Edward Burtynsky in Wired and Fast Company Magazine

From the Wired article:

 

“Anthropocene” is a term coined by Nobel-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 to describe what he and some other scientists consider a new era in world history, an epoch beginning with the Industrial Revolution and characterized by mankind’s permanent alteration of the natural world.

 

“For the last 12,000 years we’ve been in the Holocene epoch, which followed the last ice age and saw the development of human civilization,” Burtynsky explains. “But now we’re tipping the planet into another state, whether you look at the heating of the oceans or the atmospheric loading we’re doing with CO2 emissions.”

 

Burtynsky has spent the past five years traveling to some of the most ecologically devastated parts of the world: a clearcut forest in Borneo, oil bunkers along the Niger Delta, the Santa Ana Freeway in Los Angeles. He usually shoots the sites from above, using a helicopter, fixed-wing airplane, or drone. “Taking that aerial view has allowed me to show the scale of the human footprint in a way you can’t do from the ground,” he says.

 

To read the full Wired Magazine article, please click here 

 

To read the full Fast Company article, please click here