1The universal is arguably in crisis, that is simultaneously in a time of trouble and at a turning point. This crisis has its roots in the fact that the universal is historically a product of the European Enlightenment that originally served Europe’s interests, in a context of exploration and colonisation; Europe’s self-assigned civilising mission was justified by the universal values that undergirded it. With the post-World War II movement of decolonisation, this assumption was challenged by colonised thinkers who rejected not only the violence and shackles of colonisation, but who also demanded a break with the way of thinking that allowed European colonisation to happen in the first place. Leading this movement in the French-speaking sphere were Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Sedar Senghor, among others. While some consider that the former colonies entered a postcolonial phase after the 1960s wave of independence, others argue that the epistemological decolonisation remains incomplete and must be pursued. In this context, the notion of the universal (or universalism) is at the core of the debates on decolonisation, as the notion is reappropriated by the formerly colonised, and developed into renewed forms that aim to integrate the claim for recognition of the oppressed.
2The crisis of the universal interacts with other, interrelated issues, notably to do with race, gender, social justice, globalisation, and the environmental crisis, to name the key ones. With the COVID crisis, the environmental crisis, and climate change, the universal has taken on a different dimension, which the philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne formulates as follows in his most recent book, Universaliser: these combined crises “have transformed into a feeling the idea that we are one and the same vulnerable species” (Diagne 25; translations mine throughout). Although Diagne’s universalising statement rings true, there are various degrees of vulnerability among human beings. But nonetheless, the shift from the idea to the feeling that there is a universal human condition has made it all the more urgent to address this combination of crises, as can be seen in the current scramble for responses to climate change, although in ways that often fail to change, let alone radically break away from, the existing order of things. The fact that Diagne is able to articulate these links between various aspects of the current crisis, and is poised at the junction of North and South (he hails from Senegal but teaches at Columbia University, New York, and has many links with the French-speaking world), probably accounts for the success of his interventions in France, in the United States, in his native Senegal, and beyond.
- 1 Ghosh first expressed this idea in a 1992 review of two novels, in which he observed that there wer (...)
3Universaliser is a programmatic essay, the aim of which is to “reinvent the universal” (Diagne 12); the infinitive form of the verb implies that humanity must agree on a practice of universalisation (Martin 13’20). In his conceptualisation of this programme, Diagne foregrounds several key and interrelated ideas. One is that decentering is necessary, to abandon the Eurocentric perspective; to do so implies shifting from an all-encompassing perspective—de surplomb (Diagne 43)—to one that is located at ground level. Consequently, a plurality of voices is needed to universalise (Diagne 2024, 133), to represent the many. Amitav Ghosh famously argued in the late 1990s that there was a lack of narratives about the climate crisis; that “the climate crisis [was] also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (Ghosh 2016, 9)1. It could similarly be contended that the crisis of the universal is a narrative crisis, one that calls for renewed forms and voices to tell of situations until now ignored or marginalised that need to be part of the universalising process Diagne calls for. More generally, the crisis of the universal suggests that established forms of narratives are no longer adequate, in the same way as the postmodern age, starting in the 1950s, following the conflict between metanarratives and the discourse of scientific knowledge, was marked by the obsolescence of metanarratives and a crisis of metaphysical philosophy (Lyotard 1984, xxiv, 3). As suggested by the editors of an issue of Epistémocritique on “Crises : climat et critique” [Crises: climate and critique], the current climate crisis signals a renewal of the relationship between literature and reality, with a rebalancing of ethical and activist positions on the one hand, and aesthetic and formalist ones on the other, while the perspectives of ecocriticism are added to the minority positions that have already structured literary studies since the 1980s, including feminist, gender and queer studies, postcolonial studies, critical race theory (Patoine et al §5-6).
4This call for new forms and new voices, in the context of the dual crisis of the universal and of the environment, is what I will reflect on in this essay, through the study of three works, and following the lead outlined by Diagne. I will examine how decentering and the shift of perspectives it entails are ways to address issues related to the dual crisis of the environment and the universal, in two life-writing narratives: Rebecca Priestley’s Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica (2019) and Vanessa Nakate’s A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis (2021). Life-writing, in a context of decolonisation, can be “combative, cause-led, and, often, unashamedly polemical,” and appears as “a medium for political mobilization and instruction” (Boehmer 180, 185). Along with life-writing, photography is another vector that brings us images of the crisis of the universal. A selection of photographs by the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky that illustrates the global environmental crisis from a bird-eye’s view will be analysed, keeping in mind the question of its contribution to “inventing a new universalism” (Diagne 12).
