can be attributed to changing land-

dramatically increases as huge numbers of birds

In principle, you would believe that birds of all

use practices, which have seen a decline in the

migrate here from the colder parts of Europe.

species should be able to relocate, as birds

number of soil invertebrates. As starling numbers

At dusk they form massive flocks and perform

can fly. But what happens when change is on

were decreasing in the wider countryside, they

‘murmurations’ to confuse predators before

a global scale?

were increasing in our towns and cities. It’s their

cascading like a waterfall into their chosen

ability to readily adapt to feeding from bird

roost site.

feeders and foraging in our gardens that’s been key to their success. As a species they have

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Lorne Gill

Survival/Extinction: vulnerable species Paul Souders Ghost Bear

This image was taken in the Arctic regions of

in the background is to do with wildfires that were

Hudson Bay, Canada. Out one evening in a zodiac,

sweeping through the Canadian tundra, creating

I came upon this large female who was shyly

this eerie light nearing sunset. This photograph

curious. Floating quietly close to her with the

went on to win at the 2013 BBC Wildlife

camera extended on a boom, I was able to

Photographer of the Year award as well as

capture several brief images before she ducked

photo of the year with National Geographic 2014.

under the ice and swam away. The surreal color

Above: Ghost Bear Female polar bear at sunset, partially submerged during wildfires around Canada’s Hudson Bay, 2012

Paul Souders

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Above: Inset shows: Finlay Macquien catching puffins, Cherry Kearton, 1896, from Kearton, R. and Kearton, C., With Nature and a Camera, Cassells, London, 1898 Main picture: from Cherry Kearton's vantage point for his photograph 'Finlay Macquien catching puffins'. Pete Moore, 2019

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Right: Puffin, 1896, Cherry Kearton Far right: Puffin, 2019. Pete Moore

Survival/Extinction: endangered species Pete Moore Rephotographing puffins on Boreray, St Kilda, 1896 and 2019 Pioneering nature photographers Richard and

the comparison implied that numbers – or perhaps

Does returning to Kearton’s vantage point tell us

Cherry Kearton arrived at St Kilda on 13 June,

it was simply distribution – were comparable to

anything? Examination, and later comparison of

1896. They stayed for ten days and afterwards,

those in the 1890s.

the photographs, indicates that the turf cover

wrote and illustrated a seminal book, With Nature and a Camera,1 with which they stoked the already smouldering Victorian fascination for all things St Kilda.

Puffin numbers are difficult to determine. Birds standing in colonies offer an indication of numbers, birds rafted on the sea offshore of colonies also, but the accepted method is to

As well as the endemic wildlife, they photographed

count the number of occupied burrows within

aspects of St Kildan society, and anthropological

representative areas. Kearton’s photograph

details, which had been described and amplified

appears to show roughly 335 puffins. With my

through a tourist industry evolving over the

own camera at the vantage point, I marked and

previous two decades. They persuaded the

counted the visible area and found 139 burrows

islanders to take them to Boreray/Boraraigh,

of which 29 appeared to be occupied, indicating

which, alongside its two stac neighbours, lies

at least some sustained use of the area.

some five miles from the main island group of Hirta/Hiort, Soay/Sòdhaigh and Dun/an Dùn, and even now, is seldom visited. The landing on Boreray is difficult, but roped and guided by the St Kildans, the brothers ‘trudged up the steep cliff, clambering from ledge to ledge, from boulder to boulder until [they] came to where the turf clothes the island’.2 About fifty metres onto this turf, at a height of 330 ft (91 m) above sea level,

of the colony and the grazing-pressure appears similar, but most obviously, the 2019 photograph records a conspicuous lack of puffins. They can be fickle in their attendance at the burrow, but over seven days on the island, none were seen standing in the area shown in Kearton’s image. To further confound photographic comparison, there seems to be a shift in puffin social behaviour on Boreray. Previous visitors have remarked on how confiding the Boreray birds have been in the past. In the 1980s I experienced evenings when birds would sit prominently, nearby. These days

A heavily bearded native islander, a fowling

seem to have gone, perhaps due to the changed

device and a carpet of confiding puffins. Kearton’s

distribution and increasing numbers of great

image is a powerful documentary, loaded with

skuas, which now patrol the colonies and appear

judgement when viewed through a twenty-first-

to prefer direct predation to klepto-parisitism.

century lens. Kearton’s photograph begs the question: ‘What impact did Finlay MacQueen and his fellow cragsmen have on the puffin populations, over a century ago?’

Seabird declines are complex. Human exploitation may have been sustainable in the past, but the underlying problems today are linked to seabirds’ food abundance, food distribution and weather,

Cherry Kearton set up a tripod and photographed

The Keartons reported that Angus Gillies,

with climate change underpinning the declines.

Finlay MacQueen [Macquien], St Kilda’s ‘champion

another of their acquaintances on the islands,

The situation cannot be fully captured by

cragsman’,3 sitting at the lower edge of the puffin

‘once bagged to his own rod, no less than six

rephotography, but the process of re-occupying

colony, with his catching noose. One hundred and twenty-three years later in June 2019, I landed on those same rocks, made

hundred and twenty puffins in a single

day’.5

the site allows informed on-site reflection, and

They later quote Sands who ‘calculate[d] that

rephotography does allow the decline to be

eighty-nine thousand six hundred puffins must

simply visualised.

have been killed [ ... ] in 1876’.6 These are huge numbers, the meaning of which is impossible to

1. Kearton, R. and Kearton, C., With Nature and a Camera. Cassells, London, 1898.

fathom against the unknown masses of the time.

2. Ibid. p. 78

It is generally agreed that puffin numbers on

3. Ibid. p. 84

In 1975, Harris and Murray4 used Kearton’s

St Kilda have undoubtedly declined in recent

photograph to report that a more recent

decades. Seabird 2000 calculated 50,999

4. Harris, M.P. and Murray, S., ‘Puffins on St Kilda’, British Birds, 50-65, 1977, p. 63.

photograph taken on 5 July from ‘virtually the

apparently occupied burrows on Boreray (against

same place [showed] a similar number of puffins’.

an island-group total, of c.136,000).7 The results

In the absence of (any) other data at that time,

of the 2019 survey indicate a further decline.

that same ascent and arrived at the Keartons’ vantage point, the two rocks in the lower foreground permitting accurate relocation.

5. Kearton, R. and Kearton, C., op. cit., p. 81 6. Sands, J., Out of the World or Life in St Kilda. Maclachlan and Stewart, Edinburgh, 1878. 7. Mitchell, I.P., Webb, A., Pollock, C., Reid, A., Mavor, R., and Dunn, T., ‘The Status of Breeding Seabirds on St Kilda in 1999 and 2000’, JNCC, Aberdeen, 2000.

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Survival/Extinction: Endangered Tim Flach

All images from Flach, Tim with text by Jonathan Baillie and Sam Wells, Endangered, Abrams, New York, 2017

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Opposite: White-bellied pangolin: Bushmeat and trafficking

Human civilisation is destroying natural habitats

Traditional wildlife photography views

at accelerating rates, bringing Earth to the brink

anthropomorphism as stylised and unscientific –

of a sixth mass extinction of animal species.

an aversion inherited from ethology, which is

A young white-bellied pangolin from equatorial Africa, clinging to the base of its mother’s tail. Pangolins are solitary, shy, nocturnal creatures that breed far too slowly to meet the demands of illegal harvesting, for bushmeat in Africa, and in Asia, for their scales, used in unproven medicines. Pangolins are endearing and useful to farmers, being insectivorous, but they are easy to catch and the most trafficked mammals in the world, traded by the tonne. The local species in Asia have been hunted to the brink of extinction, and those in Africa are now particularly vulnerable due to the recent Asian-led expansion of transport access through their forest habitat.

