Photos of Human Impact on the Planet and the Stories Behind Them

Environmental Photography: Visible Damage and the Context Behind It

A herder covers his face beside a polluted stretch of the Yellow River in Inner Mongolia. Photo: Lu Guang.

Some of the most powerful arguments about the environment are made without words. The 20 photographs below show places where human activity has visibly changed the land, the water and the animals that live there: sprawling megacities, open-pit mines, burning rainforest, dumps of broken electronics and wildlife killed by poachers or plastic.

Most of them were collected in Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot, a large photo book published in 2015 by the Foundation for Deep Ecology and edited by Tom Butler, with contributions from some of the best-known environmental photographers in the world. Each credit below names the photographer.

A photograph is a record of one place at one moment. It can be striking and true and still not prove a global trend on its own. So for each image we have added what it actually shows, where it was taken when that is known, and what reliable sources say about the wider issue behind it. Where an older caption was wrong or exaggerated, we say so.

Where these photographs come from

Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (often shortened to OVER) is a 316-page book of 164 photographs grouped into themes such as urban growth, food, materials, waste, energy and climate. It was produced by the Foundation for Deep Ecology, founded by the late outdoor-clothing entrepreneur Douglas Tompkins, together with the Population Media Center and the Population Institute. Author Alan Weisman praised its images as arresting and hard to put down.

The book also drew criticism. Writing in Reason, science correspondent Ronald Bailey argued that several photos lacked context, for example by showing pollution from poor countries while ignoring how richer countries cleaned up their own air and waste, and that global fertility rates were already falling. Both views are worth keeping in mind: the images document real damage, while the causes and solutions are debated.

Crowded cities and consumer culture

Mexico City

Houses spill across the hills around Mexico City in this aerial view by Mexican photographer Pablo López Luz, known for his studies of the city's endless urban sprawl. The 2020 census counted about 9.2 million people in Mexico City itself and about 21.8 million in the wider metropolitan area. Rapid, often informal, growth has strained water supplies, and the city is sinking as its aquifer is over-pumped.

Delhi

A satellite image (Google Earth, DigitalGlobe, 2014) shows tightly packed housing in the Delhi area, with almost no open ground between buildings. The older caption's "22 million" figure mixed up places: the National Capital Territory of Delhi had about 16.8 million residents at the 2011 census, while the wider urban area was estimated at roughly 28.5 million in 2018. New Delhi, the government district, is a small part of that.

Black Friday in Boise, Idaho

The beginning of Black Friday at an electronics store in Boise, Idaho

Shoppers push through the doors of an electronics store as a Black Friday sale opens. The photo by Darin Oswald of the Idaho Statesman became a symbol of consumer frenzy. Its connection to the environment is indirect but real: every gadget bought and later thrown away requires mining, manufacturing and eventually disposal, which links this scene to the e-waste photo further down.

Wildlife under pressure

An elephant killed by poachers

A man stands behind the dried-out remains of an elephant left where it fell after poachers took its tusks. The photograph was credited to Kristian Schmidt and the conservation group WildAid, which campaigns against the ivory trade. Poaching for ivory caused steep declines in African elephant populations, and international ivory trade has been banned under CITES since 1989, although illegal trade continues.

An albatross chick filled with plastic

A dead albatross shows what happens when we litter. A living dumpster.

The decomposed body of a young Laysan albatross reveals a stomach full of bottle caps, lighters and plastic fragments. It is one of US artist Chris Jordan's photographs from Midway Atoll in the North Pacific, taken between 2009 and 2013 for his project Midway: Message from the Gyre. Parent albatrosses skim floating plastic from the ocean, mistake it for food and feed it to their chicks. Jordan did not arrange the contents; he photographed the birds as he found them.

A dead polar bear in Svalbard

Researchers in red survival suits stand near the carcass of a thin polar bear on the tundra of Svalbard, Norway, in a picture by British climate photographer Ashley Cooper. The older caption said the bear starved to death; the photograph alone cannot prove the cause. Polar bears hunt seals from sea ice, and scientists warn that shrinking Arctic ice makes it harder for them to feed, but any single death needs a proper examination to explain.

