Capitalist Punishment:Travails of travesty
In both the Arctic and Antarctic regions, ice is retreating. Pictured is melting water on an icecap, North East Land, Svalbard, Norway.
Indonesian surfer Dede Surinaya catches a wave in a remote but garbage-covered bay on Java, Indonesia, the world’s most populated island.
Sprawling Mexico City, Mexico, population 20 million, density 24,600/mile, rolls across the landscape, displacing every scrap of natural habitat.
Los Angeles, California, population 15 million, typifies America’s consumption-oriented and car-dependent culture.
Brick kilns dot a dystopian landscape of trash in Bangladesh.
Massive quantities of waste from obsolete computers and other electronics are typically shipped to the developing world for sorting and/or disposal. Photo from Accra, Ghana.
Skies darken at a coal-burning power plant in the United Kingdom.
Shanghai, China, a sprawling megacity of 24 million.
Ground zero in the war on nature – cattle graze amongst burning Amazon jungle in Brazil.
Depleted oil fields are yet another symptom of ecological overshoot; Kern River Oil Field, California.
Sometimes called the Brazil of the North, Canada has not been kind to its native forests. This image shows clear-cut logging on Vancouver Island.
Aerial view of an oil fire following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
A shepherd by the Yellow River cannot stand the smell, Inner Mongolia, China.
Tar sands-related tailing ponds are among the largest toxic impoundments on Earth and lie in unlined dykes mere meters from the Athabasca River in Alberta, Canada. Indigenous communities downstream are fearful of being poisoned by toxic seepage into the food chain.
As far as the eye can see, greenhouses cover the landscape in Almeria, Spain.
An industrialized landscape – center pivot irrigation grid amongst square fields in western Kansas.
Massive haul trucks support surface mining operations in the tar sands region of Alberta, Canada, one of the largest known deposits of unconventional (bitumen, in this case) oil resources.
People jostle for food relief distribution following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
One of the most powerful and disruptive storms in U.S. history, Hurricane Katrina nears landfall in 2005.
One of Earth’s most vulnerable nations to climate change, the Maldive Islands are severely threatened by rising sea levels.
