Photographer Edward Burtynsky: A Picture is Worth 1000 Spreadsheets
Listen to Peter and Jackie speak in front of a live audience with world-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky at the office of GBE Energy in Calgary (recorded on April 14, 2023). Edward is regarded as one of the world’s most accomplished contemporary photographers, known for his large-format images of natural environments altered by industry. His collections are included in over 80 major museums around the world.
Peter and Jackie talk about how Edward’s industrial pictures show the impact of human consumption on the Earth, including (among other things) oil and gas, farming, mining, and waste. Edward shares his views on energy, environmental sustainability, energy transition, climate change, and the growing footprint of humankind.
Content referenced in this episode:
- Edward Burtynsky’s website https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/
- Edward talks about a popular picture he took of a nickel mine tailings pond in Ontario. https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/tailings
- The Paul Kuhn Gallery is hosting an Edward Burtynsky exhibition from April 15 to May 27, 2023 http://www.paulkuhngallery.com/
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Episode 197 transcript
Disclosure:
The information and opinions presented in this ARC Energy Ideas podcast are provided for informational purposes only and are subject to the disclaimer link in the show notes.
Announcer:
This is the ARC Energy Ideas podcast with Peter Tertzakian and Jackie Forrest. Exploring trends that influence the energy business.
Jackie Forrest:
Welcome to the ARC Energy Ideas podcast, I’m Jackie Forest.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I’m Peter Tertzakian and welcome back. Well, Jackie, you’re just back from Hawaii. You got a little bit of a tan and you look very relaxed, but I sense you’re getting back into the numbers.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, well, I don’t feel very relaxed and my holiday feels a little long time ago, but yeah, we’re always into the numbers. We’re always trying to analyze things with numbers.
Peter Tertzakian:
I know. And oftentimes I look at numbers, of course, I’ve been looking at numbers all my career, but you look at them and the charts and the graphs and the tables, they do tell a story, but quite often I tell my audiences that I present to the proverbial picture is worth 1000 words. And to the more numerical audience, as I say. “The picture is worth 1000 spreadsheets”. A bar chart doesn’t tell what is happening in the world. And oftentimes they just say, “Close your laptop, look out the window when you’re driving home. Look at what you see around you when you’re on vacation. Take a look and see what’s going on in the world of energy and do a reality check.” And I also tell people, “Take a photo, take it back much as I do. Take a look at it and just see what you see.” And for us, our lens is energy. See what you think of it as energy, But we’re delighted today because…
Jackie Forrest:
Today we have someone who has put his life towards taking pictures of industry and energy. And we’re very happy today to have Ed Burtynsky, the photographer. Welcome to the show.
Edward Burtynsky:
Great to be here, Jackie.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, thanks for coming, Ed. It’s delightful to be here. And so for our audience to envision where we are, this is one of the handfuls of live recordings that we’ve done. We are in the offices of GBE Energy, which has graciously offered their space, and is also Corey Paddock, who is the CEO and is an avid collector of Burtynsky photographs. And so for those of you in our listening audience, I just want you to envision a cool office space in downtown Calgary, sort of a modern vibe with photographs of Edward Burtynsky all around us. And we’re going to get to know Ed a little bit better here, and he’s going to tell us why he’s in town. I think you’re from Toronto, right?
Edward Burtynsky:
I’m from Toronto. I flew in this morning and I’ve been represented by Paul Kuhn in Calgary now for probably 15, or 20 years. And so Calgary’s been always a stop along the way in my exhibitions. And so I’ve had a long-standing relationship with Calgary and with Edmonton. I had a big show, the Alberta Art Gallery, the oil show when I did a whole show in oil and I’ve photographed Alberta several times.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about your photographs here in a minute because you’re being already somewhat modest. Your shows are, concurrently going on in Hong Kong and New York. You have exhibited in some of the finest galleries around the world. It’s so lovely to see a Canadian of your stature achieve these levels as a photographer. And we’re delighted to have you. Now, I know as a listener to a podcast, you as our audience are not able to see where we are or see the photographs, so I encourage you to go to edwardburtynsky.com, whether you’re on your phone or maybe you’re sitting in front of a computer or your iPad or whatever, and you can kind of follow along or check out the website as we go. But maybe we’ll start, Ed, by just telling us how you got to be a photographer.
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, I fell in love with it as a kid. So when I was back in the ’60s, this was way pre-digital, and then all we had was a family camera, and so kids weren’t able to take pictures and it was always taken out during special events on a Sunday when we’re all dressed up or a special event, a birthday. But that was it. So it’s not like today, but at 11, I was lucky that my dad was interested in photography and he got a dark room. And in that dark room that he got, there were three cameras in a box and he said, “Here’s yours.” I remember it was like a Minolta, a 35, but the magic was that it had these 100-foot rolls of Tri-X film. For those who love photography, it’s one of the classic films. And it had cassettes and I could spool off these cassettes and put them in the camera and shoot whatever I wanted.
