Despite the environment pollution, there is another main topic portrayed through the works from Burtynsky which is poverty. Among his pieces which belong to anthropocene, there are a number of picture that reveals the impacts poverty has on people. By taking pictures from slums in different areas, it directly reflects the life of local people. In addition, there are some specific photo that Burtynsky especially compared the different living condition for people in poverty and those who are not.
For example, the picture named Makoko #2 reveals the situation of one of the largest slums in the world located in Nigeria. As it shown below, people in Makoko all living on floating houses that built on river. Due to the reason of poverty, people in Makoko are living in the condition which have no or little access to electricity, sanitation, clean water and food, and safety environment. specifically, in Makoko since all the community is built on the water, the river itself becomes landfills for local population. In this case, within all the garbage being directly throw to the river, the water is badly contaminated. In addition, without enough sanitation access, people are directly drink the contaminated water coming from river and ended up as being sick because of that.
Furthermore, since most of people living in Makoko have a average income below 1 dollar per day. They are less likely to afford the normal spend outside their community. Therefore, in order to support the population in slums keep, living, they managed to create their own economics. People in side Makoko has their own floating market that sells food and daily supports. Therefore, they successfully make the community of makoko become bigger and have a more stable living condition even though it is still way lower than the UN expectancy.
Except the development on economics, population in Makoko also built a floating schools within the helps from some volunteer organization. As the society nowadays starting to put more attention on the poverty population, there are more and more people and organization starting to help people in slums in different areas. For example, UN as the biggest organization, plays a crucial role in supporting multiple slums in sanitation. Other helps including, food donation, money donation, and efforts from some organization who are trying to improve the living condition with limited resources they have in slums.
The graph above shows the extreme poverty population in the world. As can be seen, even the trend for recent years reveals that the population of poverty is keep dropping. There are still about 10% of world's population in 2013 who living in extreme poverty condition. Basing on the world's population in 2013, we can count that the poverty population in 2013 is approximately 720,000,000 people. In this case, it is still a large population.
Finally, within the increasing of world's population, there is a high possibility to keep rising which means, the population of poverty will also keep rising. It might become one of the most urgent problems for world to solve in the future.
After watching the slide about Anthropocene,it brought me a strong impacts with all those images showing how badly we are current damaging our planet. It also lead me starting to think how can we do something to save our planet. Within all problems being showed from slides, conflicts like oil spilling, petrochemical plants, oil fracking, and clear cutting should become main concern for us to think about.
For example, in the slide oil spill #1, it directly point out how can oil spilling severely damage environment. According to the slides, oil spilling can cause heavily damage the local eco-system and society since the area being polluted is abandoned for all tourists including, boating, diving or swimming. In addition, since the water in oil spilling areas are badly contaminated it can also kills all the species living in that areas. Therefore, it not only resulting as the negative impact to local fishing industry, but also causing unbalance of local eco-system. In addition, since oil can not combining together with water and can last for years long without dissolving, it requires governments or company to pay a huge amount of money in order to clean it. according to the data, each year there will be at least more thousands of tones oil being spilling to environments due to all kinds of reason. Even though now oil spilling start to receive more attention from society within more people realize the crucial to prevent this. the number of oil spilling is still high. Which means, there are still large areas beingi polluted each year.
In addition, industry like mining and clear cutting are also destroying the local eco-system, without people knowing. As both the photograph shot by Burtynsky and the analysis slide reveals how can these industries heavily influence the environment. In order to plant palm trees which contains palm oil that has a high economic values. forest in south Africa are largely being destroyed. In this case, it can lead to lost of habitat, break of local eco-system, increasing the possibility of flood, and accelerate the progress of climate change. Furthermore, within the build of plantation such as palm or cotton, it can also damage the local soil. As all known, cotton is one of the plants that dealing worst damage to soil. Therefore, it can impact animals and other plants who use those areas as their habitat. which may eventually result as the disorder of local eco-system.
As the video above reveals, clear cutting can also have negative impacts on human.
As can be found from this graph, during the process of clear cutting, there will be large amount of fossil fuels being burnt and emit CO2 into the atmosphere. Despite that, it also emit gases like methane and Nitrous oxide which are all green house gases.
As a conclusion, the art works created by Burtynsky directly reveals the situation we are facing right now. By watching, these photograph, it reminds us the importance to immediately react to these phenomenon before its to late.