5Rebecca Priestley is a New Zealand science writer who approaches her scientific topics through a conversational tone in her writing, with the goal to make science accessible to general readers (Priestley 101). She explains that, as a writer, her work is driven by “[her] constant need to translate what [she’s] experiencing into words, to find or create a narrative” (Priestley 147). In Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica, even though her aim is to pass on scientific knowledge about deep time and climate change, her narrative also has a strong personal dimension, in the form of a quest—what to do about climate change, once you have a grasp of the facts?—that gives her narrative a strong life-writing and travel-writing dimension. How does this narrative, which mixes scientific discourse and personal experience, resonate as a story that can be universalised? I will argue that the book may be considered as a layered story; one that is all at once educational (in relation to Priestley’s trade and training as a popular science writer), postcolonial (in relation to Priestley’s positionality), and universal (to the extent that Priestley’s personal experience resonates with the general climate anxiety).
6Priestley’s project as a science writer spreads over time: she went on three trips to Antarctica, in 2011, 2014 and 2018, as part of the Antarctica New Zealand programme, which has a shared logistic pool with the equivalent US programme. New Zealand’s presence in the Antarctic is well established historically, with the Scott Base, a most valuable scientific base, as Priestley explains:
The Scott Base meteorological station provides one of the longest continuous records in Antarctica. It’s one of the only sites with someone there on base, making a meteorological observation, every day of the year since 1957. Continuous records like this involve a sometimes tedious data-gathering process but they are invaluable when it comes to monitoring climate change. It’s hard to argue with a dataset collected in the same place, using the same method, using the same type of instruments, for more than 50 years. (Priestley 62)
7As one of the scientists Priestley interacts with formulates it, “Understanding what’s happening in Antarctica is key to knowing what’s happening in a changing climate” (Priestley 205). Scientists who are involved in the programme are “dealing with deep geological time and working on problems with implications for the future of humanity” (Priestley 154-155). Thus, research in the Antarctic has provided evidence that climate change happened 15 to 17 million years ago, after the continent of Gondwana broke up and cooled (35 million years ago) and massive ice sheets started to spread over Antarctica:
15-17 mya [D]uring a time geologists call the mid-Miocene climatic optimum, atmospheric CO2 levels reach 700 parts per million, temperatures are 4-5°C warmer than today, and sea level is up to 35 metres higher. The Antarctic ice sheets melt and once again there are trees in Antarctica. (Priestley 111)
8This process of the earth freezing then warming up happened once again in Antarctica 3 million years ago. Naturally, this geological and climate history lends itself to a comparison with the climate change we are experiencing now:
The greenhouse gases we’re pumping into the atmosphere have raised atmospheric CO2 levels to more than 400 parts per million, the same concentration they were 3-5 million years ago, when the Ross Ice Shelf and much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted. The Antarctic ice sheets contain nearly 30 million cubic kilometres of ice and even a small amount of melting would have a significant impact on global sea level. That’s why projects like this, with the aim of fine-tuning our understanding about how the Antarctic ice sheets respond to a warming climate, are important. (Priestley 129-130)
9Projects like the New Zealand Antarctic Programmes are important because they provide scientific evidence about climate change, and may influence global polity on climate change. A few years back when Priestley was working on the book she published in 2019, climate change denial was stronger than it is now as I am writing. First, Donald Trump was president of the US, who, as Priestley reminds her readers, declared “I’m not a believer in man-made global warming” (Priestley 165), and who:
- 2 Although climate change skepticism is now a minority opinion, there is good reason to fear that it (...)