So if I wanted to take my first foray into photography was 36 pictures of my dog jumping in the snow. And then I went and processed the film for the first time. And in the magic of a dark orange light in the furnace room in the wintertime, up comes this image of my dog. And to me, it was like magic. And so from that time on, I could just spool off anytime I wanted and take pictures. So I always had a camera with my friends and they didn’t because again, it was expensive, but I had all the chemicals, I had all the film.
So I had this free-flowing and I was just fascinated with the fact that I was in a three-dimensional world. But when I took a whole bunch of pictures, one of them, I usually took many because that first experience of 36 of my dog, two of them were great, the rest of them were mediocre. And I realized all pictures aren’t alike. And the flattening of the three-dimensional world into this two-dimensional piece of paper, there was some magic to it. And I was curious about what the world looked like as a picture. And that was my intuitive way of training my eye and taking pictures as a young kid.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Well, now you’re a world-renowned photographer. It’s from the start of taking pictures of dogs that you’ve differentiated yourself by taking these pictures of industry and humans’ impact on the planet. So what got you into that? What made that something you wanted to take photos of? Because those are things most people want to take photos of things that weatherize seeing, not things we don’t like seeing.
Edward Burtynsky:
My father died when I was 15 and I wanted to go to university. So my mother didn’t have any funds and resources, so I had to put myself through school. And I was born in St. Catherine’s, which was an industrial town. It was a GM town. And I got work in large industries. My first job was in a big frame plant, punching out frames for trucks. Heavy, heavy labor. And then I went to the GM plant, I went to the Ford plant, and then when I was 19, I heard that there was good money to be made mining.
So I went to Red Lake and became a minor for six months to earn enough money to buy a camera and go to the school of photography. At a certain point, I realized that there’s this whole world of an industry that we never get a chance to see, and the camera was this fascinating way to transcribe those worlds that we partake of every day. They say a writer should write about something that they’re familiar with or something that they somehow own or have been part of their biography. Well, this is part of my biography, and I decided that I would train my camera on the worlds that we partake in but never get to see.
Peter Tertzakian:
So mining sort of was the entree industry and industry is often at conflict with nature. And that’s what you specialize in terms of bringing people’s awareness to what’s going on behind the scenes. And so let’s talk about that because, if you’re on Ed’s website, the splash page has the quote, “We come from nature. There is an importance to having a certain reverence for what nature is because we are connected to it. If we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves.” Can you sort of expand on your emotions around what you do as you see a conflict between nature and industry?
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, yeah. When I first started taking pictures of industry, it was kind of out of scale and awe, and the lack of familiarity that I had, and we all have with those worlds behind those walls were the things that we use every day with the cars or the planes and all those kinds of industries were again not known to us. So it was out of this curiosity that I began. But then as I went into mining and when I started seeing deforestation and mining even large-sericulture, I started realizing that the victim here is nature.
As our success continues, as technology gets more and more sophisticated and more capable of extracting whether it’s forests or trees or minerals, that on the other side of that is this diminishing of the natural world. And so in many ways that the whole body of work almost stands as a lament for the loss of nature to our success. My father, when he was alive took me into force when I was three years old to go mushroom picking. We went fishing on boats and we went into the north and I explored that and I was as a kid the forest all the time. So nature was kind of part of my DNA when I grew up. So there had to be this understanding and reverence for I think nature for me to understand that something is being lost in our success.
Jackie Forrest:
Now, do you think you got a selection bias because you focus on the very negative things without the context of those things being part of the landscape, but then there is lots of the landscape that doesn’t like that and you don’t get that context by seeing a narrow scope of a picture that’s pretty ugly in some of these industrial areas? Do you think it leads us to think we’re in big trouble, but we lose context that, and I don’t denied by the way that humans are having a bigger and bigger footprint on the world, but we lose that context that isn’t just all there is. There’s like beautiful parts of the world as well.
Edward Burtynsky:
Yeah, there is. And I’ve actually, really tried to take these industries and apply a lot of what I learned in university about the history of art and the history of photography. I’ve taken references from abstract expressionism, even the great modernists in some contemporary photography. There’s a group called the New Topographics that came out in the mid-‘70s, that was a big influence on my work. I even looked at the original practitioners of photography in the eight 1850s, Carlton Watkins, and the work they did with these big cameras.
