Photographer Chronicles Petroleum Planet

Edward Burtynsky is a photographer, and in his new photos he shows us how addicted to oil our country has become.  Our entire transportation system is built around oil — and the saddest thing is that it never had to be this way. The first cars were electric and we have always had the technical know-how to mass produce electric cars. We also have the technical capability of driving battery-powered cars. Where are they? Now that we are in the midst of a climate crisis and an oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, it’s time to look at how we can get off of our oil addiction once and for all.  The article below is reprinted from Earth Island Journal.

Houston, Texas, photo by Edward Burtynsky

The fish, famously, doesn’t know it’s in water. Our relationship to petroleum is much the same. From our waking moments we are surrounded by oil: It helps grow the grains in our breakfast cereal, takes us to and from work, forms the plastics that wrap our products, and then delivers those very same items to us. Oil has become the sine qua non of our lives. And for that reason it’s so easy to forget that’s it’s even there.

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky wants to remind us. Burtynsky has spent most of his career focusing on the landscapes of manufacturing complexes, creating formal compositions of industrial scenery that are at once attractive and abhorrent. His latest project is titled, simply, Oil.

Ten years in the making, the collection is the result of Burtynsky’s travels throughout the globe to examine oil fields, refineries, car culture, and the eventual disposal of our oil-thirsty machines. The photos take us to places we’ve never seen and in the process reveal the massive, complicated apparatus that undergirds our lives of seamless convenience.

Oil, which toured North America and Europe last year, is divided into three categories. “Extraction & Refinement” examines the landscapes that have been formed (or deformed) by the petroleum industry. An image of oil pipelines snaking through the Canadian forest is unsettling. The stark contrast between the silver of the pipes and the trees’ green shows how alien our technologies can appear on our own planet.

The next section, “Transportation & Motor Culture,” then pivots to look at the built environments that, however artificial, have become our homes. Perhaps the best in this series is Burtynsky’s shot of Breezewood, PA, a town that could, with its riot of corporate logos, be Anywhere, USA. The image is incontrovertible proof of how we’ve remodeled much of our world – not to serve real people, but to accommodate the needs of our cars, which have become like second skins.

Burtynsky concludes with “The End of Oil.” [...]