“Where do our resources come from? How have we reshaped the world to meet our needs?” asks the work of this industrial photographer.
[Editor’s Note: German photographer Tom Hegen’s work provides an overview of a planet transformed by humanity.]
When James Watt perfected the steam engine in the latter half of the 18th century, there were just under one billion people on the planet.
Some 250 years later, the world’s population has exploded to over eight billion, increasing the demand for raw materials and inspiring new, often invasive, ways to get them.
We mine billion-year-old iron deposits for steel and limestone for concrete. We also drill, dig, and frack for oil, coal, and gas.
We cut down forests to make way for huge plantations that produce food for our livestock.
Dam on Lake Grimsel, Canton of Bern, Switzerland
Our “inventive” minds have dammed rivers to generate electricity. We move mountains because they are in our way. We drill holes in the ground to exploit the earth’s natural resources. We cultivate, extract, cultivate, blast, pump, clear, burn, fertilize, seal, pollute, and poison.
As a result, only about a quarter of the earth’s surface is free of human traces today. The mass of materials we have created for our buildings, furniture, clothing, appliances, packaging, and vehicles now exceeds the total biomass – i.e., the mass of all plants, bacteria, fungi, animals, and humans.
The weight of human-produced materials in New York City alone is roughly equivalent to the weight of all the fish in the world. We have formed all these things from raw materials that we have wrested from the earth.
TERRA EXTRACT (read more below) shows places around the world where we extract raw materials for our daily lives, where we process these elements, and where the traces of our actions are unmistakable. Even if many of these places seem far away, we are all connected to them. In our everyday lives, we use raw materials that have been extracted at great expense for our needs.
Photography can help us to understand the world better.
The distanced perspective, in particular, opens up a view of connections that often remain hidden from us in everyday life. But knowledge alone is not enough.
We need to become aware of the raw materials that shape our lives and understand that every resource we use has its price—be it for nature, for people, or for future generations.
This awareness will hopefully bring about a new appreciation. And appreciation is the basis for responsible and conscious use of the precious raw materials that our planet has in store for us.
| Tom Hegen’s exhibition: TERRA EXTRACT, opens May 2025, in Zingst, Germany |