So I’ve kind of taken references from the whole history of art and photography and applied I think the kinds of compositions using color on all these different industries and try to find whether it’s a refinery, I would go with one kind of look and the way of thinking and approach or mines that would be whole other approach. Or we went to do the shipbreaking work. Each one of these was kind of unlocking a puzzle of how to visually capture it in a way that’s interesting and intriguing but also isn’t quote-unquote “ugly”, that it’s something that draws you in that your curiosity.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. And there’s no question that there’s a capture when you stand in front of any of your amazing photographs, especially when they’re blown up to four feet or five feet, there’s this feeling of being drawn in. And so as you talk to people in galleries that are viewing your works, come to events like this one here, I would suggest that a large fraction of your audience is sort of affluent, more of the elite elements of society, they’re the ones that can afford your works. And as they look at your works and experience that capture that you speak of, do they connect the dots between, the salt ponds on the other side of the world or the oil fields or the mines or the scars on the planet,” to their own behavior? Because at the end of the day, those things are supplied to satisfy the demands of what we value in our modern-day world here, especially in the more affluent countries which consume your photographs.
Edward Burtynsky:
So yeah, I think when I’m talking about my work, one of the things that I’m always careful to say is that I don’t photograph disasters. I photograph business as usual, so in the world that we live in, this is the yin to the yang. To have a city like this, all these materials, where does the silica from glass come from? Where do the steel from the rebar and the columns and the concrete come from? Everything has a source in the natural world. And so what I’m saying is I’m kind of reconnecting us in an urban landscape with this other landscape that we also need to be paying attention to that this one is where animals and fish and megafauna and plant life are abundant and what we’re doing, we should be aware. And so therefore, again, we don’t get a chance to go to those places.
Not a lot of people are going to fly over the oil sands or not a lot of people are going to go and fly over a mine or visit a mine or a quarry. So in a way through the camera, I’m also careful to point out that I don’t use Photoshop as a compositional tool. Everything I photograph is a place that I can take you to and show you and say, “Yes, this does exist in the world.” Of course, I’m being very selective in the frame and I’m controlling the gaze. But at the same time, these are all places in the world, even though they look surreal.
Peter Tertzakian:
But this is your gaze. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the gaze of the person looking at it and drawing the connection between their buying a luxury piece of fashion, a car, or some other thing, and the fact that the raw materials for their pleasure came from this scar on the planet on the other side of the world.
Edward Burtynsky:
But I think actually in many ways I see the work as revelatory and not accusatory. And so I’m trying to pull the curtain back on where those worlds are. So I think that, and anything like music or art, the completion of the meaning happens in everyone’s mind and it’s slightly different. So I can’t control it, and some people might see the piece as like, it’s interesting because I think the piece can sit on a corporate wall. It could also sit on the wall of the environmental group, or so it can be used in either one of these formats. So I’m not saying, and I’m not trying to pin a meaning on it saying, “This is bad,” or, “This is good.” I’m saying “This exists”. I’m photographing in a particular way to allow people to have access to these worlds. But I’m not editorializing. I’m not saying, “You need to see this as a negative thing.”
We need energy. I got here on energy on a jet, and if it wasn’t there, I wouldn’t be here. So I understand that we’re all implicated in this. So it’s a question of whether we all need to see that we all live on this planet, and if we have children, we want them to have a place to live on this planet in 50 years and 100 years, and their children have a place on this planet. So they’re going to be looking at what we’re doing right now in this decade, it’s going to be the most important decade for our kids talking to us in 30 years and saying, “What did you do during that time? You knew what was coming, what did you do?” So this is our moment to do it.
Jackie Forrest:
Right, and to capture that. Well, let’s talk. I just came back from Hawaii and the little story is there was a lot of stuff about plastic waste in the ocean there and signs everywhere. And I got myself thinking, “Do you think the plastic waste in the world is coming from Hawaii?” I think it’s mostly coming from Southeast Asia, and we tend to, in the developed countries, spend all our time trying to fix the problems within our borders and think that we were made a solution. Greenhouse gas emissions might be a good one. We’re very focused on reducing our own, but meanwhile, they’re growing in places like Asia. So a lot of your pictures, or some of your pictures really focus on giving us a perspective of some of the scars on the planet that are happening in the developing countries, is why you’re taking those photos, trying to create more recognition to people in the west to think a little broader than just inside their own country?
Edward Burtynsky:
To look at globalism and industry and how we’re reshaping the planet, in a way, I felt I had to go to China. And originally I got interested in going to China to see the largest dam being built. So this is in 2001, 2002, the Three Gorgeous Dam, which still exists as the biggest dam. I don’t think any dam will ever be built that’ll be bigger than that dam. And so I started there, and then I started seeing all the recycling and the e-waste and the industry and the big factories and all of that became a really interesting thing to see.
And of course, China, now I think it’s 1.5 billion people. A province of 35 million which is the population of Canada, in China, doesn’t even get a seat at the table in Beijing. Just to give a sense of scale. So when you start looking at Southeast Asia with 2.5 billion people between India and China and Indonesia, you know, start realizing that if we want to understand what’s happening to the planet and what we need to do, we need to understand what’s happening over there as well. If you look at the global energy footprint, I think China’s now 25%, the United States is 12%. I think we’re like 2% or just under 2% of-
Jackie Forrest:
Greenhouse gas emissions.
