I’m about to get sentimental about a small photo.  Small in several senses: the copy I have is smaller than what we usually post, the photo depicts only a few birds on a tiny spot of land, and neither they nor their image is likely to change much of anything.  In fact, this is an image of incapacity, even futility.

Even the viewer is made to feel a bit inept, as you have to lean forward and peer into the photo to see what is happening.  The dingy colors of fading snow stained with–what? urine?–and the dim water offer little contrast in the dull light to the black and white uniformity of the birds.  There seems to be no focus, no action, no drama, and certainly nothing like the grandeur of nature with its magnificent, triumphant struggle for existence, as typically portrayed in TV documentaries.

So what is happening?  The caption at the New York Times story coupled with the photo said “Adélie penguins struggle to save eggs submerged by snowmelt.”  It seems that climate change is producing particularly distinctive effects in the polar regions, and one consequence is that this penguin colony is having its reproductive cycle disrupted while also suffering greater exposure to predation.  Sudden adaptation is difficult in a harsh environment, and the prospects for the species are not good.

At this point, one might expect conservatives to jump in and save the penguins.  After all, the March of the Penguins, a documentary movie set in Antarctica, became a hit because of its supposed demonstration that monogamy, heterosexual parenting, loyalty, and other traditional virtues were natural law.  As with all such allegories, the facts were another story, as penguins are about as monogamous as our own species, which is nothing to crow about.  In any case, the point never was to care about the penguins themselves, and no one is likely to now.

But I’m going to get sentimental anyway.  What is happening is that the snow has melted under some of the penguins’ eggs, and because they are trapped in the water they can’t be incubated.  The water will be warmer than the snow but not warm enough, while washing away any heat that could be supplied by the parent.  The eggs will die.  And the birds seem to know it.

One could say that these are but a few eggs, and that the species will adapt as the birds that place their eggs on better snow will reproduce while the others don’t.  Nature is a harsh teacher, but one can learn, right?  Wrong, actually, if that is your theory of evolution, but that’s another discussion.  What grabs me is that the birds want to adapt to the change and can’t.  They are congregated around the eggs as if trying to figure out how to solve the problem, and they are trying to do what they can that situation: roll the eggs out of the water.  That is what any engineer might do, if the engineer lacked arms and tools.   The penguins are doing everything they can do to save those eggs, and that means that they care about the eggs and, as their efforts are failing, understand that a disaster is slowly befalling their little community.

Obviously, the sentimentality here is not mine alone: witness the word “struggle” in the caption.  But is it misplaced?  I don’t think so, because once again the story really isn’t about the birds.  I happen to believe they are capable of emotional intelligence and rational problem solving, albeit while severely limited in their manipulative capability on land.  That is beside the point, however.  What the sentimental response does is open the viewer to understanding what the photograph is really about.  That is, to see why it is not such a small thing after all.

The pathos of the photograph is that the penguins are standing amidst a slowly unfolding catastrophe but handicapped as they try to deal with it.  That deficiency is due to biological limitations, including their lack of hands.  Just as important, however, is that they are only dimly capable of comprehending the full extent of the danger, and lack the cognitive, social, and political resources needed to adapt successfully.  They care about their young, but caring is not enough.  To avoid what is fast becoming their fate, they would need to analyze the terrain, organize and deliberate about the options, and adjust their habits for sustainability.  They aren’t wired to do that, of course.  Those are human capabilities, right?

Long story short, we may be like the penguins after all.

Photograph by Fen Montaigne, as part of Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica.

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The protests by environmental activists at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico last week ran the full gamut of street theatre: signs, costumes, body painting, effigies, nudity–you name it.  The image that caught eye, however, was obviously static and even inanimate.

Greenpeace has positioned replicas of some of the world’s iconic sculptures and architectural monuments to suggest one of the sure consequences of global warming: the rising sea levels that could conceivably submerge coastal cities.  Obviously, some creative license has been taken, as no one outside of a bad B-movie studio is going to suggest that the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro is likely to get wet–its base is 2300 feet above sea level.  But in any case, we’re all in this together, right?

Well, yes, actually.  These iconic images provide a shorthand for relaying messages and activating emotional attachments within a global civil society.  Cancun is not known for its public monuments, so this display is one way of bringing the world to Cancun.  It would persuade few to point out that the buildings in the background might be flooded someday, but the Sidney Opera House would be a loss that might touch those who care about culture.  Seeing the several icons sharing a common fate of being reclaimed by the sea suggests that national interests should be united by global warming.  More important, the scene suggests a common public interest, represented by a shared public culture known in part by its visual symbols.  Left to themselves, they symbols are shown to be defenseless against the predictable consequences of unregulated exploitation of another common resource: the global ecosystem.

