Diane Ackerman The Human Age The World Shaped

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.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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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