withdr[ew] the United States from the [2015] Paris Agreement [to keep the global temperature rise below 2°C], defund[ed] climate research programmes and appoint[ed] climate change deniers to top jobs at NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency. (Priestley 212)2
10About climate change denial, one of the scientists Priestley engages with points out:
Ten years ago, people were fairly sceptical, perhaps because they didn’t understand the science. I think with the last two IPCC reports both reinforcing the science very clearly, the majority of the public now accept that the world is warming because of fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions. The latest polls say about 60-70 per cent of New Zealanders are there. What I would say now is why are we not doing anything about it? That’s the key question. What are we going to do? (Priestley 203)
11Although the proportion of the population who agree with the need to “do something about it” has increased, especially after the publication of the 2023 synthesis report of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) and the accelerated accumulation of climatic events, back in 2019, climate change denial was still something that needed to be fought against vigorously. But worse still: since the start of Donald Trump’s second mandate as US President—“Trump 2”—in 2025, the US has known a reversal of climate policies, attacks on climate and environmental regulations, and an acceleration of oil and gas production, epitomized by the famous phrase Trump reiterated after his inauguration: “We’re going to drill, baby, drill and do all of the things that we wanted to” (Milman). This has had worldwide implications and the question of what to do has become an urgent one in more than one way.
12Apart from the educational dimension of the project to produce popular science, another important, more personal aspect of Priestley’s narrative is her anxiety, in relation to the environmental situation, but not only. She confesses that she is an anxious person, and her very trip to Antarctica demands that she has a degree of control of that feeling. But the main source of her anxiety is the ecological situation and “the future world her children will grow up in” (Priestley 143). During her third trip to Antarctica, and at the end of the book, she decides that this is her last trip, that her work is at home. Eco-anxiety plays an important part in changing the course of her projects:
Mental Health and Our Changing Climate has a list of recommendations for helping people deal with their feelings, the fifth of which is to ‘promote connectedness to family, place, culture, and community’. That’s where I’ve got work to do. I want my kids to be able to cope with the future we’re heading towards, but I’m not sure what to do. Do I need to teach them how to catch fish and propagate plants from seed? Or do I just carry on doing what I’m doing, teaching them to care, to do their bit, but sheltering them from my worst fears about the future? (Priestley 300)
13On her third trip to Antarctica in 2018, Priestley observes skuas (a predatory bird) and the behaviour of parents feeding their chicks, feeling “an unexpected affection for or connection with the skua and the way they protect their young,” concluding “Here I go anthropomorphising again.” (318) In her work as a science writer she projects her feelings as a mother, which are not culturally specific. Both Priestley’s fears about the climate, and as a mother for the future of her children, are a common ground likely to be shared, although it may be in very different contexts, by any reader of her book. The anthropomorphizing of the skua gives her fears a fable-like, mythical, universal dimension.
14By the end of her third trip Priestley decides to aim for a better balance in her home life and stop doing extreme things like going to Antarctica. This decision is also partly linked to the fact that there is a paradox in wanting to protect Antarctica and having more researchers there, which has a huge environmental cost, as everything is flown in. Researchers have been present in Antarctica since:
1961 The Antarctic Treaty, signed by 12 nations […], comes into force and the continent is dedicated to peaceful purposes and the pursuit of science. This is the beginning of the Antarctic Treaty System, a set of international conventions and protocols aimed at protecting the Antarctic land, water and wildlife. (Priestley 113)
15Priestley observes that in comparison, by 2019, “There are now more than 80 permanent research bases in Antarctica [compared with 48 in 1961], and many more in summer, during which the Antarctic population reaches more than 4000 people” (Priestley 114). The strategic value of having a scientific presence in Antarctica is obvious through “the strong military presence” there, even though “[the military] work on transport, communications and logistics […] can be used only for scientific research and other peaceful purposes” (Priestley 335).
