Overview: A New Perspective of Earth

Documenting the Anthropocene

The Earth suffers greatly under our stewardship. Benjamin Grant collects and reposts satellite images from around the world documenting it. These publicly available images are starkly beautiful and ultra-high quality, but looking at them in series is most uncomfortable. They depict evidence of Man: the discolored water, the scarred earth, the intense clusters of humanity, broken every so often by a spot of greenery.

Many of the shots are magnificent, poster-worthy and suitable for framing. Two that stand out for me are the solar array tromp oeil that appears to be a giant sphere, the ugly abscess of an open pit mine in Botswana and a section of Mexico City (See Amazon review for images). From the ugly ports to show more the massively complex airports to the checkerboard housing developments and agricultural fields – evidence of Man is everywhere, and it is never an improvement. There are some interesting before and afters – Burning Man during and after, a refugee camp where there just desert before, and polluted lakes in various states of distress. Either to prove the point or to relieve readers of angst, the last chapter, just a few shots, are of places untouched by Man.

Overview is a print best-of the same service on the internet, where Grant calls it dailyoverview. It is evidence for some future civilization as to what went wrong.

David Wineberg show less

Very beautiful coffee table book showing the view from above. For a taste--check out the Daily Overview website: http://www.dailyoverview.com/

Beautiful. This is what I call money well spent!