8 photos show the ‘human footprint on the land’

This article is part of Coins2Day ‘s Blueprint for a climate breakthrough package, guest edited by Bill Gates.

In the afterward of his newest book, The Human Planet: Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene, George Steinmetz calls himself “The Accidental Environmentalist.” After 40 years of traveling the world making photos, Steinmetz writes it had “become clear to me that we are entering an era of limits, because we can’t keep consuming resources at today’s pace if we wish to leave a habitable planet to the next generations. The classic narrative of man versus nature might need to be rethought, as a narrative of man with nature.”

The selection of photos document “how we are reshaping the world for our own purposes,” showing the technologies and methods humans have created to be “with nature.” In an interview with Coins2Day, Steinmetz noted that “the most arable land on this planet has been repurposed…We’ve carved it all up, and there’s not much original stuff left.”

Riding his motorized paraglider, though now more often using drones, Steinmetz hovers his lens low enough that we imagine ourselves inside the photo picking licorice plants—but high enough to reveal the surrounding landscape of vast fields of solar panels, and beyond that horizon line, the world. “From the air you can get a sense of the human footprint on the land,” he says.

“As a photographer, one of the great challenges is creating visual surprises and to show people things that either they’ve ever seen or to show them things they know in a different way. That’s really the goal for me,” Steinmetz concludes.