16Priestley’s position about New Zealand researchers working at Scott Base is positive, as we saw, notably about the valuable temperature record that has been kept over time. New Zealand’s relative geographical proximity to Antarctica also means that some of the scientific work on Antarctica is done in New Zealand. Priestley explains how sediment cores are transported to Wellington to be examined there. Which epitomizes the paradox of scientific work on climate change contributing to CO2 emissions, as one scientist suggests:
That core’s had a bit of a journey. […] We’ve moved a lot of shit around the world, us humans. We’ve really changed the face of the Earth like nothing before us. Sixteen-million-year-old fossil leaves from Antarctic forests, brought back to a freezer in Wellington. (Priestley 2019, 167)
17Closer to home, another scientific project related to Antarctic research is the geological site of Whanganui in New Zealand, which Priestley goes to with scientists:
We were heading for Whanganui, where we now know that the sea-level changes recorded in the rocks catalogue a changing sea level related to ice melt and freeze. Put simply, when global temperature increases, the ice melts, and sea level rises. When temperatures drop, the glaciers and ice caps grow, and sea level falls. Today, Whanganui is one of the best places in the world to see the way that the sea level has responded to climate change in the past. (Priestley 196)
18The final shift in location in the narrative, from Antarctica to Wellington, implies that it makes sense for Priestley to conduct her work locally, which is quite a big change. By revealing the scale of deep time, as observable in geological sites, she sets the climate crisis in perspective, on a geological scale. In the process of conducting her research, she reveals her eco-anxiety, which may be read as first-world discomfort, in view of the privileges that first-world citizens have enjoyed over time, for instance, conducting science trips to Antarctica. It may be argued that Priestley indirectly expresses a settler’s guilt at having historically contributed to the climate crisis. New Zealand’s participation in the scientific activity in Antarctica is linked to its status as a colony of the British empire, and this has not been entirely decolonised. By observing climate change in Wanganui rather than going all the way to Antarctica, Priestley repositions herself in local terms that reduce the inconsistency of wanting to fight climate change by resorting to heavy means (and staying in Antarctica). That in itself is a geopolitical statement. However, it doesn’t go so far as to formulate a political critique of climate change, the way Andreas Malm does in Fossil Capital (2016), by considering that he calls “the fossil economy” as a totality (Malm 12). In fact, Priestley’s form of action consists in writing.
19As Olivier Remaud explains in “Raconter le vivant,” narrative is aimed at “creating relations” (Tim Ingold). Going back to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” Remaud also recalls that narrative is based on experience—which leads to knowledge, giving the storyteller a certain aura—and it aims at being remembered: it is to be passed on and told again, to build up a “universal memory” and better envision the future (Remaud 359-360). This is the kind of narrative Priestley performs here, in the hope that knowledge about climate change will lead to climate action. Her personal praxis adjusts to come into agreement with this view, as she plans to do less field work in the Antarctic. In contrast with Priestley’s work in popular science, or complementary to it, Vanessa Nakate’s goal is to spread the word about the climate crisis in her native Uganda through her activism.
20Vanesssa Nakate is a young woman from Uganda who became involved in climate activism in 2019. In A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis (2021), she retraces how she gradually became aware of the magnitude of the climate crisis in Uganda and globally, and was inspired by Greta Thunberg in Sweden to start climate strikes outside the Parliament of Uganda, having to learn in the process to overcome her natural reserve to raise her voice about the issues that she cares about. Nakate advertised her work on social media, which drew attention to her activism and led to her being invited to join international meetings: the United Nations Youth Climate Summit in Madrid in 2019, the Youth Climate Summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York in September 2019, the Davos World Economic Forum in 2020… In Davos, Nakate drew another kind of less palatable attention after she was cropped out of a photograph that featured four other young activists like herself (including Greta Thunberg). This incident was deeply formative—as well as painful—for Nakate, as she writes in the introduction to her memoir: “Being cropped out of that photo changed the course of my activism and my life. It reframed my thoughts about race, gender, equity, and climate justice; and it led to the words you’re now reading” (Nakate 3). From then on, she became vividly aware of issues of representation. The incident is also emblematic of what Diagne calls for in Universaliser: “the irreducible plurality of voices that must be present to universalise” (Diagne 133). In this part I will analyse Nakate’s figure as a writer-activist who made the personal experience of racism and subsequently positioned herself to explain the kind of intersectionality at play in the climate crisis. Stylistically, what Nakate achieves as a writer-activist is along the lines of what Rob Nixon describes in Slow Violence and the Environment of the Poor:
Writer-activists can help us apprehend threats imaginatively that remain imperceptible to the senses, either because they are geographically remote, too vast or too minute in scale, or are played out across a time span that exceeds the instance of observation of even the physiological life of the human observer. […] To allay states of apprehension—trepidations, forebodings, shadows cast by the invisible—entails facing the challenge, at once imaginative and scientific, of giving the unapparent a materiality upon which we can act. […] To address violence discounted by dominant structures of apprehension is necessarily to engage the culturally variable issue of who counts as a witness. (Nixon 15-16)
21Nakate is stung when she realises that she has been cropped out of the Davos photograph. Her analysis is multilayered: she feels that by cropping her out of the picture, the media had “erased a continent” (Nakate 67), as she was the only African person in the shot. She feels “like the photo-cropping was a direct expression of racism and sexism” (Nakate 71), an experience that is reinforced by the observation made by Dr. Robert Bullard, an African American professor who defended the concept of environmental justice in the United States, that “climate activism among youth is perceived by the larger society as a ‘white thing’” (Nakate 74). She also agrees with and quotes the comment that the photo crop-out is “really a metaphorical crop-out from the narrative of climate science in general” (Nakate 76). The casual racism that led to the cropping of the photo has many consequences in terms of representation—of Africans, of women, of young people.