Poachers with a Siberian tiger skin

Poachers pose proudly with the coat of a Siberian tiger

Two men hold up the skin of a Siberian (Amur) tiger in a photograph by Steve Morgan. Poaching remains the main threat to these tigers, which live mostly in the Russian Far East, along with habitat loss. There is some good news: thanks to protection that began with a Soviet hunting ban in 1947, the population has recovered, and a 2022 survey counted about 750 tigers in Russia.

Forests, mines and farmland

Rainforest in flames

Smoke rises from burning rainforest beside a pasture where white animals graze. Spanish photographer Daniel Beltrá has spent years documenting deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon from the air. The older caption mentioned goats; the herd here looks like cattle, which makes sense, since clearing forest for cattle pasture is the largest driver of Amazon deforestation.

Stumps of an old forest in Oregon

In Oregon, this thousand year old forest fell victim to the chain saw for a new dam

Hundreds of tree stumps are exposed on the shore of a reservoir in a photograph by Daniel Dancer. Forests are often logged before a valley is flooded by a dam, and the stumps reappear when water levels drop. The caption's claim that the trees were a thousand years old could not be confirmed, but old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest do include trees many centuries old.

The Mir diamond mine, Siberia

The Mir Mine in Russia; the photograph does not establish a global size ranking

This satellite view shows the Mir mine beside the town of Mirny in Russia's Sakha Republic. The open pit is about 525 metres deep and 1,200 metres across, one of the largest holes ever dug by people. Open-pit mining began in 1957 and stopped in 2001; the mine has operated underground since 2009. The older caption called it the world's largest diamond mine, which overstates it.

Oil sands mining in Alberta, Canada

The scars left behind from the mining of oil sands in the Canadian province of Alberta

Canadian photographer Garth Lenz (the older caption misspelled his name) has spent years photographing the Athabasca oil sands from the air. Here, mine roads, tailings ponds and stripped ground replace the boreal forest. Alberta reported about 77 square kilometres of tailings ponds in 2013, and about 900 square kilometres had been surface-mined. Reclamation has been slow, and industry claims about restored land are disputed.

The "sea of plastic" in Almería, Spain

The area around Almeria in Spain is littered with greenhouses as far as the eye can see – simply for a richly filled dinner table

Greenhouses stretch to the mountains in this aerial view by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Andalusia has more than 36,000 hectares of greenhouses, most of them in Almería province, and the area is nicknamed the "sea of plastic" because it is visible from space. It supplies much of Europe's winter vegetables, but it relies on scarce groundwater in one of Europe's driest regions and on migrant farmworkers who have often faced poor conditions.

Pollution and waste

The Yellow River in Inner Mongolia

The same herder seen at the top of this page covers his nose beside the river. The photographer, Lu Guang, spent years documenting industrial pollution in China and won the W. Eugene Smith Grant in 2009 for that work, along with three World Press Photo awards. In November 2018 he was detained by state security agents in Xinjiang and released in 2019.

Smoke over a waste dump in Bangladesh

A waste incineration plant and its surroundings in Bangladesh

A field of trash stretches towards a row of smoking chimneys in this photo by Bangladeshi photographer M.R. Hasan. The older caption described an incineration plant; the tall, evenly spaced chimneys look more like brick kilns, a major source of air pollution around Dhaka, though the exact site is not recorded. Either way, the scene shows how open dumping and smoky industry often end up side by side in fast-growing cities.

Broken electronics waiting to be stripped

Tons (literally) of broken electronics end up in developing countries and are stripped for precious metals by using deadly substances.

Old computer monitors and casings are piled high in a photograph by Peter Essick, who documented the global e-waste trade for National Geographic. The world produced a record 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, and only about 22% was formally collected and recycled. Much of the rest is handled informally, where workers burn cables and use acid baths to recover metals, exposing themselves and nearby communities to lead, mercury and dioxins.