Meanwhile, science continues to reveal how

meticulously objective. In wildlife photographs,

humanity depends on healthy ecosystems.

undomesticated animals live ‘wild and free’;

It has never been more important to reconnect

their natural habitat fills the frame. Yet this is

with the natural world. Critical anthropomorphism

equally contrived; photographers are journeying

is an aesthetic technique that employs potent

to increasingly remote and specific locations to

emotional stimuli, accentuating human

avoid markers of human activity entering their

characteristics, to arrest attention and force

images, although humanity is, in fact, encroaching

engagement with non-human subjects. Recent

further into natural habitats. Critical

scholarship by Linda Kalof and her collaborators

anthropomorphism artistically represents the

demonstrates that viewers respond more

complex and disconcerting relationships between

empathetically to anthropomorphic animal

humans and animals. Wildlife photography

portraits than to traditional wildlife photographs.

remains an indispensable educational tool, but

Feelings of kinship elicit support for conservation

‘art by conservationists is a key translator of

action, as do ‘negative’ feelings, such as pity, fear

information from science into culture’1, and

and shock. But wonder, alone, is insufficient.

developments in science are rapid and shocking. Tim Flach 1. Whitley, Cameron Thomas, Kalof, Linda and Tim Flach, ‘Using Animal Portraiture to Activate Emotional Affect’, Environment and Behaviour 1–27, 2020

Survival/Extinction: Endangered Tim Flach

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Opposite: Ploughshare tortoise: Illegal trafficking The critically endangered ploughshare tortoise from Madagascar is on the brink of extinction in the wild. When smugglers began stealing tortoises from a successful local captive-breeding-andrelease programme, to sell to the lucrative international market for exotic pets, the desperate solution was adopted of defacing the shells by engraving them as seen here, a process which is painless to the animal but which renders it worthless to collectors. In one of the poorest countries in the world, a commitment to saving the endemic wildlife is vital.

Right: Saiga antelope: Hunting, disease and climate change Hunted for its meat and horns since prehistory, the critically endangered saiga antelope of Central Asia, an ancient mammal that co-existed with woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, has proved incredibly resilient, thanks to its successful breeding in the wild, together with recent protection after a drastic population decline in the early twentieth century. Its numbers had returned to six figures when a bacterial disease, not normally fatal, struck in 2015/16, killing more than 100,000 animals, possibly because climate change had affected their normal range. There are now too few males to pull the species out of endangerment, and stringent protection is necessary for its survival.

Following page opening: White-backed African vulture: Poisoning ‘Gore-encrusted carrionbirds that gobble putrid flesh’, vultures are ‘icons of death in popular culture, but are in fact great symbols of life’. Not only do they keep disease out of innumerable communities and ecosystems, they protect endangered mammals by helping wardens to locate poachers. Throughout most of the world, the death of a large animal is quickly marked by a circling kettle of vultures. Poachers, however, to evade detection, have learned to lace their kill with cyanide, so that one dead elephant may directly kill hundreds of adult vultures. Almost half the world’s vulture species, like this one from Sub-Saharan Africa, are now critically endangered, and losing their contributions to waste management is costing governments enormous sums every year.

205

After the Anthropocene

Opposite; Susanne Ramsenthaler From the series Hybrids, 2006 - 2010

Imagined future biologies: plastic Mandy Barker from SOUP and Beyond Drifting

Above: SOUP: Bird’s Nest (Ingredients: discarded fishing line that has formed nest-like balls due to tidal oceanic movement. Additives: other debris collected in its path).

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Opposite: Beyond Drifting Ophelia medustica (Pram wheel) Specimen collected from Glounthaune shoreline, Cobh/Cork, Ireland

SOUP SOUP is a description given to plastic debris suspended in the sea, and with particular reference to the mass accumulation that exists in an area of the North Pacific Ocean known as the ‘Garbage Patch’. The image SOUP: Bird’s Nest aims to engage with, and stimulate, an emotional response in, the viewer by combining a contradiction between initial aesthetic attraction and social awareness. All the plastics photographed have been salvaged from beaches around the world and represent a global collection of debris that has existed for varying amounts of time in the world’s oceans. The captions record the plastic ingredients within each image, providing the viewer with the realisation and facts of what exists in the sea. Beyond Drifting Beyond Drifting highlights current scientific research that plankton are ingesting microplastic particles at the base of the food chain. In this series, unique 'specimens' of these animal species relate to the pioneering discoveries made by naturalist J.V. Thompson in Cobh/Cork harbour during the 1800s. Presented as microscopic samples, objects of marine plastic debris, recovered from the same location, mimic Thompson's early scientific discoveries of plankton. Presenting new 'specimens' created from recovered debris, serves as a metaphor for the ubiquity of plastic and for the Anthropocene, encapsulating in miniature the much larger problem of an imperfect world. Mandy Barker

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Imagined future biologies: plastic Pinar Yoldas from An Ecosystem of Excess

This project starts in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Covering between 700,000 and 15 million square kilometers, the site is a monument to plastic waste on a global scale. Referring to Kantian aesthetics, it is a truly ‘sublime’ kinetic sculpture built by all the nations around the Pacific Ocean through many years of mindless, unsustainable consumption. As environmental activist, and discoverer of the Trash Vortex, Captain Charles Moore boldly claims, ‘the ocean has turned into a plastic soup’. From primordial soup to plastic soup, An Ecosystem of Excess asks a very simple question: ‘If life started today in our plastic debris filled oceans, what kinds of life forms would emerge out of this contemporary primordial ooze?’ The project introduces pelagic insects, marine reptilia, fish and birds endowed with organs to sense and metabolize plastics as a new Linnean order of post-human life forms. Inspired by the groundbreaking findings of new bacteria that burrow into pelagic plastics, An Ecosystem of Excess envisions life forms of greater complexity, life forms that can thrive in man-made extreme environments, life forms that can turn the toxic surplus of our capitalistic desire into eggs, vibrations, and joy. Starting from excessive anthropocentrism, An Ecosystem of Excess reaches ‘anthropo-de-centrism’, by offering life without mankind. Pinar Yoldas See also: Doug Ramsey: ‘Artist Offers Dystopic Vision of New Life Emerging from Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, University of California San Diego, News Centre, 2017 (accessed September 2017)

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Above: Installation view of An Ecosystem of Excess Left: P-Plastoceptor: Sensory organ to detect plastics Polypropylene is the second most common plastic after polyethylene. P-Plasticeptor is a sense organ which can detect polypropylene polymers in the ocean. The organ takes its name from its sensing capabilities for polypropylene and its shape that almost resembles the letter P.

Opposite top: The Plastic Balloon Turtle Each year it is estimated that 100,000 marine mammals and turtles die because of plastic ingestion or entanglement. Studies show that specifically marine turtles prefer eating colored plastics to clear plastics. Marine turtles have been ingesting plastic balloons. Balloon pollution is a bizarre type of pollution that primarily affects turtles. The Plastic Balloon turtle after eating balloons for eons, evolves an elastomer back, that can inflate and deflate. As the sea levels rise due to climate change, this elastic back becomes an advantage helping the turtle rest on it after swimming for very long hours. Opposite below: Detail of sense organ to detect plastics All images: Pinar Yoldas, from the exhibition: An Ecosystem of Excess, 2014

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Imagined future biologies: jellyfish Susanne Ramsenthaler from Hybrids

Jellyfish are shape-shifters. Undergoing a number

To emphasize the idea of metamorphosis and

of transformations in their life cycle, their rapidly

mutation, the images in my series Hybrids digitally

growing numbers are indicative of changes in the

‘mirror’ selected parts of jellyfish. The resulting

world’s oceans. Both a part of, and travelling with,

images suggest the ornamental, which may have

plankton, they are well equipped to deal with

connotations of femininity, but also of the history

diminishing oxygen: the warming conditions in

of science, from the time of the invention of the

certain parts of Europe and also in New Zealand

kaleidoscope and its use as a scientific instrument.

cause their numbers to explode, creating ‘blooms’

The fact that the modified jellyfish images are

and on occasion bankrupting holiday resorts.

presented on a white background, removed

Impervious to acidification because they have no

from their original context, plays on the idea of

skeleton, their breeding grounds and ‘tethers’ for

the collection, scientific or otherwise. This digital

the resulting polyps are constantly growing. Any

intervention transforms them into a new species,

floating plastic matter can be colonized, as well

suggesting new habitats, new modes of existence

as stationary structures such as oil rigs and wind

at once simple and sophisticated, while still

farms. More positively (from the human point of

retaining the ‘visceral’ connection to an organic

view): recent research has shown that the coating

life form.

of some species of jellyfish is able to bind nanoparticles and plastic micro-globules which, once in workable form, could effectively combat certain types of water pollution.

