The Human Age (3 page)
The silent message of this spectacle is timely, strange, and wonderful. We’ve tattooed the planet with our doings. Our handiwork is visible everywhere, which NASA has captured with graphic poignancy in “Black Marble,” its December 7, 2012, portrait of Earth ablaze at night. A companion to the famous “Blue Marble” photograph of Earth that appeared forty years ago, this radical new self-portrait promises to awaken and inspire us just as mightily.
On December 7, 1972, the crew of
Apollo 17
, the last manned lunar mission, shot the “Blue Marble” photograph of the whole Earth floating
against the black velvet of space. Africa and Europe were eye-catching under swirling white clouds, but the predominant color was blue. This was the one picture from the Apollo missions that dramatically expanded our way of thinking. It showed us how small the planet is in the vast sprawl of space, how entwined and spontaneous its habitats are. Despite all the wars and hostilities, when viewed from space Earth had no national borders, no military zones, no visible fences. One could see how storm systems swirling above the Amazon might affect the grain yield half a planet away in China. An Indian Ocean hurricane, swirling at the top of the photo, had pummeled India with whirlwinds and floods only two days before. Because it was nearly winter solstice, the white lantern of Antarctica glowed. The entire atmosphere of the planet—all the air we breathe, the sky we fly through, even the ozone layer—was visible as the thinnest rind.
Released during a time of growing environmental concern, it became an emblem of global consciousness, the most widely distributed photo in human history. It gave us an image to float in the lagoon of the mind’s eye. It helped us embrace something too immense to focus on as a single intricately known and intricately unknown organism. Now we could see Earth in one eye-gulp, the way we gaze on a loved one. We could paste the image into our
Homo sapiens
family album. Here was a view of every friend, every loved one and acquaintance, every path ever traveled, all together in one place. No wonder it adorned so many college dorm rooms. As the ultimate group portrait, it helped us understand our global kinship and cosmic address. It proclaimed our shared destiny.
NASA’s new image of city lights, a panorama of the continents emblazoned with pulsating beacons, startles and transforms our gaze once again. Ours is the only planet in our solar system that glitters at night. Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and for eons the nighttime planet was dark. In a little over two hundred years we’ve wired up the world and turned on the lights, as if we signed the planet in luminous ink. In another forty years our scrawl won’t look the same.
There are so many of us who find urban life magnetic that our cities no longer simply sprawl—they’ve begun to grow exponentially. Millions of us pack up, leave jobs and neighbors behind, and migrate to the city every year, joining nearly two-thirds of all the people on Earth. In the future, more and more clusters will appear, with even wider lattices and curtains of lights connecting them. Many display our curious tastes and habits. A harlequin thread drawn from Moscow to Vladivostok and dipping into China is the Trans-Siberian Railway. A golden streak through a profound darkness, the Nile River pours between the Aswan Dam and the Mediterranean Sea. A trellis connecting bright dots is the U.S. interstate highway system. The whole continent of Antarctica is still invisible at night. The vast deserts of Mongolia, Africa, Arabia, Australia, and the United States look almost as dark. So, too, teeming jungles in Africa and South America, the colossal arc of the Himalayas, and the rich northern forests of Canada and Russia. But shopping centers and seaports sizzle with light, as if they’re frying electrons. The single brightest spot on the entire planet isn’t Jerusalem or the Pyramids of Giza, though those do sparkle, but a more secular temple of neon, the Las Vegas Strip.
Newer settlements in the American West tend to be boxy, with streets that bolt north-south and east-west, before trickling into darkness at the fringes of town. In big cities like Tokyo, the crooked, meandering lines of the oldest neighborhoods glow mantis-green from mercury vapor streetlights, while the newer streets wrapped around them shine orange from modern sodium vapor lamps.
Our shimmering cities tell all (including us) that Earth’s inhabitants are thinkers, builders and rearrangers who like to bunch together in hivelike settlements, and for some reason—bad night vision, primal fear, sheer vanity, to scare predators, or as a form of group adornment—we bedeck them all with garlands of light.
N
ow let’s zoom in closer.
The Earth isn’t the same when you fly over it at three thousand feet and look for signs of humans. It’s easy to lose your bearings. All the reassuring textures of daily life are lost. Gone are the sensuous details of wild strawberry jam, a vase of well-bred irises with stiff yellow combs, the smell of wild scallions beside the kitchen door. But it’s a grand perch for viewing our tracks on the ground—visible everywhere and just as readable as the three-pronged Y’s etched into the snow by ravens or the cleft hearts stamped by white-tailed deer.