Surfing a wave of trash in Java

The Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya rides a wave of filth and trash (Java, Indonesia)

Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya rides inside a wave full of plastic and debris off Java in this widely published photograph by Hawaiian surf photographer Zak Noyle. Indonesia's rivers carry large amounts of plastic to the sea, and rainy-season currents can push it onto popular surf breaks. The image became one of the best-known pictures of ocean plastic pollution.

Energy and fire

A refinery fire after Japan's 2011 earthquake

While the entire world watched the events of Fukushima, a massive heat and power station was burning just a few miles away. All attempts to extinguish it were fruitless.

Fireboats spray water on burning storage tanks in this photo from the Mainichi Newspapers/AFLO. It appears to show the kind of refinery fire that broke out on Tokyo Bay after the earthquake of 11 March 2011, while the world was focused on the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The best-known case, at Cosmo Oil's refinery in Chiba, began when gas tanks collapsed and exploded. Contrary to the older caption, that fire was put out after about ten days, and it was well over 200 kilometres from Fukushima, not "a few miles".

An oilfield in California

Pumpjacks cover a bare hillside to the horizon in a photograph by Mark Gamba. California's oil industry grew up in such fields, and some of them have been pumped for more than a century. Wells this close together mean wide land disturbance, and communities near oil operations have raised concerns about air quality and health.

A lignite power plant

Plumes rise from the cooling towers and stacks of a power station surrounded by farmland, photographed from the air by British aerial photographer Jason Hawkes. Much of what you see from cooling towers is water vapour. The pollution comes from burning lignite, or brown coal, the lowest-grade coal, which releases more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than other fossil fuels.

The Waldo Canyon fire, Colorado

A fire storm plows through Colorado – increased incidences of wild fires is a result of climate change

Flames reach houses in Colorado Springs during the Waldo Canyon fire in June 2012, photographed by R.J. Sangosti of the Denver Post. The fire burned about 18,000 acres, destroyed 346 homes and killed two people. Investigators found it was human-caused, though the exact cause is unknown. Hotter, drier conditions are widely linked to longer fire seasons in the western US, but no single fire can be blamed on climate change alone, as the older caption implied.

How to read environmental photos critically

These images are strongest when we let them be what they are: specific, credited records of real places. A few habits help:

Check the credit and the place. A named photographer and location let you find the original story. Uncredited reposts are where errors creep in.
Separate the scene from the claim. A dead polar bear is a fact; the cause of its death is a separate question.
Watch the numbers. Population figures and "largest" claims go out of date or depend on definitions, as with Mexico City and Delhi.
Look for the trend data. Deforestation rates, e-waste totals and wildlife counts come from long-term monitoring, not from one picture.

A famous line often accompanies galleries like this one: "Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money." It is often attributed to a Cree prophecy, but its origin is uncertain, and it appears in several versions from the 1970s onwards.

What you can do

The problems in these photographs are large, but several of them have clear, everyday links to choices we make:

Keep electronics longer, repair them when possible, and use certified e-waste collection points rather than the household bin.
Cut single-use plastic, especially bottles, caps and lighters, which are among the items found in albatross chicks.
Never buy ivory, tiger products or other wildlife parts, and report illegal wildlife trade when you see it online.
Support credible conservation and clean-up groups, and check that they publish results.
Share images with their credits and context, so that the photographers' work and the facts travel together.

There are also signs of progress: Amur tiger numbers have recovered, many rich countries cleaned up their rivers and air in recent decades, and reforestation projects are expanding. The photos show what goes wrong when we stop paying attention; the record also shows what is possible when we do.

Sources: Photographs from Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (Foundation for Deep Ecology, ed. Tom Butler), credited to the photographers named above; Resilience: Alan Weisman reviews the book; Reason: Ronald Bailey's critique; Wikipedia: Mexico City, Delhi, Chris Jordan, Siberian tiger, Mir mine, Athabasca oil sands, El Ejido, Lu Guang, Electronic waste, Cosmo Oil Company, Waldo Canyon fire.

Related:

Header$type=social_icons