22Nakate’s awareness of structural racism keeps expanding as her narrative unfolds. She revisits the notion in chapter 8, towards the end of the book, after the murder of George Floyd in the United States on 25 May 2020:
The murder of George Floyd and of many other Black men and women made me grasp more fully the sheer amount of anti-Black racism in the world. […] Once I looked more closely, with my photo-cropping experience seared into my consciousness, I discovered that bias against Black people was everywhere: in access to health care, in education, in textbooks, in workplaces, in what jobs are available, in criminal justice, in housing, in the media, and also in the climate crisis and the movement that was trying to address it. While I’d heard of Black Lives Matter and seen some of the movement’s Twitter posts before 2020, it was only after George Floyd’s death that I got a bigger picture of the movement. (Nakate 147)
23The “bigger picture” of the book title at first seems to be a metaphor for the author’s personal development as a climate activist and for the gradual expansion of her vision, from the moment she decides to go on climate strike in Uganda, then builds up an international network on social media to support her action and spread the word about climate change, and joins global youth forums. But all that Bildung process is brutally replaced by the harsher reality of structural racism, which is the actual “bigger picture” that is revealed to Nakate. Structural racism pervades every aspect of society, and every part of the world where Black people are found, she realises; historically, it also links colonialism and the overexploitation of natural resources that led to the current climate crisis (Ferdinand 2019). The bigger picture she can now see brings her to a level of “planetary consciousness,” a notion which Rob Nixon uses, after Mary Louise Pratt, to “link […] questions of power and perspective” (Nixon 15). Pratt demonstrates that “planetary consciousness” was historically aimed at “the construction of global-scale meaning through the descriptive apparatuses of natural history”, and “coincide[d] with the height of the slave trade, the plantation system, colonial genocide in North America and South Africa, slave rebellions in the Andes, the Caribbean, North America, and elsewhere” (Pratt 15, 36). Here, what is taking place is a reverse and critical “planetary consciousness,” in response to the one that established eurocentrism, one that sees through the biases and racism of that system.
24But beyond the revelation of global racism, Nakate’s vision is not reduced to a racist binary, as the situation is complicated by the fact that she is a woman. She explains to her international reader that where she is from, “to be considered a good African woman often means not saying anything at all. So, if we raise our voices, like I did, we’re accused of not only being un-African, but of being unfeminine too” (Nakate 71). After the photo cropping incident, she writes,
I decided, from my perspective as a young African woman, that I would dedicate as much of my time as possible to addressing the many interlocking facets of the climate crisis, environmental justice, and gender discrimination—and to do so without apology or fear of erasure. (Nakate 78)
25Even though she doesn’t use the term, Nakate’s approach of the situation is an intersectional one, that is to say, in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s terms, one that reflects “the multidimensionality of Black women’s experience,” rather than adopting “the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences” and through which “Black women are theoretically erased” (Crenshaw 139).
26One dimension of African women’s experience is that they are erased from scientific discourse, so Nakate remedies to that, after observing that Africa is underrepresented in the coverage of the climate crisis. Her book includes chapters in which she explains and documents the ecological situation in Lake Chad and the Congo rainforest, two ecosystems that are hugely important to the planet (Chapter 5: We Are All Africa), and the pressure in Uganda of the refugee population on forests and woodlands (Chapter 6: A Greener Uganda). These chapters are followed by one that argues about the importance of girls and women’s education (Chapter 7: Women and Government), an idea that is not new but that is fundamental. Nakate also acknowledges the powerful role model of Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 (see Maathai 2004, 2008). By bringing in the perspective of an insider, as an African, Nakate performs the sort of decentering that Diagne deems necessary to epistemic decolonising, one that shifts from an all-encompassing, imperial universalism (Diagne 12) to a view that is closer to the ground. It is also a more ethnological approach (Diagne 96), one that pays close attention to the specificity of a given culture. Or to quote Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to whom Diagne refers: “this is a new way to the universal; not the all-encompassing universal issued from a strictly objective method, but a lateral universal that we acquire through ethnological experience” (Merleau-Ponty 150; my translation). Here the ethnological experience is indirect, as mediated through Nakate’s writing, but it is close to the ground. In the third body of works that I will examine, by contrast, the perspective is that of the bird’s-eye-view, which creates its own effect on the viewer’s apprehension of the environment as a universal element.