Edward Burtynsky:
Greenhouse gas emissions. Yeah.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yep, yep. Yeah. So I want to sort of follow up on this a little bit about exposing through the lens what’s going on on the other side of the world and taking into account what you said a little bit earlier, that everybody has a different perspective on art and how they come at it, including photography. I have to tell you my perspective in looking at some of the photographs on the other side of the world stems from, if it’s not in my backyard, it’s not my problem. Sort of the Western kind of attitude. Maybe can you talk a little bit about that? Is there a sense of that in your work? Look what’s going on the other side of the world wake up and I know you said you’re not accusatory, but honestly, I think for me there was that implication there. It was wake up, if it’s not in your backyard, it is your problem. Oh, sorry. Yeah, that’s right.
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, it is because quite frankly, if you know, look at all of the projects, the coal energy projects, power plants that are planned between India and China, if those come to fruition and now Africa, this is not going to work. It’s just no matter what we do is not going to work. So we need to pay attention there. I often said that being there, we from the West need to help them fund alternatives to building those plants because each one of those coal-burning plants, and that’s what they burn coal. They’re not even burning natural gas because it’s cheap and plentiful and a lot of places in China and throughout, and a lot of it’s coming from Australia. So that, I think, is what keeps me up at night is those plants being built and they all have a 50-year lifespan and they’re not going to want to tear them down.
And so in many ways, we need to pay attention there. Although I can’t say that our current relationship with China right now is doing very well, whether Canada or the United States, I think we have to get back to the table they still are the largest producers of green technologies and they still produce more solar panels than anybody else in the world. But even with that, the amount of new energy coming on board, we’re still not being able to flatten the curve, let alone start bending it down. So we’re still on an upward trajectory for CO2 emissions per year.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. I agree with you. We’re very busy managing our emissions, but just even more important is stopping the growth of coal-fired power generation in other places. Well, I want to show you this picture, you already know it, but show our audience this picture. This was a picture taken in Nigeria and it’s some of the oil pollution now. You took pictures of the oil sands in I think first in 2007 and in that 2007 to 2009 period, the pictures of the oil sands, not only from yourself but other artists got out and it really, I think was a big part.
There was one of many things that happened that made put the oil sands kind of on the map globally and not in a positive way. When you take pictures like this in developing countries, does that result in change? Do people look at these pictures and are changes made? I would argue in our oil sands that from 2007 to 2009 period, a lot has changed. There are still some pretty not flattering pictures up there, but there’s a lot of positive change that’s happened since that time. And I’m wondering if that’s the same here.
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, I think so. There was a movement, if you look at the history of that picture, that’s called oil bunkering, and the locals were taught by the military how to tap into, often Shell was the main company that was there, tap into these pressurized pipelines, put a spigot on it, and then fill boats, or barrels full of oil, go over and put them onto boats to go to the ships and tank them away to refineries as stolen oil and they’re stealing a lot of it, or they were just processing it themselves. And makeshift refineries, it’s called bunkering. And basically what they do is they start a fire underneath the tank and the evaporation comes off as steam from the oil, the light sweet crude that they have there. And on the top of the water, it would all float up.
The first 2% was gas, the second 2% was kerosene, and then 40% of diesel. So about 45% of that refinery they could do and get a valuable product. For the other 55%, you need a bigger refinery to get the asphalt and the oils and the lubricants and all the other things. The plastics that we got out of the oil, they couldn’t do anything with it, so they just poured it into the landscape. So that’s what you’re looking at is illegal, but at that point, the whole illegal operations were being destroyed. So that is a destroyed bunkering operation that the government was trying to do to correct it. That’s just the remaining oil still spewing out of that area a year later after they had stopped the illegal bunkering. So it was one of the most horrific contested landscapes. But again, when you have oil extraction in a place where you don’t have governance, you get that.
Peter Tertzakian:
One of the things that we try and do in our podcast, Jackie, is sort of try and connect the dots more clearly, even with numbers, but the guests and things are the connection between supply and demand. Because so often there’s a tendency to vilify only the supply side of the equation and forget again about our consumption. And I know I’m sort of on a bit of a rant on this podcast about the consumption side because I think it’s so important because the solutions to our environmental sustainability challenges lie equally on the demand side as it does on the consumption side.
Jackie Forrest:
I would say even more so, because, without the demand, people would stop producing these products.
Peter Tertzakian:
No, absolutely. And what I like about Ed’s work, is it’s not just only about the scars on the planet, but it’s also some of the photos about industrialization and for example, this parking lot full of vehicles, which is a consumer item, sorry, which is a consumer item as well as the photo on the right, which is the tires. So Ed, can you talk about photographing closer to consumption versus going out into the wilderness in the far reaches of the continent’s photographing the source of the supply of stuff?
