11 Photos of Human Impact on the Planet, and What They Show

Environmental Illustrations and the Questions Behind Their Message

What these photos are, in one minute

This is a set of eleven photographs that has travelled around the internet since the mid-2010s, usually under a headline about what people are "really doing" to the Earth. They show a smoking power station, a lake shore full of tree stumps, burning rainforest, open-pit oil sands, a shaved hillside, a garbage field under smokestacks, a shopping stampede, an oil field, a mountain of tyres and a heap of dead computer monitors.

Each picture is real and each problem is real. What the viral versions leave out is the context: where the scene is (when it can be known), how big the problem is, and whether things are getting better or worse. That is what we add below.

A note on credits: the set was shared by the website Collective Evolution in 2015 without photographer names, and several of the same scenes appear in the 2015 photo book Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot, edited by Tom Butler of the Foundation for Deep Ecology. Where we cannot confirm the exact place a photo was taken, we say so rather than guess.

The cover image above, a coal-fired power station venting plumes over farmland, sums up the theme: most of our impact comes from how we produce energy, use land and throw things away.

Land: forests cut, burned and cleared

A shoreline of stumps. Hundreds of cut trunks stand on bare ground beside a lake, which suggests a forest logged before a valley was flooded or exposed again when a reservoir level dropped. The exact location of this widely shared photo is unconfirmed. Whatever the place, it shows how completely a stand of mature trees can be removed in a single harvest.

Rainforest burning behind a herd of cattle. Smoke rises from a half-cleared patch of palms while white cattle graze in the foreground. The scene matches the typical pattern in the Brazilian Amazon, where cattle ranching accounts for roughly 80% of deforestation and fire is used to clear the cut vegetation. Brazil's official figures show annual loss peaking above 27,000 km² in 2004, falling to about 4,600 km² in 2012, rising again until 2022 and dropping to around 5,300 km² by 2025.

A clear-cut ridge above the water. A whole hillside has been logged down to bare soil, with logging roads zigzagging up the slope and untouched forest still standing on the far shore. Clearcutting is a legal and common forestry method, but research summarised by foresters links it to much higher landslide erosion, warmer streams and habitat loss, especially on steep ground. Alternatives such as patch cuts and leaving reserve trees reduce some of that damage.

Energy: coal, oil sands and oil fields

The power station again, from a wider angle. This frame repeats the cover scene: cooling towers and a chimney sending steam and smoke over a patchwork of fields. Much of the white cloud from cooling towers is water vapour, while the carbon dioxide from burning coal is invisible, which is part of why climate pollution is so easy to overlook. Several countries, including the United Kingdom, have since closed all or most of their coal plants.

Oil sands mining from the air. Brown haul roads cut through a dark, scraped landscape dotted with ponds of tailings. This is very likely the Athabasca oil sands near Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, one of the largest oil deposits on Earth. Only about a fifth of the deposit can be reached by open-pit mining, but around 900 km² had already been mined, and the tailings ponds alone covered about 77 km² in 2013.

A giant haul truck at an oil sands plant. A mining truck rolls across a frozen site while an upgrader breathes steam in the background. Operators such as Syncrude and Suncor use some of the largest dump trucks in the world, carrying around 400 short tons per load. Producing a barrel of oil from bitumen takes a lot of natural gas for heat, which is why the oil sands made up about 8% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions in 2024.

A forest of pumpjacks. Hundreds of oil pumps cover dry hills as far as the eye can see. The Overshoot photo book made the same point with the Kern River Oil Field near Bakersfield, California, and this frame may show that field, though the location is unconfirmed. Kern River was discovered in 1899 and is one of the largest oil fields in the United States, with over 9,000 active wells in 2006. Many of these old fields now rely on injecting steam to keep heavy oil flowing.

Waste and the way we shop

A dump under smoking chimneys. Plastic bags, wrappers and scraps stretch to a line of smokestacks on the horizon, with a single bird overhead. The location is not confirmed. Open dumping and open burning of waste remain common in many lower-income countries, where collection systems have not kept pace with the growth in packaged goods.

A Black Friday rush. Shoppers surge through the doors of a store at opening time, some pushed against each other. Doorbuster crowds can be dangerous: in 2008 a store worker, Jdimytai Damour, was trampled to death when about 2,000 people broke into a Walmart in Valley Stream, New York. Since then much of the buying has moved online, but the picture still captures how quickly bargains turn into piles of stuff.

A field of scrap tyres. Thousands of discarded tyres spread across dry ground at the foot of mountains. Piles like this breed mosquitoes and can catch fire and burn for weeks. The good news is that the US stockpile shrank from over a billion tyres in 1990 to about 67 million by 2015, as tyres were turned into fuel for cement kilns, crumb rubber and road material.

A graveyard of old computer monitors. Broken beige plastic casings and screens are heaped in an open lot. Old tube (CRT) monitors contain pounds of lead, which can leak into soil and water when they are smashed open by informal recyclers. The world produced a record 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, and only about 22% of it was formally collected and recycled.

Reading the pictures fairly

Photographs are powerful because they skip the numbers, but that is also their weakness. A single frame cannot tell you whether a forest was replanted, whether a dump has since closed or whether emissions in that country are rising or falling. When the critic Ronald Bailey reviewed the Overshoot book in 2015, he pointed out that air emissions in rich countries had fallen sharply since 1980 and that waste is far better managed in many places than such images suggest. Both things can be true: serious damage, and real progress.

The text that first accompanied these photos also made some claims that need care:

"Hemp has 50,000 uses." There is no reliable count behind this number. Hemp is genuinely useful for fibre, rope, paper, insulation and food, and it needs relatively little water, but hemp paper costs far more than wood pulp, and one study found it had a bigger footprint than eucalyptus paper. Growing industrial hemp has also been legal in the United States since the 2018 Farm Bill.
"Natural means harmless." A plant-based product still has to be grown, processed, shipped and thrown away. Life-cycle studies, not labels, show whether a swap actually helps.
"A world without money would fix this." That is a political opinion, not a finding. Whatever you think of it, the practical fixes below work inside today's economy.

What actually makes a difference

The scenes above are driven by a few big levers, and those are where individual and collective action matters most:

Energy: cleaner electricity and less fossil fuel per kilometre travelled or room heated. Coal is falling fast in Europe and North America because of policy and cheaper renewables.
Land and food: beef has the largest land footprint of any common food, so eating less of it, and buying from producers who do not clear forest, reduces the pressure seen in the Amazon photo.
Stuff: buying fewer, longer-lasting things, repairing electronics and handing old devices to certified e-waste recyclers keeps monitors out of open dumps.
Waste systems: tyre and e-waste programmes show that when someone is responsible for collecting a product at the end of its life, mountains of waste shrink.

The point of looking at difficult pictures is not despair. It is to see clearly enough to choose where effort counts.

Sources: Photos as shared by Collective Evolution (2015, photographers not credited); context from Wikipedia: Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest; Wikipedia: Clearcutting; Wikipedia: Athabasca oil sands; Wikipedia: Kern River Oil Field; Wikipedia: Electronic waste; Wikipedia: Tire recycling; Wikipedia: Black Friday (shopping); Wikipedia: Hemp; Reason: review of Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (2015).

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