The western fjords on Svalbard, Norway, that normally freeze in winter, remained ice-free all season.
This bear headed north, looking for suitable sea ice to hunt on. Finding none, it eventually collapsed and died. Photo © Ashley Cooper.
“Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. the more original move is to assume that it has already happened.” —Jean Baudrillard
The rooftops of Aleppo, Syria, one of the world’s oldest cities, are covered with satellite dishes, linking residents to a globalized consumer culture; © Yann Arthus-Bertrand.
“Not until man sees the light and submits gracefully, moderating his homocentricity; not until man accepts the primacy of beauty, diversity, and integrity of nature, and limits his domination and numbers, placing equal value on the preservation of natural environments as on his own life, is there hope that he will survive.” —Hugh H. Iltis
Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Burning of computer wire and parts to recover copper and other metals in Accra, Ghana. The computers are shipped here from Europe and the USA and some are reused but majority are dumped in Ghana. Poor workers often from the northern poorer region of Ghana do the work and sell the copper to buyers who send the copper to China or India. © Peter Essick.
“Even as a waste disposal site, the world is finite.” —William R. Catton Jr.
Trucks the size of a house look like tiny toys as they rumble along massive roads in a section of a mine. The largest of their kind, these 400 ton capacity dump trucks are 47.5" long, 32.5" wide, and 25" high. Within their dimensions you could build a 3000 square foot home. The scale of the Tar Sands is truly unfathomable. Alberta Energy has reported that the landscape being industrialized by rapid Tar Sands development could easily accommodate one Florida, two New Brunswicks, four Vancouvers, and four Vancouver Islands.
Aerial view of the tar sands region, where mining operations and tailings ponds are so vast they can be seen from outer space; Alberta, Canada, © Garth Lentz.
“All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. there is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced.” —Jared Diamond
Aerial view of landscape outside Miami, Florida, shows 13 golf courses amongst track homes on the edge of the Everglades; Google Earth/NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO.
“Human agriculture and industry are embedded in and supported by the natural ecosystems of earth.... Yet modern societies heedlessly displace, poison, overharvest, and directly assault natural ecosystems with little thought for their importance in their own sustenance.” —Paul and Anne Ehrlich
A shepherd by the Yellow River cannot stand the smell, Inner Mongolia, China; © Lu Guang.
“Water is life. Without it, we perish. Clean water and healthy seas are fundamental to the future welfare of humanity, and yet the industrial growth economy wastes copious amounts of water and treats the living oceans as a dumping ground for our effluent. This distain may stem, at least in part, from an old myth—the idea that the seas were limitless and their abundance immune to the efforts of people. That may have been true when we were few and our tools were simple. It is not true today when we are overabundant and no part of the ocean is out of reach of industrial fishers. The aggregate demands of a bloated humanity on freshwater systems leave less and less room for nature and put billions of people at risk of having inadequate drinking water.”
Lu Guang
People jostle for food relief distribution following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti; © Carolyn Cole/LATimes.
“The immediate relief problems and earthquake casualties would be much less with a smaller population. the size of population now, with the scale of the problems it creates, leads to an increasingly chaotic situation. more population exacerbates any efforts needed to solve humanity’s problems, anywhere, be they immediate or long term.” —Walter Youngquist
Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times
Tar sands-related tailings ponds are among the largest toxic impoundments on Earth and lie in unlined dykes mere meters from the Athabasca River; indigenous communities downstream are fearful of being poisoned by toxic seepage into the food chain. Alberta, Canada; © Garth Lentz.
“Think of Alberta as the Nigeria of the north. (Well, there are a lot more white people in Alberta, and Canada’s military hasn’t killed anybody to protect the oil business.) both economies have been increasingly dominated by oil. In 2009 Nigeria exported around 2.1 million barrels of oil per day; Canada exported 1.9 million barrels per day. environmental regulation of the oil industry in both Nigeria and Alberta is lax, and the industry has been actively opposed by native people— the Ogoni, in particular, in Nigeria and the Cree in Alberta." —Winona LaDuke and Martin Curry
Garth Lentz
Globalized transportation networks, especially commercial aviation, are a major contributor of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Photo of contrails in the west London sky over the River Thames, London, England; © Ian Wylie.
Ian Wylie
Siberian tiger skin recovered from poachers, Siberia, Russia; © Steve Morgan/Photofusion.
“Less than 3,500 tigers (Panthera tigris) now occur in the wild, occupying less than 7 percent of their historical range . . . . With the tiger we are witnessing the tragic winking out of one of the planet’s most beloved animals across its range, one population at a time.” —Elizabeth L. Bennett
Steve Morgan/Photofusion
Aerial view of New Delhi, India, population 22 million, density 30,000 per square mile (77,700/km2); Google Earth/2014 Digital Globe.
“Humans evolved in wild nature. Only relatively recently in our time on Earth, roughly ten to twelve millennia ago, did we begin to domesticate other species—and ourselves. That first agricultural revolution set humanity on a trajectory of population growth and settlement-based land use. Increased social organization and the invention of cities went hand in hand to allow development of increasingly complex economic and political systems. In 2008, for the first time in history, the majority of humans on Earth lived in cities. We had become, at least superficially, urban animals.”
Google Earth/2014 Digital Globe
Dead Elephant: Basketball star Yao Ming comes face-to-face with a poached elephant in Northern Kenya; © Kristian Schmidt/Wild Aid.
Kristian Schmidt/Wild Aid
Darkening Skies: Coal-burning power plant, United Kingdom; © Jason Hawkes
Jason Hawkes
The Mir Mine in Russia is the world’s largest diamond mine; Google Earth/ 2014 Digital Globe.
“Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it? i do not believe it can be done. the universe is sacred. You cannot improve it. if you try to change it, you will ruin it.” —Lao Tsu
Google Earth/ 2014 Digital Globe
Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot. Published by Goff Books