We get that, I think, and we were supposed to get it.  But there is something else in the picture that also bears comment.  Here I refer to the somewhat shabby tone of the tableau.  Amidst the tropical ocean and gleaming beachfront resorts, the figures look out of place, off-kilter, as if they had been discarded.  Instead of consolidating their symbolic powers, they have been diminished, as if hollow effigies deserving only fire sale prices.  Instead of rightly adorning world cities, they could be in backlot storage for a Hollywood studio.  “Where did you put the icons, Eddie?”  “Those things?  I got ’em out in back, in the containment pool.  Why?  You get an offer for that junk?”

And what would you pay for a damaged icon?

The collapse of the roof of the Minneapolis Metrodome got a lot of press yesterday, even though it wasn’t the first time that snow has caused the roof to deflate (yes, that’s the term that is used).  No one was hurt, the scheduled football game has been moved to Detroit, and the structure would have had little use anyway, so what’s the fuss?  Obviously, the damage is one measure of the impact of Saturday’s snowstorm, and, as with the Greenpeace protest, another signature building became a symbol of how society cannot avoid the consequences of ignoring nature.

What interests me, however, is how this photograph, like the one above, captures a sense of shabbiness.  Actually, the Metrodome is never far from vernacular life, as even on its best days it looked like a Marshmallow that one might see around a Minnesota campfire.  (That lack of elevation is one of the things I love about Minnesota.)  Even so, the deflated stadium looks like a cheap backyard pool or hot tub poorly protected against yet another winter.  Or, if compared with the Minneapolis skyline in the background, like some decrepit structure in an old industrial park, say, where the pork by-products used to be processed.

Rather than assume this shared mood is accidental, perhaps one might consider how the photographers have captured something important about public culture.  Monuments to civilization are not self-sustaining, and engineering marvels need to be well-designed and well-maintained in respect to environmental challenges, and even then can fail.  Civilization itself is something that is not automatically sustainable, and modern societies create particularly complex equations that may include only a thin barrier between progress and catastrophe.  It doesn’t take long at all for any modern building, city, or society to look rundown, past its best days, trapped now into cycles of decline.   All that is needed is enough denial or inattention.  Against those tendencies, these photographs suggest how close the present can be to a future of decline.

Photographs by Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press and Carlos Gonzalez/Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Not long after the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978, a friend remarked casually, “That’s why we shouldn’t have space colonies.”  This was not the typical connection made at the time, and he spoke primarily as a critic of NASA’s “manned” space program, but it spoke volumes about the tendencies that had driven the unfortunates to their deaths: fleeing the center to create an enclaved community, the strange cult proved to be all too American after all.

The story came to mind again when I saw this photograph from the European Space Agency.

He’s Italian, not American, and he’s all alone, not part of a group, and he’s working for an organization of highly trained professionals, not an authoritarian dictatorship, so what’s the point of the comparison?  Well, take a look.  The astronaut lies confined to his space suit, almost immersed in it, and moving, seeing, and even breathing now seem barely possible because of the equipment that allows him to live at all.  His head is framed by two portals: the round window behind him to the outside of the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft, and the one in the foreground through which we peer into the dim interior with its cluttered material and garish lighting.  This is an image of confinement, and also of the long term consequences of confinement while being hurled, centrifugally, into space.  We see him both as he is now in the test space, and as his successors might become after many years of exploration far removed from Earth.  Grown into machines that both sustain and entomb them, cut off from all the interaction and change of social life outside the bubble, left to the growing madness induced by the repetitive immobility of the colony, anything becomes possible while the prospects of remaining human become ever more dim.

Thus, an image from the modernist dream of advancing humanity to the stars has a dystopian hue.  Instead of touching the heavens, space travel looks decidedly claustrophobic.  It looks, one might say, like the past.

