Photographer Edward Burtynsky has won international accolades for his large-scale photographs of 'manufactured landscapes'—sites of industrial waste and ruin. In an ethically ambivalent fashion, his work seeks to find beauty in quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, and dams, sites of human intervention, the debris of so-called industrial progress. Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal accompanies Burtynsky on a trip to China to document not only his artistic process, but to expand his meditations on humanity's impact on the planet beyond the frame.
Beginning in a virtuoso tracking shot through an endless factory floor, and delving into the vicissitudes of industrialization's mutual, albeit asymmetric, exploitation of low-wage laborers and natural resources, Manufactured Landscapes paints a nuanced picture of the ecological toll of the way we live now.
Agriculturist Cary Fowler, director of Global Crop Diversity Trust and co-founder of Norway's Svalbard Global Seed Vault, has spent his life's work seeking to safeguard biodiversity. Since humans evolved beyond hunting and gathering and became agrarians some 10,000 years ago, plant diversity is ...
The Campanarios de Azaba Nature Reserve in Spain is one of the largest remaining tracts of wild nature in western Europe. Over the past centuries, it has fallen victim to exploitation—in the forms of hunting and farming—and neglect. Today it is the site of an ambitious rewilding project that se...