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, yeah. When I did the oil project, and oftentimes when I do my projects, I try to conceptually move across a range of ideas. So when I decided to do a project on oil, I think it was the mid-’90s and I was going to do the tailings, into, that was in ’96. And I remember there was a brand new asphalt road and it was raining and I had a plastic rain jacket and I had a car, had a plasticized steering wheel, and I just put in two quarts of oil because my oil was low and just filled up with gas. And I went, “Everything I’m doing right now is touched by oil and I’m on this asphalt.” And I went, “I’m going to show people mining because we don’t get to see where copper or nickel or anything comes from,” but oil that drives all, even the mining and drives allows me to get there.
I don’t know the landscape of that. And I kind of started to think oil is, we don’t see it. It’s like the blood in our veins, it provides for our life, but you don’t want to see the blood on the floor because there’s a problem. You don’t want to see oil on the ground. It’s a problem. So it is almost like veins of energy coming in. And I said, I want to somehow create a project where I pull the curtain back into that world where the oil comes from. That’s where I went to the very beginning where in California where the first gushers came and they’re still pumping oil near Bakersfield. I went to all the different areas I could find where we’re extracting oil at the source in the landscape. And then I looked at refineries and then I looked at the culture of oil.
I looked at the consequences of oil tire piles, the cars, the scrap cars, the new cars, all of it. I started to show a complete life cycle that oils allowed for and in the book, and that show I had at the Alberta Art Gallery was that show. And it was really interesting. And it’s not like saying, “Alberta is bad, contributing to the problem.” I agree. We’re all implicated here, we’re all on the consumer side of this. And it’s a question of how are we making decisions in our own lives what are we doing? What companies are we buying from? What are those companies doing to help us do the right thing as consumers? These are all major questions that we need to ask if we’re going to get to net zero and if we’re going to, I think the scientists are saying we should get to half of our energy consumption in the next 10 years or 15 years or by 2030.
Jackie Forrest:
2040 or something.
Edward Burtynsky:
It’s like, “Okay”-
Jackie Forrest:
Half by 2030 and all gone by 2040 is the latest guidance.
Edward Burtynsky:
That’s a lot of work. That’s a lot of work.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, first of all, I did encourage people to go to your website there. You can look at the oil section on the website and see some of those photos. And I’m appreciative that you included not only the supply side but also the consumption side because I think too much of our debate around energy is focused on the supply side without recognizing you have to look at the whole chain, the whole pathway. But let’s talk a bit more about energy since this is an energy-focused podcast and you’ve impressed me with your knowledge of refining and energy so far.
And I would say that following the pathways is going to get more complicated for transportation because now we’re going to move to mine and extract all sorts of different minerals to support transportation that we haven’t before. And we’ll get to that. But first I wanted to talk to you about studies that have been done. There have been numerous universities that have done studies that have linked corruption and authoritative type governments with poor environmental performance. From your traveling in the world, would you say you’ve seen that in action? The more corrupt a country is, the more you’re going to see environmental practices that are leaving scars on the earth that are bigger than they could be.
Edward Burtynsky:
Absolutely. Nigeria is the case in point. At one point, I was reading a report that Delta was producing, the largest delta in all of Africa, used to have the greatest concentration of megafauna. There is no megafauna left. The forest is almost depleted. And so it’s taking a beating. The people who were there naturally have been displaced and there hasn’t been any support. So none of the money comes back to them properly. That’s why they’re illegally bunkering there.
So yeah, when you don’t have governance and when you don’t have oil whether it’s Venezuela, whether it’s Nigeria, many of these countries, you find that the governments don’t have to go to the people to create a brain trust to create value. It’s sitting right there. It’s easy to skim off the top. And so it is an authoritarian government. And I’m Ukrainian, but look at Russia. Russia couldn’t be doing the kind of what it’s doing right now in the world if it wasn’t for the oil and gas going out of there every day. It’s supporting what they’re doing right now. So authoritarian governments tend not to pay a lot of attention to the environment.
Peter Tertzakian:
So the photographs that you’ve taken corroborate the spreadsheets and the bar charts and the numbers that come out of these academic studies. But the photographs that have been taken in and around the oil sands, some went into National Geographic, not yours, but yours are a similar sort of ilk. They’re taken circa 2008, and they’re not flattering, the tail ponds and so on. And as Jackie said, there have been some improvements along the way and more to come. Maybe give us your response to even back then the oil industry saying, “Well, wait a minute, these people have just cherry-picked the worst of the worst images and are not showing all the good work we’re doing in reclamation and all that. Where are those photos and why are they not making it into the mainstream media?” How do you respond to that?
Edward Burtynsky:
Reclamation doesn’t make a very interesting photograph. Number one. It’s just grasses on a flat field.
Peter Tertzakian:
Exactly.
Edward Burtynsky:
No, but I think I’ve always looked for them, I’ve allowed whatever I’m photographing to help me determine the point of view or where the gaze was to lock off the gaze. And I think it’s visually compelling is what I’m after. And so I’m also looking at the color, I’m looking at form and line and texture and light. All of those things are at play. So they are a real consequence. I’ve done tailings in mining and there are tailings in the oil sense as well. So it’s part of the process.
