Edward Burtynsky on the power artists have to inspire climate action

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has devoted much of his career to highlighting the ways humanity impacts the planet.

And he's setting out to do again with his latest art installation, In the Wake of Progress, which will take over all of the screens at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto this weekend. The project will include photography and film starting with verdant untouched forests followed by images of the many ways humans have impacted the planet with practices like mining and deforestation.

Burtynsky spoke to What On Earth host Laura Lynch in his studio in Toronto about his latest public art project and how his role as an artist and advocate for the environment has changed over the course of his career. Here is part of their conversation.

This is the latest in a long line of projects that you've done that seek to raise awareness about what's going on in our planet, and perhaps in that way, try to raise people's aspirations to make it a better place. I'm wondering where that comes from in you, why you've chosen this way to approach your work. 

By allowing you to kind of experience all of these things, and not being told how you're supposed to react to it or what you should take away from it, we believe that there's a greater likelihood of you owning it; you then start to absorb it in a different way. 

Here's something that you experience. You feel it. You walk away and maybe feel a little sad, or you might feel angry, but you're going to feel something. That I think has a greater chance to translate into behavioral change.

We need to move away from rhetoric and move away from just talking about the problem, because we're now in it. We now have to start acting. Each and every one of us has to start doing what we can.

You don't have to look any further than B.C. last summer to understand the danger we're in. 

Do you feel that after all this time that you've made a dent, that you've had success in doing what you've been trying to do?

I mean audiences do respond. I'm always encouraged when I do a talk and then afterwards, you know, a student will come to me and say, I was going down this path and I saw your work and now I'm going into environmental studies, or I just wrote a dissertation and I'm now interested in biology and what we can do to lessen our impact.

I think, those kinds of things are very important, that the next generation gets on with the project. They need to become foot soldiers. But, also the great danger is to expect the youth to fix it and thus not to work on it today because you can't fix it once the milk is spilt in the carpet. All that CO2 is milk in the carpet. 

Our show focuses on climate solutions, and I'm wondering how you see what you do as a solution?

What we think that our films do, and our work does, is to broaden the tent. Yes, you are speaking to the choir. This reinforces and helps them kind of digest and feel the need to continue the aspiration to solve the problem.

There are those that will never join the choir and then there is this group, I think, in between that could be convinced there's a problem. I think films, images, books and now this public art thing helps, maybe, move some of those [people] under the tent. 

In this new film, you begin with these beautiful images of a verdant forest on Vancouver Island, and then you go through what is clearly the destruction wrought by industry, the quote unquote, progress the world is seeing. Then you come back to the verdant forest at the end and the sounds of nature. Is that because you're trying to give people hope? 

Absolutely. I think there is an anxiety happening in the youth today, and this almost kind of giving up, and the last thing we want is people to give up. That is not the message or the place we want the youth or anybody to end up at.  

As long as there is a chance, as long as there are still opportunities to stave off the worst, then we need to.

There are still large tracts of [forest] available, and if we just leave it alone, then it will regenerate. It will continue to grow and prosper. We just need to understand that we can't keep adding to the problem because nature will self-correct. It's just going to correct us off the planet and that is not what we want.

Written by Devin Nguyen. Interview produced by Dannielle Piper. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.