Flying at dusk, I glance out the window in curiosity. Everything appears so orderly from this height, cities, fields, forests, but after a long stretch of endless forest I see a meandering river of great length and pause to consider the rivers’ patterns. Then I notice almost as an afterthought for it is so tiny and off to the side, there, right there amidst all that green forest, I see a human settlement and think, "Ah, we are so small."
Burtynsky, the current Canadian photography darling, shows us up close how our dirty jobs mark the planet but he misses the vastness of the Canadian raw earth spaces, the rough and soft flow of our untouched forests and the folly of our own importance compared to the planet's big pictures from this vantage point of the sky. Photograph the rivers, Burtynsky, I think, photograph their size and shapes and then compare what "we" have accomplished. We wreck havoc you say? Thank god we are so small then and the earth is so large for our marks are quite small in comparison, that is at least here in Canada, my wild and beautiful home.
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