In mining, there are two types of tailings. There are dry tailings and wet tailings. The wet tailings are where they pulverized the rock and got the copper or whatever they were getting out of it. And then there are the dry tailings, which are the rocks that don’t have enough minerals to go into the process, but they still need to be put aside. And they create a lot of problems too because they leach out a lot of minerals and things there as well. So to me, it’s like about the process that there’s still, this is part and parcel of getting oil this way.
Jackie Forrest:
Right. Now you’re in Alberta, so we’re just giving you a hard time about what the oil sends pictures. But I look at your pictures of Nigeria and you have other pictures that aren’t so flattering of other jurisdictions that extract oil, but it seems like the oil sands pictures, and they’re not all yours, they put oil sands on the map. They resulted in, I would call a type of sanction against the industry. Some investors won’t invest in oil sands, and it’s not just because of the photos, but I think they were a big part of bringing that to people’s consciousness. Do you think that’s fair when you’ve got pictures of places like Nigeria, I’m sure if we got photos of Russia, there’d be some pretty ugly pictures there in terms of their oil fields. Do you think it’s fair that Canada’s resource sector has sort of faced, more sanctions than others that may also have big environmental impacts?
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, I think quite frankly, the challenge with the oil sands is that if you’re taking light sweet crude and pumping it out of the ground, it’s a very different process than oil sands. And oil sand is a mining operation, and so it is a lot of displaced surface. It’s the largest mining surface operation of any operation of a mining operation on the planet. It’s disruptive. It disrupts the surface of the landscape and displaces a lot of the natural force.
I think if you look at environmental groups like Bill McKibben or even Al Gore, they’ve come and they’ve said, “Look, the energy footprint of getting oil this way…” The oil sands are kind of like early-stage oil. I mean, give it a little bit more compression and another 30 million years, and it’ll probably be oil that you can pump out of the ground with pressure and everything. But now this is a kind of an earlier version of oil, and that’s what they call it, synthetic crude, you’re having to separate it from the sand. And I think that the carbon footprint of actually getting it out of the ground, adds a dimension to it that makes it scarier as a source of energy than even conventional light sweet crude.
Jackie Forrest:
Yeah, I agree. Today it’s higher carbon, and I think that is part of it, it’s not just the pictures of the tailing ponds, it’s high carbon. I will say that the industry, hopefully, it’ll come back in 2030 and we’ll have a different story to tell about those carbon emissions. But today they’re high and, but I think they’re going to change.
Peter Tertzakian:
Well, they are changing. And just as a point of correction, I mean not all of the oil sands are mining. I mean, a substantial fraction is also with-
Edward Burtynsky:
SAGD.
Peter Tertzakian:
SAGDs, steam assisted gravity drainage. And so there are all sorts of improvements coming along there. But I want to forget back to this idea that if we see it and it’s in our backyard, it’s terrible, it’s evil, but hey, if we shut it down and get it from some other part of the world, it’s okay because it’s not in my backyard.
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, I don’t agree with that.
Peter Tertzakian:
No, I know you don’t. But there’s sort of the psychology, sort of the underlying, don’t you think?
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, I think so.
Peter Tertzakian:
It’s not my backyard, it’s okay. Whether it’s making, as I said, stuff for wallets, handbags, and shoes, or whether it’s for putting gasoline in your vehicle. Because that’s sort of happening, the more we shut down or sanction, I’ll call it, our industry. But then we have to start in the Western world importing more of our oil from some of the nasty places. But hey, it’s not my backyard, so therefore I’m not going to turn a blind eye to it. And I know I’m being kind of, I don’t know what the word is, not harsh, but I think there’s a reality to that. Don’t you think?
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, I think we’re being criticized right now for not getting enough natural gas off of our shores to help Europe right now with what’s happening in not taking gas from Russia, that everybody has to step up right now, particularly right now with the war effort. And some are arguing that the UN is arguing that we’re not doing its part. We are a democratically elected society that works under rules and regulations, and we’re in a fair society and we have a lot of oil. So they’re saying in a way, there’s an obligation that b I often, when I do, end up having conversations about this with people and they’re saying it’s bad, and I’m going, “Well wait for a second, you have to be careful what you wish for. If, if we stop oil tomorrow, it’s called anarchy. If we look at how much we depend on every day, so what we need to be talking about is transition and rapid transition.
And so that to me is a useful conversation. Cease and desist is not a useful conversation because it’s unrealistic. So how do we do that, manage that slipstream more sustainably and do it in a just way so that… In the boom and bust cycle of oil, it’s not great because it wasn’t that long ago there was a bust. And so it’s a very hard thing to ride through dependent on the price of a barrel of oil for your economy. So the sooner you can transition to a more stable system, that’s even better for everybody. So you get away from the boom and bust, and it also solves a lot of problems, but we’re going to need energy. It’s a question of how to re-engineer our society to both go to electric cars, heat exchange units for our homes, and heating more electrification, all of that. That’s the way out.
