“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” John Muir
The great Scottish-American naturalist, John Muir inspired the photographer Ansel Adams and led to the creation of the U.S. National Parks Service. Muir, a devoted follower of Charles Darwin, understood like Darwin, that all living things were connected that they rely on a shared environment and that nature can provoke a profound sense of wonder.
Photographing the Icelandic landscape provided me an emotional connection to nature. Its wild empty spaces gave me a sense of vulnerability, but also made me conscious of the environment itself. Looking at energy cycles and their feedback effects on nature provoked a fuller appreciated of climate change. It led me to the concept of The Metabolic Landscape where my photographs confront viewers with the natural metabolism of the Earth and the newer social metabolism established by humans.
For millennia, the climate balance was set by the carbon emissions of volcanoes and the absorption of carbon dioxide back into world’s oceans and forests. Today, the burning of fossil fuels has shifted their balance.
Although we know the Earth’s average surface temperature has increased by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) since the 1880s, driven by human-caused emissions, it is another thing to witness the effect first hand. this fact, but it is another to witness its effects or make the emotional connection to our lives. Muir was more right than he knew. Everything really is connected. Environmental destruction, once localised, ripples across the planet. My photographs investigate the connections between the burning of coal, the main source of the world’s electric power and the melting of glaciers and icebergs.
In land adjacent to one of Muir’s beloved national parks – I came to recognise other connections, as fracking operations for oil in North Dakota graphically reveal the power of the hydrocarbon industry,
Now when I engage in the complexities of this work, I follow Muir, understanding that facts and feelings must go together.
