Footprints

Underpinning all this is sand, the main ingredient in concrete and asphalt. Global demand for sand is exceeded only by the demand for water. Around forty billion tonnes are used annually in construction and road building, as well as in the manufacture of window glass, smartphone screens, silicate solar panels and cosmetics. It is a key ingredient in metal foundries and fracking for shale oil and gas, and also used in the creation of artificial land. Singapore has used imported sand to add 130 square kilometres to its landmass in the past forty years, and when completed, the Palm Islands complex in Dubai (including an archipelago of islands shaped like a map of the world) will have used over three gigatonnes of sand, equivalent to the weight of nearly eight Great Walls of China. Despite its abundance, desert sand is too fine for commercial use; instead, we’re dependent on the planet’s capacity to weather enough coarse sand from the backs of mountains and the sides of hills, and global demand is outstripping geological processes. The King of the Road is hungry still.

Okri’s Nigerian fable of the insatiable road sent me to the pictures of the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. Since the 1970s, Burtynsky has photographed manufactured landscapes – quarries, salt pans, railway cuttings – in pursuit of what he calls the ‘residual thing’, the trace of us and our demand for raw materials that will linger long after the landscape has been relinquished by humanity. Often his subjects, far from urban centres, are what the environmental philosopher Val Plumwood has called shadow places: unacknowledged places, those that are unseen and unthought of, but feed our desire for minerals or energy.

Burtynsky makes his images on an epic scale in every sense, often taking them from a great height with the help of cranes, helicopters, or drones. Distance alchemizes the landscape, producing what Burtynsky calls ‘mythic space’. From above, the scenes often resolve into patterns, revealing unnoticed geometries like abstract art, in which human figures are absent or reduced to tiny grains of colour (as he often works in industrial areas, the figures in the pictures usually wear yellow safety vests). The effect is detached, but not affectless. Burtynsky’s landscapes are emptied of people but full of human presence. What we see reflected back is ourselves, or rather our shadow selves, our hungry selves, which have gouged, cut, blasted, shaped, and hoarded the earth until it looks back at us like a face in a mirror.

Roads have played a significant part in shaping Burtynsky’s vision. His panoramic sense of landscape, he has said, emerged during long childhood journeys across Canada, watching ‘the endless country go by’. As a young photographer searching for an aesthetic, he took a two-week journey alone around the United States. A wrong turn in Pennsylvania led him to a coal mining town called Frackville, where the landscape so arrested him that all he could do was stop the car and stare. Wherever he looked, in any direction, there was nothing in the land that had not been made by human industry. Mounds of coal slag formed an arc of black hills, with pools of lime-green water at their feet. The only evidence of nonhuman life was the bone-white birch trees thrusting upwards through the slag. Burtynsky’s first thought was that he had somehow entered an alien world. The black land ‘totally destabilized me’, he said. ‘I thought, is this Earth?’ But he quickly came to realize that what he found in places like Frackville was the consequence of our addiction to fossil fuels, scoured into the rock and sediment. We are in the shadow places even when we don’t realize it.

Burtynsky’s images follow the appetites of the insatiable road. In 2007 he photographed open-cast mines in the West Australian gold fields. In one picture of the salt pan landscape around Lake Lefroy, a deep, belly-like crater is sunk hundreds of feet into the earth like the King of the Road’s stomach in Okri’s fable, starkly black against the white crusted plain, its ribbed layers picked out eerily in salt. In another, of the ‘Super Pit’ near Kalgoorlie, the mine’s true scale becomes apparent only when you notice the small town perched on its rim like a speckle of white lichen. The pit’s mouth yawns 3.5 kilometres across at its widest point, and plunges down 180 metres. A squiggle of access roads winds down to its tapering base. The mine extracts around twenty-three tonnes of gold per year, but every gram of gold involves the displacement of half a tonne of earth.

Our capacity to move sediment like this, far exceeding the rates produced by geological processes, will leave behind countless future trace fossils, both large and small, from vast craters like the Kalgoorlie Super Pit to the minerals themselves, which we have drawn from deep in the earth and scattered over its surface. Increased concentrations of gold, copper and platinum at the surface, as well as of the toxic heavy metals produced during mining such as cadmium, lead and mercury, will bear witness to the way we have relentlessly sought to feed our appetite for prized minerals. Geologists speak of our ability to distribute rocks and sediments far from their place of origin as comparable to the way glaciers drop erratic stones in distant valleys.

‘When you think about it’, writes Michael Mitchell about Burtynsky’s images, ‘there’s a big hole somewhere for every stone building on the planet.’ Burtynsky’s photographs of the Rock of Ages quarry in Vermont resemble the urban canyons of a city like New York. Cut into regular horizontal sections like the floors of a skyscraper, the ledges highlighted by a fortuitous snowfall, it seems as if a completed building has been lifted from the earth. Meltwater has streaked the grey granite walls to obsidian black. Michelangelo famously insisted that the statue is already inside the stone and that it is the sculptor’s task to reveal it (the first quarry Burtynsky photographed was Carrara in Italy, where the marble for Michelangelo’s statue of David was extracted). In Burtynsky’s photos, we are confronted with a kind of ghost architecture, as if our cities were somehow excavated whole.

IN 1997 BURTYNSKY HAD what he calls an ‘oil epiphany’: that all the many manufactured landscapes he had photographed ‘had been made possible by the discovery of oil’. He resolved to trace with his camera the immensely complex infrastructure of fossil fuels, from extraction to the depleted fields and devastated landscapes it leaves behind. A few weeks after my trip over the old Forth Road Bridge, I visited the university library to look at Oil, the book that gathers together the results of Burtynsky’s quest.

