Edward Burtynsky photographs the landscape of oil

44,376 views ・ 2009-11-13

TED


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00:15
I started my journey 30 years ago.
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And I worked in mines. And I realized that
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this was a world unseen.
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And I wanted, through color and large format cameras
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and very large prints,
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to make a body of work that somehow
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became symbols of our
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use of the landscape,
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how we use the land.
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And to me this was
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a key component that somehow, through this medium of photography,
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which allows us to contemplate these landscapes,
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that I thought photography was perfectly suited
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to doing this type of work.
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And after 17 years of photographing large industrial landscapes,
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it occurred to me that
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oil is underpinning the scale and speed.
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Because that is what has changed,
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is the speed at which we're taking all our resources.
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And so then I went out to develop a whole series
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on the landscape of oil.
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And what I want to do is to kind of map an arc
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that there is extraction, where we're taking it from the ground,
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refinement. And that's one chapter.
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01:15
The other chapter that I wanted to look at was
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how we use it -- our cities,
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our cars, our motorcultures,
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where people gather around the vehicle
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as a celebration.
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And then the third one is this idea of the end of oil,
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this entropic end,
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where all of our parts of cars, our tires,
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oil filters,
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helicopters, planes --
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where are the landscapes where all of that stuff ends up?
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And to me, again, photography was
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a way in which I could explore and research the world,
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and find those places.
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And another idea that I had as well,
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that was brought forward by an ecologist --
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he basically did a calculation where
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he took one liter of gas and said,
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well, how much carbon it would take, and how much organic material?
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It was 23 metric tons for one liter.
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So whenever I fill up my gas,
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I think of that liter, and how much carbon.
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And I know that oil comes from the ocean and phytoplankton,
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but he did the calculations for our Earth
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and what it had to do to produce that amount of energy.
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From the photosynthetic growth,
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it would take 500 years of that growth
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to produce what we use, the 30 billion barrels we use per year.
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And that also brought me to the fact that
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this poses such a risk to our society.
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Looking at 30 billion per year,
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we look at our two largest suppliers,
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Saudi Arabia and now Canada, with its dirty oil.
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And together they only form about 15 years of supply.
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The whole world, at 1.2 trillion estimated reserves,
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only gives us about 45 years.
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So, it's not a question of if, but a question of when
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peak oil will come upon us.
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So, to me, using photography --
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and I feel that all of us need to now begin to really
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take the task of using our talents,
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our ways of thinking,
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to begin to deal with what I think is probably
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one of the most challenging issues of our time,
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how to deal with our energy crisis.
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And I would like to say that, on the other side of it,
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30, 40 years from now, the children that I have,
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I can look at them and say, "We did everything
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we possibly, humanly could do,
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to begin to mitigate this,
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what I feel is one of the most important and critical
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moments in our time. Thank you.
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03:30
(Applause)
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