In two of my favorite earlier posts, I featured photographs by artist Edward Burtynsky. These photos depicted the outcomes of our consumerist societies: giant repositories of recycle-able materials and the consequences of resource extraction. In the same vein, J. Henry Fair has been taking photographs of industrial sites and environmental disasters from an even more distant place: small planes.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 14
MK — January 19, 2011
These are fascinating photos. I'm not sure I get the connection to consumerist societies, though. A society could be vastly more consumerist than the US today without these bad environmental effects, if there were proper regulation or taxation of pollution. This blog is interesting enough as it is, it doesn't need gratuitous conflation of the parts of market economies that correlate with bad phenomena but share no intrinsic relationship with them!
EMB — January 19, 2011
What's fascinating is how beautiful most of these photos look to me (while up close I imagine most of them would look pretty disgusting).
captain planet - the nihilist edition — January 21, 2011
The destruction of the planet is....... rather beautiful. Cept it isn't really the destruction of the planet, it's the destruction of the planet's capability to support complex life like ourselves. The planet will still be here and still be beautiful (assuming beauty can exist in the absence of a beholder) long after all of humanity is gone.