More than two decades ago, long before the advent of cheap drones, photographer George Steinmetz started strapping on a motorized paraglider—a lightweight machine powered by a backpack motor, with a parachute attached—and sailed over remote areas capturing images of the planet from above.
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[Cover Image: courtesy Abrams Books]In a new book, The Human Planet: Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene, Steinmetz shares stunning photos from his archive, both of the beauty of nature and of the scale of human influence, including plastic-roofed greenhouses sprawling over 74,000 acres in Spain, a mega-dairy in Wisconsin, and buildings packed together on a tiny island in the Maldives that is now more densely populated than Manhattan.
“When you see all this put together, I think that it communicates the magnitude of our impact on the planet,” Steinmetz says. He says that he didn’t begin the project with an environmental agenda. “I’m not a tree hugger…I love exploring the world, and I just started seeing things that were disturbing.”
“One of the takeaways is that maybe it’s time for us as a collective to start reconsidering our relationship to the world and think about how we can live a little more lightly,” he says. “The little things we do can have a significant cumulative effect. I don’t think it’s too big to solve.”
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