David Biello has a thought-provoking slideshow up on Scientific American today. It features eerily beautiful snapshots of industrial processes and fossil fuel development that are, simultaneously, necessary to our current way of life, and kind of horrible to look at. This picture, for instance, is of a mountaintop-removal site, where layers of trees and earth are scraped away—and backfilled into valleys nearby—in order to reach coal deposits.
Photographer J. Henry Fair has documented the landscapes left behind by the industrial processes that feed the world’s fossil-fuel addiction–as well as many of the necessities and luxuries of modern life that energy makes possible, from plastics to paper towels. His work is currently on display at The Cooper Union in New York City, presented by the Cooper Union Institute for Sustainable Design and the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture.
Of course, alternative energy sources–the wind, sun, hot rocks and nuclear–are hardly impact-free. Giant wind turbines clutter the once-pristine sight lines of ridgetops; vast solar farms soak up rays in the desert, blotting out the landscape and impacting habitat; and deep uranium mines dot northern Canada with environmental effects matching any other resource-extraction enterprise, like tar sands. Which is why being more energy efficient–recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to light a 100-watt lightbulb for nearly a day–is so crucial.