Jackie Forrest:
Well, Peter and I both are big believers in electric cars. We think that is the technology of the future, and over time we’re going to have less demand for oil, but we’re going to switch that for more demand for things like nickel, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth because it still takes a lot of natural resources to drive electric cars as well. And even you talked about electrification, right? Lots of copper, lots more mining. We’re talking about some estimates, three, four, fivefold increase in the amount of equipment and things we’d need for our electricity versus today. Have you thought about doing an exhibit around electrification that would show people some of the upstream impacts of electrification?
Edward Burtynsky:
Yeah, well, I’ve already started doing some of that. I went and did the lithium mines in the Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the highest concentrations of lithium in the world. I’m researching rare earth minerals and looking at that as potential, mining, and copper. I’ve already photographed the biggest copper mines in the world, but I do understand that we’re not going to go there without mining. We’re not going to go there without some kind of extraction. It is the consequence of who we are as a species and technology. And I think all the signs of what we need to do are there, all the technology, we know what we need to do. It’s just hard getting there. And there’s a lot of entrenched interest interests to not change things. And we have to be careful that those don’t control the narrative here, that we need to make sure that I think everybody’s on board and understanding that we need to get here if you care about the future.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah, it’s interesting about the entrenched interests. We end up swapping potentially one set of entrenched interests for a new set of entrenched interests as we shift from going less petroleum-driven vehicles to more electric vehicles which rely heavily on lithium, cobalt, and nickel. And I want to show you a photo here of this nickel tailing pond, which you photographed in 1996. And whether it’s the lithium or the nickel, and by the way, this is Ontario, okay? This isn’t the other side of the planet, this is Ontario. And I guess further to Jackie’s question about doing a show on this is the broader question of why all these photos about oil and dirty oil and so on have come forth. But we’re not seeing, in my opinion at least, and I follow a lot of stuff on the news, so much about the negative impacts like this photo that you took of tailing ponds related to mining, which is going to have to, by all accounts, I don’t know, Jackie, just order a magnitude more if we’re going to get into the electrification world.
Edward Burtynsky:
Yeah, well, Sudbury wasn’t very happy about that picture. But also at the same time in the art world, it’s become my, the diptych, it’s part of a diptych, has become one of the most sought-after images that I’ve ever taken in my career. And so from a museum and collector’s point of view, it’s become iconographic and there is this bold red gesture, right through a dark moody landscape. So I think as an image, I think it’s a fascinating image. It isn’t all that toxic. It’s what that is rivers of rust. In other words, they took out the nickel, they took out the copper, and they took out anything else that was valuable. There’s a little bit of silver in there, but they didn’t take out the iron ore because iron ore mines were far more profitable and they could mine at a different rate.
So it wasn’t valuable to them. It wasn’t worth taking out the iron ore. So those are iron ore. Maybe in the future, it will be, and we’ll be able to mine, they’re saying mining tailings will become something of the future when we can extract more things out of those tailings that are already there. The energy to pulverize all of that rock to the point where you can extract the minerals is a big energy footprint. Now, if you can go in there and just process it and put it through another process to get the iron out or anything else that we might have missed in the first round.
A lot of cobalt mining that’s happening is the Glencore mining in the Congo. It’s tailings. They were going for something, they were going for copper, but there was a lot of cobalt. And the cobalt was in the tailings and in high concentrations. So it’s artisanal mining where it’s biblical where they’re going there and filling bags and putting it on their back and walking it out of these tailings ponds. And so they’re mining the tailings for cobalt. So I think the future will be mining tailings.
Jackie Forrest:
Right? Well, let’s hope so. That’s a form of recycling. I think there are hopes that even our oil sands tailing ponds would have that opportunity. I just have a follow-up on that. Why do you think that was such a popular image? Just curious.
Edward Burtynsky:
I think that the powerful gesture, the orange against the black if you look at the print itself, it’s pretty striking. When I shot it, I was shooting with an eight by 10 camera. So when you see the big print, you can see the grains of sand in there. The detail is incredible. And then if you look carefully in the background, you look at those trees and the tailings have been coming up on those birch trees and you’re just looking at the treetops.
The whole base, the half of the tree is in tailings. I walked around that forest in there, and you’re walking on a hard surface, hard pack surface in the treetop because the tailings have come up. They pour them, they’re in through slurry, they pour them in to be able to spread them out, and then it evaporates and creates. So there’s about, I think at that time, 80 meters of tailings with 6000 acres of surface, 70 meters deep. So if you’re ever driven by Sudbury along the Trans Canada Highway, there’s a certain point you come along this bank and it’s huge. That’s the tailings pond, just on the other side of that bank.