From the series Hybrids, 2006 - 2010

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Susanne Ramsenthaler

Edenic apocalypse meets gardens against Eden Natasha Myers and Ayelen Liberona from ‘Edenic Apocalypse Meets Gardens Against Eden: Plants and People in and After the Anthropocene’ In this project, anthropologist Natasha Myers documents Gardens By the Bay, Singapore’s billion-dollar infrastructure for botanical tourism. This award-winning feat of environmental architecture is a living infrastructure that itself thrives on the labours of marginalized people. Embodying an Edenic aesthetic and an apocalyptic message, this simulation of an already lost world makes palpable the ways that capital continues to profit from the very extinctions that it drives. Myers’ research on gardens looks to artists to imagine ways to dream athwart the apocalyptic lure of Anthropocene thinking, and to foment plant/people conspiracies that can root us into an aspirational episteme she calls the Planthroposcene. Natasha Myers See: Myers, Natasha, ‘Edenic Apocalypse: Singapore’s End-of-Time Botanical Tourism’, in Davis, H. & E. Turpin (Eds.), Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, pp 31–42, Open Humanities Press, London, 2015 and Myers, Natasha, ‘From Edenic Apocalypse to Gardens Against Eden: Plants and People in and After the Anthropocene’ in Hetherington, Kregg (Ed.), Environment, Infrastructure, and Life in the Anthropocene, pp 115-148, Duke University Press, Durham, 2019. (See also Olaf Otto Becker’s image of the Gardens by the Bay, on page 53 of this book.)

Top: Supertrees, Gardens By the Bay, Singapore. Natasha Myers, 2013 Below: Labouring in the mist, Gardens By the Bay, Singapore. Natasha Myers, 2013

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from Becoming Sensor: Protocols for an Ungrid-able Ecology in a 10,000 year-old Natural Cultural Happening

Becoming Sensor is a research-creation

recognized as sites of natural and scientific

collaboration between anthropologist/dancer

interest, erasing their cultural significance.

Natasha Myers and filmmaker/dancer Ayelen

The ecological restoration efforts here reproduce

Liberona. Experimenting with techniques drawn

colonial conceptions of nature as exploitable

from art, ecology, and anthropology, they are

resource. Becoming Sensor aims to detune our

designing protocols for an ‘ungrid-able ecology’

colonial sensorium by tuning into more-than-

of Toronto’s oak savannahs, lands that have been

human sentience and generating kinesthetic data

sites of Indigenous subsistence, ceremony, and

forms that can animate the relations between

sovereignty for millennia. Today these lands are

lands and bodies.

Above: Ungrid-able ecology, High Park, Toronto. Ayelen Liberona, 2016

(http://becomingsensor.com)

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Lessons from a pandemic Jared Diamond

The Covid-19 pandemic represents a tragedy for its victims and their families, and economic hardship for the rest of us. As I write these lines in Los Angeles, 10 weeks after the state of California imposed a lockdown, some shops are reopening and a semblance of normal life is beginning to return. But the costs have been great: in my case, the past month has brought the deaths of five friends, two of them among my longest relationships. Against that background, it seems vile to say anything ‘positive’ about Covid-19. Paradoxically, though, the pandemic might also bring hope and permanent benefits for the whole world – depending on how we react. Microbes have often shaped human history. Thousands of years before the Black Death, a previous spread of plague may have contributed to the intrusion of Asian steppe peoples carrying Indo-European languages into Europe. Later, far more Native Americans – including the Aztec emperor Cuitláhuac and the Inca emperor Huayna Capac – died in bed from European germs than on the battlefield from European swords and guns. Those epidemics of the past had far-reaching harmful consequences: military defeats, population crashes, abandonments of land under cultivation and slumps in trade. They also resulted in conquests and replacements of populations, when previously unexposed peoples contracted diseases from invaders with a long history of exposure. At the time of writing, official counts are approaching 350,000 deaths globally from Covid-19; the true figure is likely to be higher1. Steep death tolls are still to come in populous countries such as Brazil and Mexico, aided by policies of denial on the part of those countries’ presidents. Yet Covid-19 doesn’t represent an existential threat to the survival of our species. Yes, the pandemic will be a serious blow to the world’s economy, but that will recover; it’s only a matter of time. Unlike many of the epidemics of the past, the virus isn’t threatening to cause military defeats, population replacements or crashes, or abandonments of land under cultivation. There are other dangers, present right now, that do constitute existential threats capable of wiping out our species, or permanently damaging our economy and standard of living. But they are less convincing at motivating us than is Covid-19, because (with one exception) they don’t kill us visibly and quickly. Strange as it may seem, the successful resolution of the pandemic crisis may motivate us to deal with those bigger issues that we have until now balked at confronting. If the pandemic does at last prepare us to deal with those existential threats, there may be a silver lining to the virus’s black cloud. Among the virus’s consequences, it could prove to be the biggest, the most lasting – and our great cause for hope.

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What, really, are our existential threats? There are four that I consider to be the most serious. They start with the threat that could kill the most people in the shortest time: the detonation of large numbers of nuclear weapons, whether launched as a pre-emptive strike (for example, between India and Pakistan), as the unintended consequence of escalating responses (say, between North Korea and the US), as the response to misread early-warning signals (as nearly happened repeatedly during the cold war) or as an intentional action by terrorists. The nuclear threat may or may not materialise, but the other three threats already have — and are getting worse. They have the potential to cripple permanently our standard of living, though they would leave many of us still alive. Those threats are: climate change; unsustainable use of essential resources (especially forests, seafood, topsoil and fresh water); and the consequences of the enormous differences in standard of living between the world’s peoples, destabilising our globalised existence. This is the context in which the virus could actually bring us a benefit. As a motivator, Covid-19 is different from, and more potent than, those existential problems. Covid’s symptoms are palpable; they are indubitably due to the virus; Covid’s consequence of death poses no problems of definition or measurement; and that consequence follows swiftly.

‘In my recent book Upheaval, I established a dozen outcome predictors that have made it more or less likely that a nation would respond successfully to a national crisis’

None of this is true of climate change, though it will do far more lasting damage to us. But whether that motivational benefit of Covid-19 actually does emerge will depend on how the world responds to this truly global crisis. We can draw guidance from how nations respond to national crises. In my recent book Upheaval, I established a dozen outcome predictors that have made it more or less likely that a nation would respond successfully to a national crisis: among them were acknowledgment rather than denial of a crisis’s reality; acceptance of responsibility to take action; and honest self-appraisal. For example, the outstanding success of 19th-century Japan in modernising began with the crisis provoked by the uninvited visit of Commodore Perry’s warships in 1853. Japan acknowledged its weakness; it took action by adopting a crash programme of selective changes; and it honestly appraised its military strength at every step of a cautious military expansion. Among other national outcome predictors, I judge as crucial the presence or absence of a shared national identity, which can help a nation’s people to recognise their shared selfinterest and to unite in overcoming a crisis. National identities variously depend on different things for different nations, such as a shared language and culture, pride in a shared historical legacy and shared environment, or a shared common enemy.

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Lessons from a pandemic Jared Diamond

That last factor has proved particularly potent in times of crisis. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor galvanised Americans literally overnight. It instantly created a shared determination to accept sacrifice, for however long it would take. For Finns, the galvanising experience was the Winter War of 1939-40, when they preserved their independence (albeit at the cost of enormous losses) by fighting to a standstill the invading armies of the Soviet Union, whose population was 40 times Finland’s. For Indonesians, fragmented among hundreds of islands, 726 languages and four major religions, unity coalesced around their shared independence struggle against the Dutch, and then around one shared national language. For all three countries – the US, Finland and Indonesia – purposeful action followed an external threat. But global problems have never generated a comparable sense of urgency. Until the unprecedented danger posed by Covid-19, there has never been a struggle that united all peoples of the world against a widely acknowledged common enemy. As a result, we have been hamstrung in our responses, especially to climate change. All four of those dangers threaten every one of the world’s peoples. Yet nations have been dealing with them, or have been avoiding dealing with them, one by one. Even before President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris agreement on climate change, that deal fell far short of an effective solution to the problem. Nations haven’t joined in acknowledging that climate change will ruin every nation, that every nation is contributing to causing it (some nations more than other nations), that all nations must do their share in the struggle, and that the failure of even just one nation to do its share will harm all other nations. The one-by-one approach is as impotent for solving the danger posed by Covid-19 as it is for solving the problem of climate change. Even if all countries save one should succeed in quelling their own virus outbreaks, that remaining country sustaining Covid-19 will serve as a permanent focus to reinfect the rest of the world. Covid-19 is at last providing us world citizens with a shared enemy, an unequivocal quick killer, a threat to the inhabitants of every nation. There are precedents for our finding world solutions to world problems. The 1973 International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships (Marpol) led to regulation that reduced pollution of the world’s oceans by separating oil tanks from water tanks on ocean-going ships, and by mandating double-hulled tankers for all transport of oil by sea. In 1980, the World Health Organization completed the worldwide eradication of smallpox, among the most devastating diseases in human history. The stratosphere’s ozone layer became protected by the Montreal Protocol of 1987, restricting worldwide the production Following page opening: Antoine d’Agata/ Magnum Photos Paris, France, Avenue Clichy: Day 0 of Paris lockdown during Covid-19 crisis, 17 March 2020

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and use of chlorofluorocarbons and other gases. The 1994 Law of the Sea Convention at last delineated exclusive national and shared international economic zones around the world.