The landscape looks very different than it did to our forebears, although we still use the sixteenth-century Dutch word (
lantscap
) to mean the natural scenery of our lives. Peering out of an airplane window, it’s clear how we’ve gradually redefined that rustic idea. No longer does it apply only to such untouched wilderness as Alpine crags, sugared coastlines, or unruly fields of wildflowers. We manufacture new vistas and move so comfortably among them that quite often we confuse them with natural habitats. A field of giant sunflowers in Arizona or an extravagance of lavender in Provence offers
a gorgeous naturalistic tapestry, even though both were sewn by human hands.
From the air, you can see how mountains lounge like sleeping alligators, and roads cut alongside or zigzag around them. Or slice clean through. Some roads curve to avoid, others to arrive, but many are straight and meet at right angles. Where forests blanket the earth, a shaved ribbon of brown scalp appears with implanted electrical towers shaped like stick men.
We not only bespangle the night, we broadloom the day. In summer, our agriculture rises as long alternating strips of crops, or quilted patchworks of green velour and brown corduroy. Miles of dark circles show where giant pivoting sprinkler systems are mining the water we unlocked deep below ground, which we’re using to irrigate medallions of corn, wheat, alfalfa, or soybeans. Lighter circles linger as the pale shadows of already harvested crops. Evenly spaced rows of pink or white tufts tell of apple and cherry orchards. Among houses and between farms, small fragments of wooded land remain untouched: either the land is too wet, rocky, or hilly to build on, or the locals have set it aside on purpose to protect or use as a park. Either way, it proclaims our presence, just as the canals and clipped golf courses do.
Where retreating glaciers once dropped boulders and stones, scattering rocks of all sizes along the way, hedgerows border the crops. Farmers first had to unearth the rocks and boulders before they could till the land, and they piled the riprap along the edges of fields, where they were colonized by shrubs and trees that thrive in crevices and trap the drifting snow. On the first warm spring days, all of the snow will have melted from the corrugated brown fields, but not from the rocky white-tipped hedgerows that frame them.
Where dark veins streak the mountains, coal miners have clear-cut forests, shattered several peaks with explosives, scooped up the rubble, dumped it into a valley, and begun excavating. The blocks and crumbles of a stone quarry also stand out, and the terraced ziggurats of a copper mine rise above an emerald green pool.
Where mirages swim in the Mojave Desert’s flan of caramel light, tens of thousands of mirrors shimmer to the horizon, each one a panel in an immense solar thermal facility. In other deserts around the world, and on every continent, including Antarctica, arrays of sun-catchers sparkle. Oil refineries trail for miles, swarmed over by pump jacks attacking the hard desert floor like metal woodpeckers and locusts.
Our pointy-nosed boats dot the ports and lakeshores; our tugboats wrangle commercial barges down the blue sinews of rivers. Newly hewn timber looks like rafts of corks floating toward the sawmills. Where marshlands attract flocks of migrating birds, one may also spot the scarlet paisley of our cranberry bogs, and the yellow of the mechanical growers that flood the bogs and then churn the cranberries to loosen them from their vines, corralling the floating fruit in long flexible arms. Red capital
T
’s are the stigmata of our evaporation ponds, where salt concentrates hard as it’s harvested from seawater, in the process changing the algae and other microorganisms to vivid swirls of psychedelic hues. One sees our dams and harnessed rivers and the long zippers of our railway lines, and even occasional railway roundhouses. There’s the azure blue of our municipal swimming pools, and the grids of towns where we live in thick masses piled one upon the other, with the tallest buildings in the center of a town, and long fingers of shorter buildings pointing away from them. The cooling stacks of our nuclear power plants stare up with the blank eyes of statues. Low false clouds pour from the smokestacks atop steel and iron plants, factories, and power stations.
These are but a few signs of our presence. Of course, our scat is visible, too. Junkyards and recycling centers edge all the towns, heaped with blocks of compressed metals and the black curls of old tires, swirling with scavenging gulls.