Jackie Forrest:
Okay. And you don’t have any context to the size. It looks small here. So this is a quote from one of your works. “Now it is becoming clear that humankind with its population explosion industry and technology has a very short period, also has become an agent of immense global change. Arguably, we are on the cusp of becoming, if we’re not already, the perpetrators of a sixth major extinction event.” So talk about the five other extinction events and why you’re worried about a sixth.
Edward Burtynsky:
Well, I don’t have a history in all five of them, but one was vulcanism, and I think the fourth and fifth one was a meteor impact 65 million years ago. So off the coast of Florida, they estimate it must have been about a four-kilometer diameter meteor struck the planet causing iridium dust, a dust cloud that went into the stratosphere that took, they figured a decade to come out of the atmosphere, which created that dark decade.
Jackie Forrest:
Killed the dinosaurs, right?
Edward Burtynsky:
70% of all life was extinguished. So anything that was small mammals got a better advantage after that. Birds were able to survive. Insects were to survive, but all the big megafauna, the dinosaurs, and the big and bigger animals couldn’t survive. So that was the last big extinction, 65 million years ago. And arguably where as a species, a single species, this is the first time, but of all of them that now a species is causing the change in the state of the planet.
And it’s because of the scale of our population. Technology, the internal combustion engine, the discovery of oil and gas, and the pushing back of diversity farming. By far, farming is our biggest terraforming activity as a species. So if you look at urban is like 1% of arable land, livable land. Farming’s 26%. So farming is by far the largest thing that we’ve done to push back biodiversity by cutting down forests and filling in wetlands to turn into farms and urban as well. We tend to build where there are rivers, where there at deltas, and where it’s good, rich soils. We often build our cities on that kind of land as well. But urban is about 1% of the land, and about 25% is not buildable because of mountains and whatever else. So as a species, we are tipping. It’s now clear that we are the equivalent of a meteor impact.
Peter Tertzakian:
And I think we can agree that there’s no easy solution to the three-way tension between supplying earthly resources, our human consumption, and the fact of 8 billion people in this world that are competing for those resources and those goods that they make. So as you see it through your incredible lens, not necessarily a solution, but what is your call to action?
Edward Burtynsky:
If you look at all the players, we have the consumer, all of us, every individual has choices to make, and we can make those choices by eating less meat or buying an electric car. The things that I can’t be trying to electrify my house. I’ve been on an electric car now for six years myself, and I think I’m trying to do what I can with the thinking that if I can get myself to the point where if everybody did this, what I’ve been doing, it very quickly becomes a better world. So I’m trying to create a world that is something that goes back into an envelope as an individual. The things that I can’t control, like flying, I take all my flights and all, when I take a helicopter and use that to do a shoot, I’m estimating on all the fuel consumptions on all my shoots, and then I go in and I find one of the best golden offset companies.
There’s one called Less, which is part of Bullfrog Power in Ontario, and they’re like a gold standard of an offset. They make sure that there is that amount of tonnage taken out of the atmosphere for your usage. So I do a double on that. So everything, so I’ve tried to take my studio in my life and make all the decisions there. But then I also think corporations, I think they’re important in their ESG, but also for their customers, it’s important for companies to make it easier for us as consumers to do the right thing. So if the only way I can get my vegetables is in a plastic container in a grocery store until the grocery store finds another way to do it that isn’t using plastic, then we’re all stuck to that. So there are ways in which corporations, I think can make it easier for us, again, as the consumers and producers to do.
And then of course, I think the role of government is to set a level playing field that is such that everybody knows what the rules are and everybody’s moving towards that sustainable goal. And I think governments can set those level playing fields for everybody to work in because we are in a capitalist system and market-driven consumer capitalism is what makes it all work and gives us all jobs. So I don’t see another is out there that we’re going to go run to communism didn’t work very well. So we still have to kind of refine capitalism to a point that when you get all of the energy going in the right direction, you can get rapid change.
Peter Tertzakian:
Yeah. Well, Jackie, I think we’re pretty much out of time, which is unfortunate because I’m very much enjoying this conversation. Ed Burtynsky, thank you so much for raising our awareness through your lens.
Edward Burtynsky:
My pleasure.
Peter Tertzakian:
And if I may say, as an amateur photographer, your creativity is off the charts and so is your attention to detail And speaking of charts, thanks for turning thousands of spreadsheets into singular images from which we can reflect. And thanks for coming.
Edward Burtynsky:
My pleasure. Thanks.
Jackie Forrest:
All right. Well, Ed, it was a very insightful conversation, so thank you for that. I just want to remind everyone, if you want to learn more or see more, visit the Paul Kuhn Gallery, we will put a link to the gallery in our show notes. We’ll put a link to your website in our show notes so that our listeners can easily find you. And also want to thank again, GBE Energy for hosting this wonderful event. And thank you all for coming. It wouldn’t have been the same without a live audience. So, thank you very much. And to our listeners, thank you for listening to the podcast. If you like this podcast, please rate us on the app that you listen to and tell someone else about us.
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