This image of a body cast from Pompeii has some obvious affinities with the one above, and also a few notable differences.  Again we see a single body immobilized, now with its head caught in a last effort to breathe and perhaps to see the cause of its destruction.  The body is framed by its rectangular enclosure of glass, which is mirrored by the framed figures in the background, and so we see it between two portals, one to the interior space and another to the society that had surrounded it.  The most important differences are that the trappings of modern civilization are here replaced with the decor of antiquity, and spectatorship has been changed from looking through a single aperture to several tourists also on display.  Here the past has been excavated, but only to be entombed again.  This is not Pompeii as it was then, a lively resort town, but the post-catastrophe ruin that silently cautions any civilization living on the edge of sustainability.

Not to put to fine a point upon it, but whether one looks to the future or the past, there is reason to see disaster as a real possibility–and one that exists not because of some unforeseen factor, but precisely because of who we are and how our society is organized.  Affluent Romans went to Pompeii to get away from the cares of the city–nothing wrong with that, but they couldn’t escape nature’s fury.  Space colonies are imagined as distant projections of our best selves, when they could become hellholes only likely to end well as monuments to isolation.  Neither are real options, but the tendencies they represent are constantly evident in contemporary decision-making.

The challenge today is not to stretch toward a distant future, no more than it is to merely stare at a long-dead past.  Far more difficult is the task of taking the present seriously, and to see the present as belonging to everyone rather than those able to move into enclaves of privilege.  Indeed, unless there is a significant re-orientation in public policy toward the concerns of a common present, the future will already be like the past: entombed by catastrophe.

Photographs by Sergei Remezov/Reuters and Roberto Salomone/AFP/Getty Images.

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In recognition of the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast, Aric Mayer has put together a short film version of his paper “Aesthetics of Catastrophe” (Public Culture 20:2), in which he explores some of the problems and possibilities in covering the immediate aftermath of the storm.

The anniversary will be recognized by a number of other documentaries, but I doubt that serious reflection on Katrina could do better than to start with Aric’s visual essay.  And while it is true that substantial investments have been made in respect to civil engineering, I think it is safe to say that much remains to be learned: about what the disaster exposed in American society and government, about that society’s relationship to nature, and, perhaps most important, about the nature of catastrophe itself.   Catastrophe involves not only dramatic destruction but also long, slow processes of denial both before and after the event.  Hence the double tragedy when the aftermath is defined by the restoration of the same rather than genuine renewal.  Aric’s mediation on the first days of the aftermath of Katrina provides a remarkable demonstration of how a natural disaster challenges not only civil engineering but also the civic imagination.

Aric was the principal photographer working for the Wall Street Journal in New Orleans in the weeks after the storm.  His solo exhibition of the photographs, titled “Balance + Disorder: Hurricane Katrina and the   Photographic Landscape,” was held at Gallery Bienvenu in New Orleans.

You can see the film here, as one of the posts at Aric’s blog.

Photograph by Aric Mayer, Port Sulphur, LA (southern Plaquemines Parish).

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By Guest Correspondent J. Daniel Elam

A recent restaurant review in Time Out Delhi described the chicken at a new restaurant as “oily enough to remind us of the Gulf of Mexico.” Too soon? Yes, at least for this temporary ex-pat. But as BP and the US government attempt to ameliorate the environmental catastrophe they’ve caused off the coast of Louisiana, India has only recently seen political progress from its 1984 environmental tragedy in Bhopal.

On the night of 02 December 1984, the Union Carbide India Limited (at that time, a subsidiary of Dow, a US company) pesticide plant in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh began to leak methyl isocyanate. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, 500,000 people were exposed to the gas and at least 2,500 died. In the first two weeks following the leak, 8,000 more people died as a direct result; 8,000 deaths since then are believed to be the result of permanently contaminated groundwater and air. 200,000 people have had or continue to have injuries or disabilities related to methyl isocyanate exposure.

This is one of the most famous images of the Bhopal tragedy, taken by photographer Raghu Rai in the days following the leak. It is a baby, blinded by methyl isocyanate exposure (given the weight of the gas, children were the most likely to inhale large quantities of the chemical), mostly buried in one of the mass graves constructed in the emergency following the leak. A hand hovers over its head, perhaps to have one last touch, or perhaps to place a final handful of dirt over the corpse. The picture is horrific and nauseating, grotesque and yet jarringly real. It is nearly impossible to look at the image longer than is required to identify it.

This is another image by Rai, taken on 03 December 1984. Three people sit, blinded, on a bench, framed by people with vision who look with skepticism at Rai and his camera. Most striking, at least to me, is the blinded man, wrapped in a blanket, whose head is tilted toward the sky. His body reads of resigned pain, and although he is unidentified, we can imagine that he died shortly after the photograph was printed (along, most likely, with even the non-disabled people around him). There is something of a Greek tragic chorus in the composition of this photograph, and wailing seems justifiably in order.