27The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has been working in his media since the 1980s and is famous for his pictures of industrial landscapes, which reveal the ways in which the earth has been transformed by human activity. Burtynsky found his early artistic inspiration in his fascination for sites of extraction and wanted his pictures to show “how we have changed the landscape in significant ways” (Torosian 47). He has composed various series, alternately focusing on railroads, quarries, mines, oil fields, shipbreaking yards, highways… From 2006, with the advent of digital technology and the use of equipment such as drones, he was increasingly able to take pictures from high up, “achieving a bird’s-eye perspective” (Burtynsky 2018, 6). This has become his trademark, with landscapes that seem simultaneously huge, colourful, and awe-inspiring.
28Burtynsky’s work has led to contrasted reactions: some viewers, unsettled by the “huge panoramas […] that show such massive human incursion into the earth,” see his work as an indictment of extraction and consumption (Pauli 2003, 21), while others charge him with “aestheticizing the evidence of social and ecological upheaval” (Baker 41). To Kenneth Baker, what Burtynsky’s work achieves is that it “cuts to the heart of our ambivalence about the twenty-first century world: undeniably humankind has achieved astonishing things […] but at what cost?” (Baker 40). Indeed, Burtynsky’s photographs reveal beauty as an unexpected result of industry, in a puzzling way that mirrors our “incapacity to comprehend the total world system” (Baker 44).
29Beyond the ambivalence at the core of Burtynsky’s work and of our relation to climate change, Burtynsky’s evolution in the past decades about his positioning as an artist and the role of his artistic work is revealing of a change in outlook. Asked about his view of his work for Manufacturing Landscapes, a book of his photographs published in 2003, he explains that he is fascinated by the way technology has created sublime landscapes, and decided early on that his work would consist in photographing the sites of extraction that are the counterpart to the buildings found in cities like Toronto, to make visible the scale of the impact of human activity (Torosian 49). He does so through photographs that sometimes present a certain degree of abstraction and that look like paintings (Pauli 2003, 24). Furthermore, in times of growing awareness about the climate crisis, Burtynsky points out that he refuses to be didactic about the impact of industry and extraction. He also believes that consumption is not going to stop, but the one important thing that can change is that we “must learn to be more conscientious custodians of the resources that we have been given” (Torosian 50). This overall aesthetic stance has been the source of criticism, for instance by Joshua Shuster who argues that “the sublime is breathlessness at a distance that stays distant, and thus involves an uneasy relationship with forms of hands-on environmentalist activism” (Shuster 194). The feeling of awe that the aesthetic sublime creates is hard to connect with forms of activism.
- 3 The photograph is also available on the website of the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, where (...)
30An emblematic series in this vein is Burtynsky’s photographs of discarded tires. Oxford Tire Pile #8, Westley, California, USA, 1999 (Burtynsky 2014, 145)3 shows a monumental pile of old tires that make up two walls and massively occupy the photograph from top to bottom. They are separated by a narrow space, where the earth is hollowed out at the bottom, while some grass is visible at the top, leading to a small patch of sky. The picture is taken from ground level, with the viewer facing the mountain of tires. This view of old products, in its massiveness, has the same awe-inspiring quality as well-known photographs of American nature, which present formal similarities. In the American landscape tradition, Ansel Adams’ Moon and Half Dome (c. 1960), one of many photographs he took of the granite dome in Yosemite National Park, shows the imposing rock that reaches the sky and the moon. The sheer rock, combined with the absence of traces of human presence, makes the viewer feel very small in this landscape where brute nature dominates, in stark black, white and greys. Burtynsky’s Oxford Tire Pile #8 also presents shades of grey, but the touch of colour, with the brown earth and green grass, as well as the subject of the photograph, the tires, are reminders that this is a late 20th-century picture and the type of sublime it displays is an eerie, man-made one. It is up to the viewer to read the picture—as a beautiful composition of the modern sublime, as a terrifying measure of the environmental pollution that dependence on cars in California entails, as a starting point for a reflection on car usage in Western societies… Burtynsky himself recalls the immense freedom that the road represented when he first set out on a photographing trip after university graduation, and the wonder inspired by the industrial landscapes he captured. He reflects:
