“Humans have wandered the Earth for thousands of years but never has our capacity to alter the Earth’s ecosystem ... been more prominent than it is today.”
Kat Lahr, Parallelism of Cyclicality
My photographs investigate the Anthropocene, or rather, My Anthropocene, since it is investigation by me about the world in which I live and move through. The word was coined in 2000 by atmospheric scientists to indicate the overwhelming changes brought about by humans over the last 200 years and especially in the last 70 years. The landscapes I investigate - the Arctic Circle, the USA and Europe - are places where human activity is pressing against ecological boundaries. If the Anthropocene is new, planet-scale concept, its precise form varies from place to place.
As a child I was brought up during the Cold War. Then the atomic bomb was the cause of my fears; now, as a grandmother, the risks to our planet cause me to shift my concerns to the living environment, prompting me, through my photography, not only to document the scientifically assessed factors of risk but also to argue for a more caring and intelligent stewardship of the natural world.
These are landscape photographs relating to places of metabolic distress. These include settings which produce CO2 emissions alongside scarring the earth through opencast mining, or drilling into the earth in the case of hydraulic fracturing; cutting down forests, thereby reducing the biological space of other creatures; creating pollutant environments due to the recent explosion of consumer waste; and compromising limited fresh water resources by cultivating deserts for new settlements or agriculture.
This work comes from Glover’s exhibition and book The Metabolic Landscape exhibition and book, co-authored with Gina's partner Dr Geof Rayner, and daughter Jessica Rayner, published by Black Dog publishing.