What seems most tragic about Bhopal – aside from the lack of prosecution except for seven middle managers made scapegoats in May 2010 – and what makes Rai’s photographs of the event so appropriate, so jarring, is that the effect of gas exposure was (and is) blindness. Thus, Raghu Rai’s photography highlights the uncomfortable difference between the viewer and the subject of the image: sight. That the leak could have been easily prevented (Dow was aware of the plant’s deficiencies), reminds us that oversight is a privilege. Rai’s photography of the Bhopal tragedy reminds us that sight is a privilege–one that may disappear in the span of a few minutes by no doing of our own accord. In witnessing the horrific effects of the pesticide leak, we are reminded of the privilege to do so in the first place, and the responsibility that vision demands we accept.

Photographs by Raghu Rai.

J. Daniel Elam is a graduate student in the program in Rhetoric and Public Culture, Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University.  He can be contacted at j.daniel.elam@gmail.com.

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It has been a summer of catastrophes, both natural and man made.  There are pictures aplenty, and in some measure they all depict a similar and recurring story of tragedy, death and destruction, first responders, clean-up, and mourning, all of which rely upon a common set of visual tropes and conventions to make their point.  Those who decry “compassion fatigue” have plenty to support their claims, but if we look closely we might see differences that warrant less knee jerk reactions. As a case in point, consider two slideshows featured in tandem at The Big Picture concerning the current floods in Pakistan and the mudslide in Zhouqu County, China.

The mudslide in Zhouqu County resulted in over 1,100 deaths (and counting).  In the above photograph we see a platoon of workers disinfecting a street in front of a building that was demolished by the slide.  The image is marked by two complementary features. First, is the contrast between the drab tones of the mud encrusted building and the bright green canisters that contain the disinfectant being sprayed.  Second, is how carefully these state workers—soldiers actually—seem to be going about their task: dressed in protective gear, their attention focused on the ground in front of them, their movements are almost entrained as they work in unison to destroy the breeding grounds of infection and disease. Taken en toto we have a representative image of the Chinese government’s response to the disaster: the carefully coordinated use of state resources and modern technology to address the immediate needs precipitated by a crisis situation.  The point is reinforced in a second representative photograph:

This is a more panoramic image of the destruction and devastation, shot from above, but once again note how the orange and yellow cranes and earth movers underscore not just the presence of modern technologies, but the capacity of the state to organize and coordinate their usage quickly and somewhat effectively.  And note too that both state workers and civilians appear to be working in tandem.  China is governed by a totalitarian regime, make no mistake about that, but such images indicate one of the sources of its internal legitimacy:  when push comes to shove the state mobilizes its considerable resources to respond to crisis situations with some dispatch.  We have seen it before (here and here).  And whatever we might find objectionable in China’s commitment to human rights—and there is plenty—this is not a feature of its government that should be ignored or scanted.  Indeed, it deserves emulation.

In contrast, consider some of the photographs that depict the recent floods in Pakistan. The Big Picture begins with this image:

Here we have a Pakistani man literally marooned on an island in the midst of flood waters.  What distinguishes him from the animals with which he shares this tiny piece of land is the demand he is placing on his viewers for assistance.  And as the caption to the image tells us, he is appealing to an “Army” helicopter for relief. There is nothing here to indicate that this particular helicopter belongs to the U.S. government, though other pictures in the slide show make the implication clear enough.  But the bigger point to be made is how alone and isolated the man is, literally separated and apart from those with whom he supposedly shares a social contract.  Numerous other photographs in the slide show underscore the sense of isolation and social fragmentation that appears to govern Pakistani society in the wake of what is without a doubt a monumental crisis, suggesting the sense in which this image is something of a representative anecdote for the immediate underlying problem that confronts Pakistan.

