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.
Coal ash waste at an electricity generation station:
Channels around a fertilizer waste impoundment:
Waste pond near a brown coal-fired power station:
Bottom ash disposal pond at a coal-fired power plant:
Residue stream of water and chemicals, resulting from coal washing:
Oil from BP Deepwater Horizon spill on the Gulf of Mexico:
Heavy metal waste from fertilizer production:
Phospho-gypsum waste at a fertilizer manufacturing plant:
A plume of foam in bauxite waste at an aluminum manufacturing plant:
Images from the Gerald Peters Gallery, via BoingBoing. Buy Fair’s book.
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