All of those efforts resolved very difficult problems by means of high-level international agreements, even without a sense of world identity on the part of the public at large. Thus, a best-case outcome of our current crisis would be for it to create, at last, a widespread sense of world identity: to make all peoples recognise that we now face the common enemy of global problems that can be solved only by a united global effort. Covid-19 would then illustrate, at the world level, another outcome predictor of success in national crises and individual crises: the memory of a previous crisis that was overcome, creating confidence that a new crisis can also be overcome. When I first visited Finland in 1959, 19 years after the end of the Winter War, there was still a widespread consensus among Finns. Nothing could have been more difficult, for Finland with its population then under 4 m, than fighting off the enormous Soviet Union; but Finns nevertheless succeeded then, and so they expected to be able to overcome any new problem that Finland faces today.

‘... if the world joins to solve the ... crisis against heavy odds, our current pandemic might thus represent the beginning ... ... of a bright era of worldwide cooperation’

Similarly, if the world joins to solve the current visible Covid-19 crisis against heavy odds, our current pandemic might thus represent the beginning, not of a dismal era of chronic worldwide danger, but of a bright era of worldwide cooperation. Hopeful signs already are the rapid recent development of cooperation among scientists studying the virus all around the world, and the shipments of supplies from China and Russia to the US to combat the American epidemic. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario would be if we instead continued our doomed attempts to solve the virus problem one country at a time, or even one American state at a time. In that case, we’d also entrench our doomed attempts to solve other global problems one country at a time. Which of these two opposite scenarios will the world choose? We’ll know the answer to that question by the end of this year. This essay first appeared in the Financial Times: FTWeekend / Life & Arts, 28 May 2020. 1. As this book goes to press 1 September 2021, there have been over 200 million cases of Covid-19 worldwide, and more than 4.5 million deaths.

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What coronavirus can teach us about climate change Leslie Hook

Imagine that you left earth before coronavirus and returned this week. That is pretty much what has happened to a team of 87 people on board the icebreaker Polarstern, who spent the past six months doing climate research in the Arctic and arrived back on land a few days ago. The world greeting them is familiar, yet changed. Smiles have been replaced by masks; people avoid each other when walking down the street. And while the researchers were at sea, the topic they were studying – climate change and emissions – underwent the biggest shift in our lifetimes. With the world in lockdown, emissions will see their biggest drop this year since the second world war. For the team who were on the icebreaker, it is a lot to take in. ‘On the Polarstern, we had only a very vague feeling about what actually the consequence of coronavirus on society is’, chief scientist Torsten Kanzow told me, recalling conversations with family over a patchy satellite connection. ‘There are lessons to be learnt, for sure; you can’t count on many things that you used to count on.’ For his group, those things included the fact that they were supposed to leave the icebreaker by aircraft in April – a runway had been built on the floating ice – but instead arrived two months later, by boat. He finally returned home on Monday. The €140m project, known as the Mosaic Expedition, is one of the most ambitious polar research programmes ever undertaken. Many of their observations show, depressingly, that warming in the Arctic is still very much under way. Climate change has not taken a break, even while coronavirus has ravaged the global economy and, sadly, hundreds of thousands of lives. One item of particular concern is that the expedition observed very low ozone levels, raising the question of whether this is linked to the ozone hole over the Arctic. (More analysis has to be done before they can say for sure.) Even though carbon dioxide emissions have fallen considerably during the pandemic, this is just a small blip when measured on a planetary scale. The drop in emissions in 2020 – about 8 per cent down on last year – will just about put us on track to where we should have been anyway, if we are to reach the Paris agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C. The earth’s atmosphere hardly noticed: concentrations of carbon dioxide hit a new record high last month. This may seem counterintuitive, but CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time – more than a century. As long as we keep pumping it into the air, it will keep accumulating there.

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Other data points gloomily in the same direction: this year saw the hottest May ever recorded by modern instruments. Meanwhile, Greenland has seen unusually high levels of melting ice this spring, suggesting more to come in the summer. So if lockdown wasn’t enough to heal the planet, should we give up hope? It may seem

‘The pandemic has had a big impact on something foundational to saving the planet – our values’

bleak to think that even after all the aircraft stopped flying and normal life ground to a halt, the warming of the atmosphere still continued. Despite the popularity of satellite images showing cleared pollution in a handful of major cities, the state of the planet remains more or less the same. But there is some good news. The pandemic has had a big impact on something that is foundational to addressing climate change – our values. Life under coronavirus has forced everyone to take collective action to protect each other’s health, and to realise that distant threats are worth preparing for. As the team from the Polarstern adjusts to life back on land amid coronavirus, they may be surprised at how the most profound shifts brought about by the disease are those that are not immediately visible to the eye. Lockdown has been an extended period of reflection, and made many prioritise collective safety over individual freedom. It is also the antithesis of the instant-gratification culture that used to fuel a lot of habits that were not very good for the environment, such as flying off for

‘The pandemic has also been a chance to re-imagine our future, since the future we were expecting has changed.’

a weekend getaway, or shopping for fast fashion. Many climate researchers and campaigners are quietly optimistic about a shift in attitudes that will benefit the climate in the long term. The pandemic has also been a chance to reimagine what our future might look like, since the future we were expecting has changed. As for the Polarstern, there is now a new crew and a new group of researchers on board the icebreaker. The research will continue through the summer, until the scheduled end of the Mosaic expedition this October. And when the final team of researchers return to land this autumn, what kind of new world will await them? It will probably be one in which coronavirus is not totally under control – and neither are global emissions. But it could be a world in which, even while warming continues, our mindset is at least more prepared to address climate change in the long term. This essay first appeared in the Financial Times: FT Weekend Magazine, 20/21 June 2020.

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After the Anthropocene: Seabirds and the oceanic images of J.J. Harrison Adam Nicolson and J.J. Harrison Every creature perceives the world differently

A deeper irony is that a limited view of how things

and, in that way, embodies its own form of

are may be integral to all living things, not only

intelligence. One of humanity’s great and historic

to humans. I have watched a golden eagle for an

failures is to have seen the world so consistently

evening displaying to his mate above a kittiwake

from its own point of view alone. We discuss

colony. The kittiwakes were revolving and eddying

something called ‘the environment’ as if the whole

around their cliffs while the eagle was making

of nature were merely our own surroundings. It is

a series of astonishing folded tuck dives above

as deep a mistake as the Ptolemaic idea that the

them, each a plunge through air as driven as

earth was the centre of the universe. But different

a stallion displaying to his mates, an arrowhead

forms of life-expertise cannot be measured by

hunched into the wind, possessing his cube of air,

our own and we need the equivalent of the

two miles wide in each direction, a vast box of wind.

Copernican revolution in world-attitudes: displace us from the centre, banish the ‘environment’ as word and idea and recalibrate our position in the web of life.

Above top: J.J. Harrison Indian Yellow-browed Albatross, Thalassarche carteri, east of New South Wales Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 Below: J.J. Harrison Great Shearwater, Puffinus gravis, off south-east Tasmania Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 Opposite: J.J. Harrison Buller’s Albatross, Thalassarche bulleri at sea east of the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania, Australia (detail, full image page 23 and back cover)

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The kittiwakes paid no attention. The eagle was communicating only with another eagle. Its power-ballet, even as it was being hammered again and again by the skuas, the great black-

How incompetent humans must seem in the

backed gulls, the ravens and the peregrines,

eyes of other creatures. We would not know

nibbling and nabbing at its body as the bird tried

how to plunge-dive for herring or locate the

to maintain its dignity, very occasionally rolling

Mid-Atlantic Ridge by smell. We could not hang

over through 180 degrees and showing to its

in the updraughts by a cliff or find our way alone

persecutors the talons that can grab a fulmar

all winter across the Atlantic. We would not know

mid-flight as if the smaller bird were rubbish or

how to exist in a form that is not our own. Other

shopping – all of that was quite irrelevant to the

animals understand the world in ways that are

kittiwakes, which were untroubled, skirling to

different from ours, and of all animals, seabirds

and fro above the rocks, shouting at each other,

have always seemed to me like the greatest of

embedded in their world.

advocates for this validity of otherness, effortless demonstrators that the human way of life has no monopoly on vision or brilliance.