But time goes on, and that flush of wonder began to turn. The car that I drove cross country began to represent not only freedom, but also something much more conflicted. I began to think about oil itself: as both the source of energy that makes everything possible, and as a source of dread, for its ongoing endangerment of a habitat. (Burtynsky 2014, 9)
31It is revealing that Burtynsky speaks of oil as “the source of energy”: he belongs to a Euro-American population for whom oil is central to many forms of freedom, while other sources of energy yet remain to be envisioned as valuable alternatives. Nonetheless, in 2018, Burtynsky started the Anthropocene Project with two collaborators, which marks a shift in his worldview. In his introduction to the book published that year under the same title, his tone about the state of the earth is alarmed:
Arguably, we are on the cusp of becoming (if we are not already) the perpetrators of a sixth major extinction event. Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring global catastrophe, but one caused solely by the activity of a single species: us. (Burtynsky 2018, 5)
32He is not being overly dramatic but stating in clear terms the facts of the climate crisis, which is directly linked to his photographic subject: the impact of human activity on planet Earth. Such a statement is bound to shift the way the viewer will interpret his work, but by considering the impact of climate change on a global scale and seeing it as the responsibility of a whole species, Burtynsky is letting colonial capitalism off the hook, a position widely shared in Western countries, and which depoliticises the consciousness of climate change responsibility. Nonethless, Burtynsky’s conception of his role as an artist has evolved, along with his method:
As a collaborative group, Jennifer, Nick and I believe that an experiential, immersive engagement with our work can shift the consciousness of those who engage with it, helping to nurture a growing environmental debate. We hope to bring our audience to an awareness of the normally unseen result of a civilization’s cumulative impact upon the planet. This is what propels us to continue making the work. We feel that by describing the problem vividly, by being revelatory and not accusatory, we can help spur a broader conversation about viable solutions. (Burtynsky 2018, 7)
33These changes are signs of how Burtynsky’s sense of his responsibility as an artist has shifted, in view of the climate emergency.
- 4 Dandora Landfill #3, Plastics Recycling, Nairobi, Kenya 2016 can also be seen online on Burtynsky’s (...)
34Burtynsky has photographed the places in the world where the impact of industry is most visible at the beginning of the 21st century and dedicated a whole book each to China (Burtynsky 2005) and to Africa (Burtynsky 2022). A famous series from Africa is his Dandora landfill project. Dandora Landfill #3, Plastics Recycling, Nairobi, Kenya 2016 (Burtynsky 2018, 35)4 shows a group of three African men surrounded by a sea of plastic bottles and bags, as well as paper, that they are sorting through. The massiveness of the rubbish dump is awe-inspiring, following the process described earlier, of the sublime being man-made and generating a terror of the level of pollution of planet earth. At the same time, as the rubbish gets recycled, it is heaped in categories that make up units of colour—white translucent bags, green and blue bottles, yellow sacks of unpacked rubbish that highlight the whole picture—that also create, unexpectedly, their own kind of beauty. The men probably make a meager living out of their recycling work, but one of them has parked his motorbike on the access path to the rubbish heap, and two dogs are watching on—life is going on, despite the broader implications of the scene. Once again, the viewer’s response is left open, unguided. Thus, within the framework of this essay, it is natural to establish a link between Burtynsky’s Dandora Landfill #3 and Vanessa Nakate’s call to go plastic free in her activism, as well as her observation on the importance of corporate governmental decisions: “Coca-Cola produces four million plastic bottles per week, in Uganda alone—a rate of production that no recycling capabilities can possibly handle” (Nakate 118). Burtynsky’s photograph, though taken in Kenya, speaks volumes to the issue that Nakate raises, but once again emphasizes visual aesthetics rather than narrative photography. The Dandora landfill poses social issues of poverty and violence that are not readable in this photograph (see “Two Rival Gangs”).