We’ve created a bounty of new landscapes, and lest the feat be lost on anyone, we even tack on the suffix “scape” to describe them. I’ve come across “cityscape,” “townscape,” “roadscape,” “battlescape,” “lawnscape,” “prisonscape,” “mallscape,” “soundscape,” “cyberscape,”
“waterscape,” “windowscape,” “xeriscape,” and many more. And let’s not forget all the “industrial parks.”
Although our handmade landscapes tend to fade into the background, just a stage set for our high-drama lives, they can be breathtaking. In Japan, tourists bored with volcanic mountains and gardens, and urban sightseers given to
kojo moe
, “factory infatuation,” are flocking to sold-out tours that specialize in industrial landscapes and public works, which are viewed by bus or boat. Especially popular are the nighttime cruises that feature mammoth chemical factories spewing smoke and aglitter with star-clusters of light, overseen by the moon and more familiar constellations. It’s become a popular date for romantic young couples.
“Most people are shocked to discover that factories can be such beautiful places,” says Masakatsu Ozawa, an official in Kawasaki’s tourism department. “We want tourists to have an experience for all the senses including that of factory smell.”
“If you come to Tokyo, don’t bother going to Harajuku,” the city’s shopping district, Ken Ohyama writes in his book
Kojo Moe
. “Go instead to Kawasaki,” an industrial hub rich in rust, contaminated water, and polluted air. For that’s where the industrial scenery is the most vivid. Some Japanese lawmakers would like a few of their working factories designated as World Heritage Sites, to draw even more tourists.
For the past twenty-five years, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been documenting “manufactured landscapes” all over the world. Many of his most startling photographs were shot inside Chinese factories that ramble for blocks, where workers pass nearly all of their daylight hours surrounded by machines, products, and each other, under artificial light. The size and scale of their surroundings play upon the eyes and mind as a landscape. So does each floor of a large office building in, say, Singapore, divided into dozens of honeycomb cubicles.
I find Burtynsky’s studio loft on a busy street in downtown Toronto. Large wooden tables flank several small offices, and a row
of tall windows offers a portrait gallery of the day’s weather. A tall, slender man with graying hair and neatly trimmed mustache and goatee greets me, and we retreat into his book-lined office. He’s wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt with a small coyote logo howling up at his face. His voice is whisper-quiet, there’s a calm about him almost geological in its repose, and yet his eyes are agile as a leopard’s.
“You’ve been called a ‘subliminal activist’ . . . ”
Burtynsky smiles. The moniker fits.
“Part of the advantage one has as a Canadian,” he explains, “is that you’re born into this country that’s vast and thinly populated. I can go into the wilderness and not see anyone for days and experience a kind of space that hasn’t changed for tens of thousands of years. Having that experience was necessary to my perception of how photography can look at the changes humanity has brought about in the landscape. My work does become a kind of lament. And also, I hope, a poetic narrative of the transfigured landscape and the industrial supply line. We can’t have our cities, we can’t have our cars, we can’t have our jets without creating wastelands. For every act of creation there is an act of destruction. Take the skyscraper—there is an equivalent void in nature: quarries, mines.”
Quarries as inverted architecture. I picture hollowed-out geometrical shapes, Cubist benches, ragged plummets. You can’t have a skyscraper made out of marble or granite without a corresponding emptiness in nature. I haven’t thought of our buildings in quite this way before, as perpetually shadowed by a parallel absence.
“And yet these ‘acts of destruction’ are surprisingly beautiful,” I say.
“We have extracted from the land from the moment we stood on two feet. When we look at these wastelands, we say, ‘Isn’t that a terrible thing.’ . . . But they can also be seen in a different way. These spots aren’t dead, although we leave them for dead. Life does go on, and we should reengage with those places. They’re very real and they’re very much part of who we are.”
My mind shimmies between two of his photographs: the stepped
walls of an open-pit tungsten mine in northwestern Spain and a pyramid of lightbulb filaments, electronics, rocket engine nozzles, X-ray tubes, and the other particulate matter of our civilization. They’re very different from the landscape photographs of the first half of the twentieth century, when Eliot Porter, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston celebrated nature as the embodiment of the sublime, with reverence and respect, in all its wild untrampled glory. Burtynsky’s photographs capture the wild trampled glory of humanity reveling in industry. For ages, nature was the only place we went to feel surrounded by forces larger than ourselves. Now our cities, buildings, and technologies are also playing that role.