I CAPTURED THIS IMAGE in the potash mines below
Berezniki, a Russian town in central Siberia. Most
people don’t have the visual or verbal vocabulary
to really understand what’s happening beneath the
ground in that remote place. And until I visited it
myself and felt the pressure of more than a thou-
sand feet of solid earth and rock and life above me,
neither did I.
This is a landscape that was never meant for
human eyes. The light of the sun will never reach
it. And yet the materials extracted here—destined
to fertilize immense farms in the United States
and elsewhere—are an essential ingredient in the
production of food that sustains the world’s boom-
ing population.
To arrive at this place—a 6,000-mile network of
tunnels in utter uninhabitable darkness—my crew
and I descended in an elevator large enough for
some 40 miners and their equipment. It was foggy;
the damp air would soon chill us to the bone. At the
bottom of the shaft, we boarded trucks, the only illu-
mination coming from the vehicles’ headlights and
our headlamps. Although I’d worked in a gold mine
before I became a photographer, this experience was
unsettling. The tunnels would split and split again
and then split yet again. I began marking our path
with an X. If our lights burned out, we would be lost
and no one would hear our calls. Voices fade away
quickly underground.
And yet it was beautiful down there amid the
brightly colored layers of an ancient seabed—the
orange striations of the potash, the undulating lines
created by the intense pressure of the earth above.
The nautilus-shell impressions, however, were
made by a machine. The miners call it a combine;
it excavates tunnels with spinning discs on two arms.
When the combine reverses course, it carves these
medallions into the rock.
Those impressions, and the tunnels themselves,
are markers of the Anthropocene, a possible new
geologic age defined by human activity. Scientists
call such alteration to Earth’s rock and sediment
“anthroturbation.” Long after our cities have been
overgrown by forests, these tunnels will remain as
clues to our existence, much as the cave paintings of
Lascaux tell us of people who lived 20,000 years ago.
I’ve spent the past 40 years photographing the
ways in which humans have altered natural land-
scapes, mostly through large-scale systems such as
transportation, industry, and agriculture. I look for
massive examples of what I call “human taking”—
the removal from the Earth of the materials used to
make our stuff. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t deeply
concerned about this world of consumption that
my daughters are inheriting.
Few people see where the resources that make
their life possible come from. Most of us see sky-
scrapers but don’t see the silica mines that created
the glass. We see concrete but not the sandpits where
it’s made. We see farmland but not the forests that
used to grow there—or the potash mines that pro-
vide the fertilizer that nourishes the crops. We don’t
see the yin to the yang—that for every one of our
great creations, there is a greater act of destruction
somewhere in nature. j
Edward Burtynsky’s most recent work is the multimedia
Anthropocene Project. His previous story for the magazine
was about California’s water crisis.STORY AND PHOTOGRAPH
BY EDWARD BURTYNSKYCOURTESY HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY AND BRYCE WOLKOWITZ GALLERY, NEW YORK/ROBERT KOCH GALLERY, SAN FRANCISCO 27