It was like two different principles of life in action: the great predator owning the air, the seabirds inhabiting it; one demonstrating its vastness, the

Perhaps ironically – because both these

others absorbed in their lives as if nothing existed

developments depend on recent human

outside them. I have seen the same thing in

technology – superb close-up images like

among the boulders of an auk colony: thousands

those on these pages, freely shared on the

of razorbills hawking and juddering around the

marvellous resource of Wikimedia Commons by

rocks, big power-birds when you get close to

photographer J.J. Harrison, of seabirds of the deep

them, equipped with ferocious, striped machete-

oceans at home, far offshore in their own vast

bills, and between them, in another universe of

environment, together with recent scientific data

consciousness, three dark little wrens hopping

obtained from satellite tracking studies, may help

and peeping in the screes, arguing and shouting

us flightless creatures to begin the process of

over some political or legal question in wren-

recalibration.

world, a cockpit two feet by three, indifferent to the armies of black and white giants looming over them. [continued on page 228]

Seabirds and the oceanic images of J.J. Harrison Adam Nicolson and J.J. Harrison

Why should one be surprised that the eagle

of the entire system to which they belong, and

albatrosses, shearwaters, cormorants and

and the kittiwake, the razorbill or the wren, live

when human beings will engage with them not

penguins – survived the mass extinction

in different life-spheres? Each bird is wrapped in

merely as an irrelevance or ingredients for dinner

66 million years ago, when three-quarters of

a unique life-vision, separated from the others by

but as co-actors with us in the oikos – the Greek

all other life disappeared, including most of the

evolution, seeing nothing but the world he or she

word at the root of ecology and economy –

plankton. No doubt, in our present catastrophe,

sees from one point of view. If we have through

the house of earth. The Ecozoic is life lived in the

that will happen again. The great generalists

our history been shut into our perceptions, that

oikos, powered by empathy and enabled by

(the gulls and gannets) and the great travellers

is probably because enclosure in one’s own

understanding, an age which has at its heart the

(like the shearwaters and albatrosses), as long

perceptions is a guiding principle of life on earth.

belief that all living beings have a right to life

as we have not destroyed them first, may have

And the fact that, led by figures such as Jakob

and to the recognition that they have forms of

the better chance to outlast the mass extinction.

von Uexküll, Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen,

understanding we have never shared and probably

Those that are caught within narrow niches,

we now seem to be stepping outside that

never will.

either in their life-habits or in their body-form,

enclosure is a moment of revolutionary significance. If survival is the product of close and extreme attention to the things that matter in your life, and indifference to those that don’t, then we humans have probably reached the moment when what matters to us has expanded beyond our own narrowly and historically defined interests. For all the vertigo this thought might induce, what happens to human beings now needs to be global. We must now enter the age of empathy, both within our own species and between it and the rest of the living world.

Deep anthropogenic perturbations to the worldsystem are evident wherever you look. Global

will be more vulnerable. But of one thing there is no doubt: this is one of the ages of loss.

warming is troubling the oceans as if it were an

There may be some cause for hope. Seabirds

infection of their inner workings. Its deep changes

are not necessarily passive victims of the giant

to ocean currents, altering the kinds of fish in the

changes occurring to their world. They respond,

sea and their distance from breeding colonies,

they fight, they learn, and they have within and

when combined with unsustainable fishing

between them an adaptability and a

methods and pollution of many kinds, will

resourcefulness which the very processes of

continue to do damage to seabirds. With the

destruction can bring to the fore. The expanding

puffins of Norway and southern Iceland, resilience

gannet populations of the North-east Atlantic

has been stretched beyond breaking point.

or the cormorants flooding into freshwater lakes

The decline of guillemots in the Baltic is a measure

and rivers, surviving on their adaptability, are

The airwaves are awash with talk of the

of the drop in the number of sprats in that sea,

signals of future well-being.

Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which

probably damaged by fishing and by climate

the single dominant factor is anthropogenic

change. In what should be the cold, rich waters

activity. It is a literal truth that every albatross

of the Benguela Current off South-west Africa,

and fulmar has eaten plastic and it is reliably

the fate of the birds has become the measure

predicted that by 2050, about 99.8 per cent of

of a general crisis: penguins, Cape cormorants

all seabird species will have plastic in their

and gannets have all virtually disappeared there,

stomachs. Nevertheless, some foundations

the result of warming waters and the utter

have been laid, or at least seedlings planted,

destruction by fishermen of the sardine and

for a successor era. The Anthropocene will have

anchovy stocks which had previously thrived

brought one geological epoch to an end; it is not

in those seas.

a time-period but a boundary condition and could now usher in the ‘Ecozoic’, a term invented by the American philosopher Thomas Berry, a time in which life-forms are understood as part

228

But there are no grounds for complacency. The great extinction is going on every day and the rate of change in the nature of the oceans is almost certainly too rapid for many of the inbuilt resilience mechanisms to cope. Most seabirds will suffer. Their ranges will shrink. There will be many local losses and several global extinctions. Birds that are now common will become rare. Populations will shrivel. The grand cry of a seabird colony, rolling in its clamour around the bays and

This is a resetting of life. The fossils will be different

headlands of high latitudes, may become a

in the future. And in this enormous process, which

memory, its absence unnoticed because people

we are now in the midst of, there will be winners

will not miss what, as far as they know, has never

and losers. Many bird lineages – early gulls,

been there.

Contributors and Acknowledgements

Contributors

Jack Aeby The American environmental physicist Jack Aeby (1923 – 2015) is best known for having made the only well-exposed colour photograph of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, on 16 July 1945 at the ‘Trinity’ nuclear test site, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA. He was then a civilian technician in the Manhattan Project, but later, after graduating from UC Berkeley, he returned to work in the Health Physics Department. Antoine d’Agata Born in Marseilles, Antoine d’Agata has spent much of his life outside France, notably in New York, and since 2005 has worked around the world with no settled place of residence. Since 1998 he has published a number of books, including Hometown (2001), Vortex, Insomnia (both 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits), Stigma (2004), and Manifeste (2005), and has made a feature film in Tokyo, Aka Ana (2006). He joined Magnum Photos in 2004. https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/ antoine-dagata/ Benoit Aquin Humankind’s relationship with the environment is a common denominator in Aquin’s work as a whole. The environment thus becomes a generic term to define the dynamics involving social, economic and spiritual elements. His documentary projects have depicted catastrophic oil spills, overexploitation of arable land, and poor agricultural techniques and resource-extraction methods. www.benoit-aquin.com Dan Bailey Dan Bailey is an outdoor sports journalist and guidebook writer with a passion for the world's wild steep places. As well as guidebooks Dan produces words and pictures for the outdoor media, and works as the editor of UKHillwalking.com. Dan has walked and climbed in North and South America, Africa, Asia, Mainland Europe and all over the UK. Having tried the rest he insists that Scotland is the best. www.UKHillwalking.com Mandy Barker Mandy Barker (UK) is an international award-winning photographer whose work involving marine plastic debris has received global recognition. The motivation for her work is to raise awareness about plastic pollution in the world's oceans whilst highlighting the harmful effect on marine life and ultimately ourselves. www.mandy-barker.com Olaf Otto Becker Olaf Otto Becker was born in 1959 in Germany and studied communication design and philosophy during the ‘90s. He combines his personal and artistic approach with documentary intention and socio-cultural questions. His images act as poetic images and documentation of processes in the world of today. www.olafottobecker.de

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Daniel Beltrá Daniel Beltrá is a fine-art photographer based in Seattle, USA, and a fellow of the prestigious International League of Conservation Photographers. His passion for conservation is evident in evocatively poignant environmental images from all seven continents. For his work on the Gulf Oil Spill, in 2011 he received the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award. www.danielbeltra.com / https://danielbeltra.photoshelter.com Tobia Bezzola Dr Tobia Bezzola is a Swiss art historian, Director of MASILugano LAC, Lugano, former Director of the Museum Folkwang, Essen, and former Curator of Modern Art at Kunsthaus Zurich. He authored the introductory essay ‘Models, Possibilities: Thomas Struth’s “Nature and Politics”’ (reproduced in these pages) in Struth’s book and catalogue of the eponymous international touring exhibition Nature & Politics.