Much of its first half has a heroic tenor. Wide-angle pictures of California oil fields are filled with a boundless herd of thousands of nodding derricks, docile and bovine, cropping the desert as far as the horizon, recalling the lost buffalo herds of the American plains. In Burtynsky’s images of oil refineries, miles of glistening pipes are crammed into the frame, arterial skeins that hint at symmetry but also elude it. Some show the world made possible by oil. In Highway #5, an aerial shot of the intersection between Highways 105 and 110 in Los Angeles (where the opening song-and-dance number to La La Land was filmed), the road is elevated to mythic proportions. The city’s sprawl fills the picture right to the edges, and as far as the San Gabriel Mountains to the north. But everything is dwarfed by the road – the endless rows of paperlike houses, even the huddle of downtown skyscrapers, are diminished, dominated by the prodigious, oesophageal multi-lane highway unfurling from the intersection and bulging and twisting away northwards.

The image reminded me of the work of the science fiction writer J. G. Ballard, who claimed to prefer concrete landscapes to meadows and predicted that the freeway system will be all that remains of Los Angeles once the city has faded into memory. People of the future, Ballard suggested, will see its slipways and overpasses as enigmatic testaments to our standard of beauty, just as we look admiringly on the mausoleums of Giza.

Other pictures ask us to imagine oil’s shadow worlds. Burtynsky turns his camera on an exhausted oil field in Baku, Azerbaijan, the site of perhaps the world’s first industrialized oil field and the largest in the world at the start of the twentieth century, from which oil had been dug since at least the fifteenth century. Skeletal derricks and towers, emaciated and blackened or rust-blushed, take the place of the placid, nodding machinery in the Californian photos. In the foreground, angular metal debris points to the sky like the ribs of desiccated cattle.

Ten million years from now, every human structure that exists on the surface of the earth will have been worn away. The largest and most extensive trace fossils of us will be underground. Animals can burrow to a depth of around two and a half metres; the deepest plant roots reach less than seventy metres. Humans, by contrast, have dug holes deeper than any life-form has ever gone before: the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia’s remote north-west is only twenty-three centimetres in diameter, but it descends more than twelve kilometres into the ground, far below even the deep-dwelling microbial communities that inhabit pockets and fractures in the rock up to five kilometres down. And we have done so everywhere. Beneath each grazing Californian derrick and pinched, leaning tower in Baku is a borehole perhaps up to a kilometre deep; worldwide, there are thousands of similar boreholes on every continent save Antarctica. The Anthropocene Working Group estimates that, laid end to end, they would make a borehole around fifty million kilometres in depth – equivalent to the total paved road network, or seven metres for every person alive today. Whereas surface roads will be preserved only in fragments, these boreholes will be sheltered from erosion. Some may be crimped and compressed by metamorphic processes, or gradually raised to the surface and weathered to dust, but others will be there in perpetuity, columns opening deep into the earth, coated in residual oil and barium-laced mud. Closed mines will lead to huge subterranean voids where, in our drive for coal, we have removed entire strata.

The insatiable road will be the source of some of the most telling future fossils. Even in fragments, they will hint at the extent of our reach across continents and into every wilderness. An astute observer of these splinters might be able to pull together an even larger story, of thriving megacities and planet-spanning industries, of our thirst for fossil fuels and the depths to which we have pursued them. Even more incredibly, beneath the sea some of the longest roads, passing between the continents, may survive intact.

In the final section of Oil, Burtynsky visits ship-breaking yards in Chittagong on the coast of Bangladesh. A series of dangerous accidents in the late 1990s and early 2000s involving heavy-fuel oil tankers off the French coast led to the banning of single-hulled tankers and spawned a new industry, as dozens of ships were beached at Chittagong to be broken down for scrap and recycled. In Burtynsky’s pictures, the partially dismantled tankers have assumed sculptural or even topographical forms. Ships minus their prows reveal their hulls in cross-section-like strata in an iron cliff; some have become metal escarpments and overhangs. It is a desperately precarious industry, undertaken by barefoot men using little more, Burtynsky says, than ‘torches and gravity’. Injuries and fatalities are commonplace, and their working environment is a malign concoction of oil and flakes of highly toxic marine paint. As the ships are broken down, they can yield as much as fifty thousand metres of copper cable, dozens of kilograms of aluminium and zinc, and tens of thousands of litres of oil. In the process, the ships are whittled away to almost nothing.

And yet, even before they come to rest on the Chittagong beach, they have played a part in creating future fossils. Although dumping shipping waste in the ocean was banned in 1972, it’s estimated that more than six hundred thousand tonnes enters the water every year, mostly hard and soft plastic, tin cans, and fishing gear. Some will be carried by currents and end up in debris traps in submarine canyons or seafloor depressions, but enough will likely remain concentrated around the routes of major shipping lanes to indicate that this was once a watery road. These plastic seafloor trails are laid on top of layers of hard clinker, the coal-burning residue dumped over the side of steamships in the nineteenth century. Many ships also disposed of extra clinker in port when they cleaned their boilers. These tough pavements connect the major port cities of the nineteenth century like Liverpool and New York, and have already been covered by sediment, preserving them from erosion. Unlike the road network on land, which will leave only fragmentary clues about its extent, a future geologist will be able to reconstruct much of the major shipping network from these clinker roads beneath the sea.

I peered at Burtynsky’s pictures of oil and its afterlives for two hours, scribbling notes and impressions, until hunger finally broke my concentration. But as I turned the last pages, making ready to leave the library, the final image struck me totally still. The camera peers directly down from ground level at a shuffle of footprints pressed into the Chittagong mud just as the Happisburgh footprints had been, eight thousand miles away and over eight hundred thousand years earlier. But these ones gleamed blackly. The mud had dried and split, and oil spilled from the broken tankers had flowed through the cracks to fill the footprints just exactly to the brim.

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