Anthropocene: Burtynsky, Baichwal, de Pencier

A controversial idea currently under vigorous and passionate international debate that would recognize the "human signature" on the planet.

Anthropocene is the latest book by Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier to chronicle the massive and irreversible impact of humans on the Earth — on a geological scale.

In photographs that are both stunning and disconcerting, Burtynsky, Baichwal, and de Pencier document species extinction (the burning of elephant tusks to disrupt the illegal trade of ivory), technofossils (swathes of discarded plastic forming geological layers), and terraforming (mines and industrial agriculture).

The book also features a range of essays by artists, curators, and scientists, some part of an international group of scientists who have proposed that the Earth is now entering a new era of geological time where human activity is the driving force behind environmental and geological change — i.e. the Anthropocene. Thus the book brings contemporary art into conversation with environmental science and anthropology on a topic that urgently affects all of us.

Anthropocene was published to coincide with a major international exhibition that opened simultaneously in September 2018 at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada and the release of a film on the same topic by Baichwal and de Pencier.