Alicia Bruce Alicia Bruce’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, winning several awards including the RSA Morton Award. Her images have featured in The Times, The Scotsman, BBC, STV, and are represented in the National Galleries of Scotland and St Andrews University collections. Recent charity campaigns include Crisis at 50 and Zero Tolerance. www.aliciabruce.co.uk David Buckland David Buckland is a lens-based artist, film-maker, writer and curator who has exhibited and been published extensively. Buckland created, in 2001, and directs the international Cape Farewell project, that continues to build an international cultural response to the climate change challenge. www.bucklandart.com / www.capefarewell.com

Barbara Bloemink Barbara Bloemink is an American international art and museum consultant, art historian, writer, lecturer and professor, a former director and/or chief curator of five US art and design museums, design curator of over 70 museum exhibitions, and the author/co-author of numerous books and scholarly publications, including Spill: Daniel Beltrá.

Edward Burtynsky Edward Burtynsky is an internationally acclaimed Canadian photographer whose remarkable photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over sixty major museums around the world, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His recent project, Anthropocene, is a multi-media exploration of human impact on the planet. www.edwardburtynsky.com

Alex Boyd Alex Boyd is a Scottish photographer and curator. His work has been exhibited at the Scottish Parliament, as well as group shows at the Royal Academy, RSA, and RUA. His work is held in the V&A, National Galleries of Scotland, and the Yale Museum of British Art. His first book The Silent Islands was released in July 2017. www.alexboyd.co.uk

Anne Campbell Anne Campbell is an artist and crofter from the Isle of Lewis, Scotland. She studied Painting at Edinburgh College of Art and Archaeology at Edinburgh University. Her work has returned over the years to themes which explore the Lewis moorland through its place names, language, mapping and oral history. www.annecampbellart.co.uk

Kate Brown Prize-winning historian Kate Brown offers landscape biographies through which we might recover the lost histories of modernist wastelands. Her recent book Plutopia (2013) is the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union. Her latest book is Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (2019), and she is the author of a recent article, ‘The Pandemic Is Not a Natural Disaster’, The New Yorker, 13 April 2020. Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA.

Thomas Joshua Cooper Thomas Joshua Cooper is a long-term practising artist, whose primary interests revolve around issues of the landscape, historical and cultural geography, cartography and the problems of photographic picture-making. He has authored 10 visual monographs, made over 90 solo exhibitions in major galleries and museums, and participated in over 80 group exhibitions. His work is in over 40 public collections in Britain, Europe and America.

Marilyn Bridges Marilyn Bridges is an American photographer noted for her fine art black and white, silver gelatin prints which have been exhibited in major museums around the world including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. She is the author of eight books. She is also a licensed pilot and fellow of the Explorers Club making a study of the marks left behind on the landscape from ancient time to the present. www.marilynbridges.com

Cortis & Sonderegger Swiss photographers Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger have both combined University lecturing and freelance photography since graduating in 2005 from Zurich University of the Arts (ZHDK), where they began their ongoing collaborative work, conceiving and manufacturing surreal worlds in compositions of ‘staged’ photography. www.ohnetitel.ch

Dalziel + Scullion Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion are Scottish based artists working with sculpture, video and sound exploring new ways to engage with the subjects of the environment and ecology. Their artworks become conduits between people and nature, helping audiences experience our shared environment from alternative perspectives, with the aim of re-establishing our connection with nature and the non-human species we live alongside. https://dalzielscullion.com Pedro David de Oliveira Castello Branco Pedro David graduated in journalism in 2002 from the Pontifical University of Minas Gerais State, Brazil (Puc Minas). His work is shown internationally in museums, galleries and private collections and he has published the following books: 360 Square Meters (Blue Sky Books); Fase Catarse (Catharsis Phase), museuin, 2013; O Jardim (The Garden), Funceb, 2012 and Paisagem Submersa (Underwater Landscape) and Cosac Naify, in 2008. www.pedrodavid.com Bryan Debus Bryan Debus is a cartographer and photographer based in Detroit, USA, known for his images of urban subjects and architecture. @BryanDebus Susan Derges Susan Derges began making photographs in Japan in the early 1980s during which time she developed the camera-less photographic techniques for which she is now known. A major book on her work, Elemental, was published by Steidl in 2010. She lives and works on Dartmoor, Devon, UK. www.susanderges.co.uk Jared Diamond Jared Diamond is an American geographer, historian and anthropologist (professor of geography at UCLA), a noted polymath, and the author of the seminal books Guns, Germs and Steel (1997); Collapse (2005); The World Until Yesterday (2012); and Upheaval (2019), which draw from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. www.jareddiamond.org Terry Evans Terry Evans is a celebrated American photographer whose work explores the environmental impact of humans on the landscape of the American Midwest and is notable for aerial photographs of prairies; it is widely published and collected, notably by the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art. http://terryevansphotography.com

William A. Ewing William A. Ewing is an eminent curator and writer on photography, a former Director of Exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, New York, and former Director of the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne. His most recent publications are Landmark: The Fields of Landscape Photography (Thames & Hudson, 2014), Edward Burtynsky: Essential Elements (Thames & Hudson, 2016), and William Wegman: Being Human (Thames & Hudson, 2017). www.fep-photo.org/curator/ewing Jared Farmer Jared Farmer is an American writer, artist, and professor of history. For the Anthropocene Cabinet of Curiosities – a multi-university project exhibited at the Deutsches Museum – Jared Farmer created a future fossil of a BlackBerry Curve 8300. Farmer's companion essay, ‘Technofossil’, is part of Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, ed. Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett (University of Chicago Press, 2018). www.jaredfarmer.net Tim Flach Tim Flach is an animal photographer with an interest in the way humans shape animals and their meaning, exploring the role of imagery in fostering an emotional connection. His work, ranging widely across species, is united by a stylisation reflecting an interest in how we can better connect people to the natural world. www.timflach.com Hamish Fulton Walking Artist Hamish Fulton was born to Scottish parents in 1946 and grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. Fulton made his first 'artwalk' with other students in 1967, and from 1973 has specialised exclusively in the restrained materialisation of his walking experiences. Fulton entirely rejects all and any association with Land Art; he has exhibited internationally since 1969. Sophie Gerrard Sophie Gerrard works for regular clients including The Guardian Weekend Magazine, Financial Times Magazine and The Telegraph Saturday Magazine, and on long-term self-initiated projects, concerning contemporary stories with environmental and social themes. A recipient of a Jerwood Photography Award and a Fuji Bursary, her work is exhibited, published and held in national and private collections internationally. www.sophiegerrard.com / thephotographersgallery.org.uk Lorne Gill Lorne Gill has been an environmental photographer for thirty years, working for the Countryside Commission for Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage / NatureScot. He firmly believes that environmental photography is more important now than it has ever been. Our planet is changing at a rapid pace and in an image-hungry world photography is uniquely placed to inform and inspire a global audience.

Emmet Gowin Born in Danville, Virginia in 1941, Emmet Gowin is Professor Emeritus of Photography, Princeton University. His publications include: Emmet Gowin: Photographs, 1990; Changing the Earth, Yale, 2002; Emmet Gowin, Fundación Mapfrey & Aperture, 2012; Hidden Likeness, Morgan Library & Museum, 2015; and, just released, Mariposas Nocturnas: A Study in Beauty and Diversity, Princeton University Press, 2017. www.pacemacgill.com Alexander Hamilton Alexander Hamilton (Series Editor) is an artist, Chair of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography, and Co-Editor of the journals Studies in Photography and Leaves, responsible for publishing journals on contemporary and historic photographic work. He studied drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) in the 1970s. As an artist his award-winning work in the field of art and ecology is exhibited internationally. He was awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship and received a Darwin Award through the British Council, allowing him to take up residencies with a focus on the art and writings of John Ruskin. www.alexanderhamilton.co.uk J.J. Harrison J.J. Harrison is a wildlife photographer from Tasmania, mainly focussed on avian photography, and recently specialising in pelagic boat trips to photograph seabirds. He feels that he can ‘generate greater social utility taking encyclopedic photos [rather than artistic ones] ... which are genuinely helpful in educational and conservation contexts’ – one of his primary motivations for his involvement with Wikimedia Creative Commons, to which he has contributed hundreds of featured images. https://www.jjharrison.com.au Willis E. Hartshorn Willis E. Hartshorn is a former Director of the International Center for Photography, New York City, and has lectured widely and curated noteworthy exhibitions in the field of photography. He is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, including the Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2013. Louis Helbig Born in Canada, and now resident in Australia, Louis Helbig is an artist-photographer specializing in aerial imagery. His work has been widely exhibited and published around the world. His background includes an MSc in Economic History from the London School of Economics, and professional roles within public, NGO and private organizations in Canada and elsewhere. www.louishelbig.com / www.louishelbig.ca Leslie Hook Leslie Hook is a non-fiction writer and journalist, currently the Financial Times’ environment and clean energy correspondent. She leads the FT’s climate and renewable energy coverage globally, including the impact of warming on the planet, how companies are preparing for climate change, and how governments are trying to reduce emissions. www.lesliehook.com