That sense of isolation and social disconnection is reinforced by other photographs in the slideshow, and not least by those few images that picture a thoroughly inadequate State response.  The Pakistani military has something of a vague presence in a few of the photographs we are shown, but even there their efforts are isolated, individuated, and apparently inadequate, as implied by the larger and more active presence of the U.S. military.  And the one place where we see a distinctively active Pakistani state, the effect is hardly salutary:

A Pakistani police officer is pummeling a fellow citizen with a baton for “looting” donated food.  On the face of it the looter doesn’t seem to be all that much of a threat.  To be sure, order needs to be maintained, perhaps all the more so in times of crisis, but beating an already weakened citizenry in need of food hardly seems to be an appropriate response.  Perhaps this is an isolated incident.  Maybe this lone police officer felt overwhelmed by a mob of looters and reacted to a felt threat. Maybe.  But again, the bigger point is how the photograph functions as a cipher for a society in total disarray and a government that doesn’t seem to have a clue as to how to proceed in the modern world—or perhaps imagines its legitimacy as nothing more than a function of brute force and doesn’t worry about the need to achieve any legitimacy by effectively administering its society.  This may or may not be an accurate characterization of Pakistani society and governance, but the contrast with how China appears to respond to crisis and catastrophe could not be more pronounced.

It is of course important to keep in mind that the magnitude of the catastrophe in Pakistan dwarfs the recent disaster in China.  The mudslides in China effect one county and thousands of people, the floods in Pakistan will effect nearly fourteen million people.  And yet, even for all of that, it is hard not to see a tale of two cities envisioned here, one animated by a modern government dedicated to effective response to crisis, large or small, and the other thoroughly inadequate to the demands of life in modern times.

Photo Credits: STR/AFP/Getty, Reuters, AP Photo/Anjum Naveed.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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Let’s start with the obvious: who can name the movie?

It’s a trick question, of course.  This fabulous sci-fi machine looming monstrously out of smoke and flame isn’t from a movie set. It’s the Deepwater Horizon oil platform in its death throes on April 22, 2010, two days after the explosion that started one of the worst environmental disasters in US history.  Life seems to be following art as this tragedy mimes an image and mood easily conjured out of popular culture, and not for the first time–recall how many people remarked that the planes exploding into the World Trade Center seemed to be a film rather than an actual historical event in real time.

Nor has this uncanny experience happened for the last time.  And the story that accompanied this photograph in the New York Times is one reason why we will continue to experience large-scale disasters.  To see why, we can begin by noting that photo had two captions: One was the small credit off to one side that said “Catastrophe” and then provided the literal details of what, where, and when.  The other was the large headline running the length of the huge photo filling the space above the fold: “Taking Lessons From What Went Wrong.”  Catastrophes, it turns out, have silver linings, as they are a spur to technological progress.  The rest of the article embroiders this idea, while also contrasting”engineers”–who agree such lessons are inevitable and valuable–against “environmentalists”–who apparently are not engineers and argue for discarding risky technologies rather than allowing them to “evolve.”  Unfortunately, “The history of technology suggests that such an end is unlikely.  Devices fall out of favor, but seldom if ever get abolished by design.”  With science, nature, and history on the side of the engineers, and a subtle association of environmentalism with the creationism and intelligent design movements, this one is a no brainer.

I could write a book about this article, as it is a line-by-line case study in ideological rationalization, and in self-contradiction.  That’s not feasible at the moment, so let’s just back up a bit and then take another look.  The article is, of course, absolutely right: engineering works by learning from its failures, and well it should.  But we knew that, right?  The problem is that the Times also is claiming that “‘You don’t want to let a good crisis go to waste,'” but that is exactly what the oil companies–and the Times–are avoiding.  If the lesson to be learned is that technology is always getting safer, and if all of the corporate and regulatory decisions that created the disaster–decisions that were made by neither engineers nor environmentalists–are hidden behind a screen of merely technical adaptation, the crisis will have been wasted.

Ironically, the story ends by quoting yet another expert, who intones, “‘It’s like our personal lives, . . . Failure can force us to make hard decisions.”  And that is exactly how it is not like our personal lives, as all the hard decisions are being ducked.  And so we might as well go to the movies.

The turn to fantasy, however, need not be an exercise in escapism.  One might ask, is there anything in the photograph that reveals some of the truth being denied in print?   The photo is not obviously radical, and it certainly also can contribute to enchantment, not least the blurring of fact and fiction that was part of the Times’ narrative.  But there are some clues: the behemoth rises up as if the embodiment of the technological imperative, an imperative that is is fully realizing itself as a gigantic, autonomous machine.  That embodiment is tragic, however: the machine is embattled with demons of its own making and dying a hero’s death.  Technocratic civilization rises up above its creators, only to crash amidst the flaming oil and gas that was its lifeblood.  To crash and burn, but boldly, gloriously, a last monument to its own epic grandeur.