35The bird’s-eye perspective that Burtynsky often adopts is a way to render the scale of the impact of industrial activity—and often to produce beautiful formal ensembles that lend themselves to abstraction, a process that Burtynsky claims as central to his artistic practice (Burtynsky 2024). The bird’s-eye view also plays on aesthetic codes associated with the colonial enterprise and the “Monarch-of-All-I-Survey” position, from which the imperial eye could see—and control—everything. The phrase is taken from a 1782 poem by William Cowper about Alexander Selkirk’s life on a desert island (a story that also inspired Daniel Defoe’s character of Robinson Crusoe). The line— “I am monarch of all I survey, / My right there is none to dispute, / From the centre all round to the sea, / I am lord of the fowl and the brute”—is a claim to power suffused with irony, as the marooned sailor is cast away from humanity. As Claire Lindsay analyses,
‘monarch’ […] speaks to the elevated social and economic rank of the travelling subject in contradistinction to the landscape being observed, the expansive, indefinite ‘all’ […]. Meanwhile, the verb ‘survey’ indicates another kind of elevation, that of the bird’s eye view, and denotes the visual observation and inspection at the heart of the experience. (Lindsay 157)
36In her appropriation of the phrase, Mary Louise Pratt emphasizes the “interaction between esthetics and ideology, in what one might call a rhetoric of presence” (Pratt 205). Burtynsky’s bird’s-eye-view photographs retain the “standard elements of the imperial trope […]: the mastery of the landscape, the estheticizing adjectives, the broad panorama anchored in the seer” (Pratt 209), in the same way as he uses the Romantic language of a sunset or a stormy sky (Pauli 2003, 30). But both these sets of codes are used in tension, so that the interpretation of the picture remains two-sided; a mix of beauty and awe in an experience of the sublime. Burtynsky’s usage of aesthetic codes thus leads to a form of decentering that may be ironic, and the opening up of his view to various interpretations. Decentering, as Diagne describes it, consists in reading a story from another perspective; not from the all-encompassing perspective of the philosopher Hegel contemplating the world in the same way as the emperor sees it from his horse, but from the perspective of the peoples who are crushed under the horse’s hooves (Diagne 2024, 43). With Dandora Landfill #3, and the photographer looking at the men below (who are not returning his gaze but must be aware of his presence), a mirror is held at Global North viewers: how to relate to the people on the ground, surrounded by a threatening sea of plastic?
37To go further, it is worth quoting the announcement at the end of the video about the “Africa Studies” project on Burtynsky’s website, by the Nicholas Metivier Gallery which represents his work:
On the occasion of the openings of Edward Burtynsky’s new series African Studies, Burtynsky and his galleries are committing CAD$ 100,000.00 to Lagos Photo. They will work with Lagos Photo to establish a new programme within the Festival dedicated to emerging and mid-career African artists who are focusing their lens on subjects of globalism, and the environmental, cultural and social impacts of the climate crisis on the Global South. (Burtynsky n.d., 08’30)
- 5 See for instance a 2023 report by Amnesty International on the human rights record of the Canadian (...)
38It is significant that this funding is aimed at encouraging the work of African photographers (note that other sponsoring initiatives from Burtynsky were targeted at supporting Canadian artists). This initiative is a measure of the awareness of the global dimension of the topic that Burtynsky addresses in his art, and it is a way, by offering young Lagos photographers the opportunity to produce work that will convey their own views, their own voices, to contribute to the universalising process in the Anthropocene. As such, it is a decolonising action, that encourages African perspectives to become visible. And yet, it carries the inherent ambivalence of charity work aimed at Global South countries and initiated by an individual from a western country that remains heavily involved in extraction, both at home and overseas.5
39In his time, Aimé Césaire called for a humanism commensurate with the world (“un humanisme à la mesure du monde”; quoted in Suaudeau and Niang 26). In our times, universalism needs to fit the scale of planet Earth and reflect a “planetary consciousness” (Pratt 15) which is the adequate scale for the magnitude of the current climate change. The different media analysed here enable processes that expand our view. In Fifteen Million Years in Antarctica, popular science, combined with life writing, exposes some of its own biases. In A Bigger Picture, activism, when viewed through personal experience, reveals the intricacies, scope and scale of the environmental crisis, turning activism to witnessing. In Burtynsky’s photographs, the reinterpretation of the Romantic tradition of the sublime, along with the confrontation of the viewer’s perspective with that of the other, alter our notion of what a planetary perspective may mean. The variety of ways to achieve planetary consciousness, through these different media and narrative modes, not only provides the diversity that is necessary to the process of “universalising”; it also reflects the evolution of the artists and their own coming to terms with what universalism means in times of climate change.