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Contributors

Zig Jackson/Rising Buffalo An enrolled member of the Mandan-Hidatsa tribe of the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation, Zig Jackson uses photography to document the ever-shifting landscape of contemporary Native America – from city to casino, Indian Country to oil country. Jackson is a photography professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. http://zigjackson.com http://Risingbuffaloarts.com

Timo Lieber Timo Lieber is a London-based photographer, best known for his aerial photography. He has won numerous awards for his work, including the PDN Photo Annual, the International Photography Awards and National Geographic. Timo's work has been widely published and exhibited and his photographs are held in both corporate and private collections. www.timolieber.com / Instagram @timolieber

Chris Jordan Chris Jordan’s work explores the collective shadow of contemporary mass culture from a variety of photographic and conceptual perspectives. Edgewalking the lines between beauty and horror, abstraction and representation, the near and the far, the visible and the invisible, Jordan’s images confront the enormous power of humanity’s collective will. His works are exhibited and published worldwide. www.chrisjordan.com

Owen Logan Owen Logan MA PhD is a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. Between 2007 and 2014 he was a contributing editor to Variant magazine and is co-editor of Flammable Societies (2012) and Contested Powers (2015). His parallel work as a photographer has been widely exhibited and his images are in several public collections, including the Scottish Parliament and the National Galleries of Scotland. He is currently developing a collaborative ethnography on ‘The Spirit of Fascism in the Arts and the Prospects for Cultural Democracy.’

Aleksandr Kupny Aleksandr Kupny worked as a health physics technician and radiation monitor at Chernobyl nuclear power station shortly after the explosion of Reactor No.4 in 1986. In 2007–09 he explored within the vast concrete tomb built around the smoldering reactor following the accident, producing incredible, radioactive photon sprinkled photographs of this highly radioactive area.

Siobhan Lyons Dr Siobhan Lyons has been a media scholar at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and an associate member of the Centre for Media History. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Continuum, Media International Australia, The Washington Post, The Conversation, Overland, Kill Your Darlings, and New Philosopher.

Chrystel Lebas Chrystel Lebas is a French visual artist based in London. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, she is best known for her photography and film works that explore and illuminate the often complex relationships between human beings and the natural world. Her work has been exhibited and published widely internationally and is held in major collections. A major solo exhibition Regarding Nature was shown at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam (2016-17), with an accompanying publication ‘Field Studies: Walking through Landscapes and Archives’. Currently working on a solo exhibition at the Wellcome Collection to run in parallel with the ‘On Happiness’ season planned for Autumn 2020. www.chrystellebas.com

Patricia & Angus Macdonald Dr Patricia Macdonald is an environmental academic, artist-photographer and Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Angus Macdonald is Professor Emeritus, and a former Head of the School of Arts, Culture and Environment, at the University of Edinburgh. Patricia & Angus Macdonald work together, editorially and as artists, through their Aerographica Partnership, forensically investigating landscapes changed by human activity, often from the air. Their award-winning environmental artworks are exhibited, published, and held in public and private collections internationally, and they are sole or joint authors of more than ten books, including Shadow of Heaven (1989), Once in Europa (1999/2000, with John Berger), Airworks (2001), and The Hebrides: An aerial view of a cultural landscape (2010). www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-patricia-macdonald www.aerographica.org

Ayelen Liberona Ayelen Liberona is an artist and educator creating at the intersections of dance, film and photography. Her awardwinning films and cinematic immersive experiences seek to provoke radical new ways of telling stories about lands and bodies. www.ayelenliberona.com

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Robert Macfarlane Robert Macfarlane is a British writer, and academic at the University of Cambridge. His prize-winning books about landscape, nature, memory and travel include Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012), Holloway (2013, with Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards), Landmarks (2015) and Underland (2019). His essays also appear often in The Guardian, Archipelago, The New York Times, and Granta, among other publications.

Pradip Malde Pradip Malde was born in Arusha, Tanzania in 1957. He finished his formal education at the Glasgow School of Art, remaining in Scotland for ten years before migrating to Tennessee, USA, where he now teaches as a professor of art at Sewanee. https://pradipmalde.com Katie Blair Matthews Katie Blair Matthews is a commercial and documentary photographer who also works as a photographer’s assistant and photographic research assistant in Edinburgh. Her personal photographic practice focuses on Scotland’s landscape and how humans intervene in the regeneration and preservation of nature. www.katieblairmatthews.com Bill McKibben Bill McKibben is an American environmentalist, author and journalist; Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College; President and co-founder of the campaign group 350.org; and author of a dozen books about the environment including The End of Nature (Anchor, 1989), which has been called ‘the first book on global warming for a general audience’. www.billmckibben.com Meryl McMaster Meryl McMaster is a Plains Cree/Canadian artist currently working in Ottawa, Canada who earned her BFA in Photography from OCAD University (2010). Known for her large-format self-portraits that have a distinct performative quality, she explores questions of self through land, lineage, history, and culture, with specific reference to her mixed Plains Cree/European ancestry. www.merylmcmaster.com Gideon Mendel Gideon Mendel is a photographer originally from South Africa and currently based in London. His work engages with contemporary social issues of global concern. His intimate style of committed image making, and long-term commitment to projects such as those on apartheid, HIV, and flooding linked to climate change (Drowning World), has earned him acclaim and several awards. www.gideonmendel.com Richard Misrach Richard Misrach is an internationally renowned photographer who, in the 1970s, helped pioneer the renaissance of color photography and large-scale presentation that are in widespread practice today. His ongoing series, Desert Cantos is a multi-faceted approach to the study of place and mankind’s complex relationship to it; a recent chapter, Border Cantos, explores the unseen realities of the US-Mexico borderlands. https://fraenkelgallery.com/artists/richard-misrach

George Monbiot George Monbiot is a British writer known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books, including Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain (2000) and Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding (2013). www.monbiot.com Fabrice Monteiro Born in 1972 in Namur, Monteiro lives and works in Dakar, Senegal. He is an Agouda, the descendant of Brazilian slaves with Portuguese names, with a Beninese father and a Belgian mother. After industrial engineering studies, he modelled internationally, and later trained in studio skills with New-York-based photographer Alfonse Pagano. Monteiro’s photography is located at the intersection between photojournalism, fashion photography and portraiture. www.fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com Pete Moore Pete Moore works in nature conservation and has a long association with St Kilda. He has over thirty years’ experience as a photographer and studied rephotography for his PhD. His research interests lie in the exploration of time and change, drawing on the work of Robert Moyes Adam and the photography associated with tourism. Pete is a committee member of the Scottish Society for the History of Photography. www.petermoorephotos.co.uk Jason Arunn Murugesu Jason Arunn Murugesu is a freelance journalist and an MSc graduate in science communication at Imperial College London, His articles have appeared in The Times, New Scientist, New Statesman, Times Higher Education and Prospect Magazine, as well as online. @justsomesomeone Natasha Myers Natasha Myers is an anthropologist working at the intersection of art, science, and ecology at York University, Toronto. She is the author of Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke, 2015). Her current projects explore a range of plant/people conspiracies, including Becoming Sensor, a research-creation collaboration with Ayelen Liberona. http://natashamyers.org Adam Nicolson Adam Nicolson is an English writer who has written widely on history, great literature, nature and place. Sea Room (2001) explored the full natural-and-cultural gamut of a small archipelago in the Hebrides; Power and Glory (2003) and The Mighty Dead (2014) described the cultural contexts, respectively, that gave rise to the King James Bible and Homer; and The Seabird's Cry (2017) addresses the global crisis threatening seabirds and their future.