That’s the movie, anyway.  Reality is less dramatic, but to the same end.  Were we to learn from the picture, the ultimate catastrophe might be averted.  Unfortunately, the narrative will dominate.  And it will dominate despite assuring us both that “‘it can’t happen again'” and that additional disasters are “inevitable,” that “investigatory findings will eventually improve the art of drilling for oil in deep waters,” and, well, “at least until the next unexpected tragedy.”

Thus, by putting text and image together, the truth is revealed.  Between the technological development that will in fact result from the disaster, and the artistry of the Times and many other propagandists spinning it down the memory hole, the opportunity for genuine societal adaptation will be lost.

The modern prophet Walter Benjamin once defined the critical moment as that point where the status quo threatens to be preserved.  In the same passage he also said what it was to have missed the opportunity: that was the definition of catastrophe.

Photograph credit: no credit was provided at the Times.  The Benjamin citation is from The Arcades Project (Harvard/Belknap,1999), N10,2, p. 474.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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The physicist Richard Feynman has famously remarked that “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”  Those of us familiar with both the clean, green British Petroleum logo and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill have good reason to savor the remark.  More than irony is needed to get to a better world, however, not least for those of us who spend much time on technologies, such as computers and the Web, that are wholly dependent on the electrical grid and the large-scale energy production that fuels it.  If visual culture is to be more than part of the problem (think of that BP logo), then there is need to look at more than oil-soaked birds or those hypnotic video images of robots at the well head.  In fact, thinking about better approaches to resource management might benefit from more ordinary images of events that are still dramatic but less than horrific.

The walls of the sunken cylinder are so uniformly even that it could be another feat of engineering–perhaps the footprint for a missile silo.  No one expects to see an underground silo along a city street, however, so something is amiss.  Seriously amiss, as it happens: you are looking at an enormous sinkhole in Guatemala City, Guatemala.  The hole opened suddenly following Tropical Storm Agatha, devouring a factory that had closed for the day only an hour before.  No harm, no foul, perhaps, but this is not what you want to see happening in your neighborhood.

The illusion that it could be engineered is indicative of the larger tension exposed by the photo.  The built environment all around the hole is engineered, which means that it is the result of carefully working with nature rather than trying to fool it, manipulate it through magic, or otherwise live at its mercy.  Nature has no mercy, and engineering either provides or protects a great deal of what is necessary for a good life in the modern world.  But the more successful and extensive the engineering, the greater the consequences when nature does expose errors in calculation.

Oops!  This photo of a landslide across Highway 3 in Taiwan is somewhat of an inverted image of the one above.  Here the earth rises above the street instead of having disappeared below, but in each case the built environment is drastically disrupted by the earth moving as it will and without any respect for the plans of those who build upon it.  The photo is more comic than catastrophic, however: perhaps it will inspire a B movie, say, “Revolt of the Hill Creatures.”  If done well, we’ll learn that all they really want is to be left alone–that, and love, of course.

I’m featuring these photos in order to point out not only that nature can’t be fooled, but that humans will continue to fool themselves.  That highway is an impressive piece of engineering, but not one that could have anticipated every change in topography.  The sinkhole in Guatemala is not the first in that area, but few would expect everyone living there to pack up and leave (and then what–move to San Francisco?)  At some level, the illusion that it can’t happen here may be essential for human life.  That does NOT excuse hubris, however, and BP and other global-scale offenders should be penalized and regulated to the hilt.  Even so, the innovation needed to develop a sustainable society has to come at all levels, and especially in respect to the humble but still difficult tasks of restoring local communities.

Perhaps one reason why I like these photos is that they are relatively humble.  The record distinctive events, but the images themselves are rather straightforward.  They show disasters but relatively small scale disasters, and they are more instructive than dazzling.  The perspective afforded is not the engrossing close-up but rather the relatively detached aerial view.  Indeed, it is that calculated distance from the scene, that long view and the comic willingness to admit to one’s own faults that may be a critical part of seeing our way to a sustainable society.

Photographs by Reuters/Casa Presidencial and Reuters.  The Feynman quote is from the report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Volume 2: Appendix F – Personal Observations on Reliability of Shuttle by R.P. Feynman.  And despite my crack about oil-soaked birds, I have to applaud The Big Picture for breaking through the fourth wall with these photos.

Cross-posted at BAGnewsNotes.

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