Simon Norfolk Simon Norfolk is a landscape photographer whose work over twenty years has been themed around a probing and stretching of the meaning of the word 'battlefield' in all its forms. As such, he has photographed in some of the world's worst war-zones and refugee crises, but is equally at home photographing supercomputers used to design military systems or the test-launching of nuclear missiles. Time’s layeredness in the landscape is an ongoing fascination of his. www.simonnorfolk.com Susanne Ramsenthaler Susanne Ramsenthaler is a visual artist from Edinburgh, Scotland. Her work is mostly lens-based, encompassing a wide range of practice, from antique, non-silver printing techniques to digital Imaging and computer animation. Her work has been exhibited in the UK, USA, Japan, Spain, Germany, Croatia, and at the St. Petersburg Biennale, Russia. http://susanneramsenthaler.com Andrew Simms Andrew Simms is an author, analyst and campaigner. His books include The New Economics, Tescopoly, Ecological Debt, and Cancel the Apocalypse: The New Path to prosperity; his latest book is We Are More Than This (Little, Brown). He co-founded the New Weather Institute, is a research associate at the Centre for Global Political Economy, University of Sussex, and Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation. @AndrewSimms_uk Paul Souders Born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1961, Paul attended the University of Maryland studying Photojournalism and astronomy. His career has taken him from newspapers to freelance. When not traveling, most recently, solo sailing up the Labrador coast in pursuit of wildlife, Paul makes his home in Seattle, with his wife Janet and their Tibetan Terrier, Lulu. www.worldfoto.com Jamey Stillings Jamey Stillings' career spans documentary, fine art and commercial projects. The Evolution of Ivanpah Solar was the starting point for Changing perspectives, Stillings’ multi-year aerial and ground-based photography project documenting significant renewable energy development around the world. www.jameystillings.com Thomas Struth Thomas Struth is a preeminent contemporary photographer whose recent works, notably his exhibition and book Nature & Politics, include photographs of natural landscapes and major scientific installations from around the world. Struth is also known for his famous series Museum Photographs and Places of Worship, examinations of both the momentary and eternal in contemporary culture. www.thomasstruth32.com

Timm Suess Timm Suess is a Swiss industrial psychologist and photographer who focusses on urban decay and abandoned structures. His photographs of Chernobyl and Pripyat may be viewed on: https://flickr.com. Klaus Thymann Klaus Thymann is a photographer, filmmaker and writer with a degree in Environmental Science. He has developed an original viewpoint having worked across a wide range of subjects and media, utilising a crossdisciplinary skill-set combining journalism, image-making, mapping, documentary and exploration with a focus on contemporary issues and climate crisis. www.klausthymann.com Chris Wainwright Chris Wainwright (1955 – 2017) was an artist and curator with interests in environmental photography and performance. His recent solo exhibitions included: We Are All Stars, Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan, 2016: First and Last, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan, 2015: Points of Departure, Fotografins Huis, Stockholm, Sweden, 2014; and A Catalogue of Errors, The Diawa Foundation, London. 2013. His recent work was also widely shown in China, Australia and Taiwan. www.chriswainwright.com Greg White Born in East Yorkshire in 1978. Greg’s work reveals a love of function and mystery combined in the graphic elements of architecture and landscape. He is inspired by repetitions of form in space. An unflinching modernism and cool detachment inflects all his images. His unassuming approach is based around simplicity, shape, structure and light. https://gregwhite.tv Pinar Yoldas Pinar Yoldas is a cross-disciplinary artist and researcher. Her work develops within biological sciences and digital technologies through architectural installations, kinetic sculpture, sound, video, with a distinct focus on posthumanism, eco-nihilism, the Anthropocene, and feminist technoscience. www.pinaryoldas.info And also, scientists and photographers, some unnamed, from: Federal government of the United States; United States Department of Energy; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA: Hannah A. Bullock; Azaibi Tamin; NASA: including Jeff Schmalz (MODIS).

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the following people and organizations who have, in many different ways, helped to

Published in partnership with

make this book possible:

Edinburgh University Press.

• Alex Hamilton, Chair of Studies in Photography / the Scottish Society for the History of Photography, and the other members of the Editorial Team of the journal Studies in Photography (Julie Lawson, Journal Editor, and Robin Gillanders) for their invitation to act as Guest Editor of a special issue of that publication. When the scale of significant content outgrew that original intended format, their critical comment and support (and that of other Committee Members of SSHoP, and of another Guest Editor of the journal, Patricia Allmer – who suggested the form of the main title) enabled me to develop the present volume from that initial project.

www.edinburghuniversitypress.com Studies in Photography is the trading name of The Scottish Society for the History of Photography A Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation Registered in Scotland with the Office of the Scottish Charities Registrar SC033988. www.studiesinphotography.com

• all those friends, authors, and colleagues past and present, too numerous to mention individually – many of them staff, student or board members / trustees / committee members of, variously,

Surveying the Anthropocene: Environment and

National Museums Scotland; the National Galleries of Scotland; Glasgow Museums and Galleries;

photography now © 2021 Patricia Macdonald.

Scottish Natural Heritage / NatureScot; Forestry Commission Scotland / Forestry and Land Scotland;

The copyright of the individual images and

Forest Research; the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh; the Cairngorms National Park Authority;

texts published in this book rests with the

the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art; Glasgow School of Art; the British Council;

photographers and authors:

the Photographers’ Gallery, London; the Botanical Society of Scotland; the Native Woodland Discussion

Patricia Macdonald (Editor) and individual

Group; Reforesting Scotland; the Scottish Wildlife Trust; the Scottish Wild Land Group; the John Muir

contributors as credited within.

Trust; the Andrew Raven Trust; Stills Gallery, Edinburgh; Portfolio Gallery, Edinburgh; the Ingleby Gallery; and the Scottish Society for the History of Photography / Studies in Photography – people with whom

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data.

I have had long-term and ongoing, or brief and intense (for me at least), discussions on the many

A catalogue record for this book is available from

interconnected strands of the Anthropocene and its environmental and social impacts, and the expression

the British Library.

of these through photography, and especially the following:

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may

Donald Addison, Mahala Andrews, Philip & Myrtle Ashmole, Dick Balharry, John Berger,

be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by

Stephen Blackmore, Iain Brodie, Liz Calder, Robin Callander, William Chaloner,

any means, electronic or mechanical, including

Maria & David Chamberlain, Thomas Joshua Cooper & Catherine Mooney Cooper,

photocopy, recording or any other information

Robert & Barbara Crawford, Roger & Lindsay Crofts, Matthew Dalziel + Louise Scullion, Sue Davies, Susan Derges, William Ewing, Lorne Gill, Rawdon Goodier, Jeanette Hall, Alan Hampson, Alison Hester, Rebecca Hughes, James Hunter, Richard & Florence Ingleby, Paul & Margaret Jarvis, Jim Jeffrey,

storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

David Jenkins, Bob Jones, James & Julie Lawson, Ulrich & Francesca Loening, Owen Logan,

ISBN 978-1-8383822-3-0 (hardback)

Thomas MacDonell, Peter & Sarah Mackay, Edward Mackey, Duncan Macmillan, Pradip Malde,

ISBN 978-1-8383822-4-7 (webready PDF)

Aubrey Manning, Richard Manning, Lynn Margulis, Gordon Miller, Peter Moore, Dave Morris,

ISBN 978-1-8383822-5-4 (epub)

Adam Nicolson, Simon Pepper, Chris Quine, Kathleen Raine, Paul Ramsay, John Randall, Andy & Cathy Ratcliff Wightman, Philip Ratcliffe, Andrew Raven & Amanda Game Raven, Duncan Ray,

General enquiries and correspondence about the

Elke Ritt, Marcia Rodriguez, Julian Spalding, Sara Stevenson, Duncan Stone, Des Thompson,

Society and its publications should be directed to:

John Thomson, Finn Thrane, Michael Usher, Andreas Vowinckel, Charles Waterston,

www.studiesinphotography.com

Marie & Rodger Waterston, Adam Watson, Jeff Watson, Will Webb, David Welch. • all the contributors – artist photographers and writers – whose diverse, insightful and powerful work,

Designed by Ian McIlroy, Edinburgh

from around the world, is presented in the book; it has been a great privilege to be able to include their images and texts; to have the chance to discuss, with those that I already knew, what we should

Printed and Bound by

include; and to come to know, a little, some of those whose work had impressed me, but with whom

Bell & Bain Limited, Glasgow

I had never been previously in contact, as well as some whose work was new to me prior to my research

J Thomson Colour Printers, Glasgow

for the book; they have all been gracious, generous and helpful;

Stock: Galerie Satin 150gsm

• and above all, two people in particular to whom I wish to give very special thanks:

The paper used in this publication is recyclable.

– my partner in several senses of the word, Angus Macdonald, Professor Emeritus at the University

It is made from low chlorine pulps produced

of Edinburgh and my collaborator in the Aerographica consultancy, with whom I have discussed and

in a low energy, low emission manner from

worked on, over five decades, many of the issues that are central to the book, and who has been

renewable forests.

a continuing support throughout the vicissitudes of its preparation; – and the book’s designer, Ian McIlroy, whose highly expert and endlessly imaginative, patient and collaborative approach has made a memorable journey of the long process of bringing the book to life. Patricia Macdonald, Edinburgh, September 2021