14 Photos That Will Make You Think About Planet Earth's Future

Oliver Libaw
·Managing Editor
Updated

Sometimes an incredible image is enough to focus public attention on the big-picture issues that often remain stuck in the backs of our minds.

“Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot,” a new large-format photography book published by the Population Institute, hopes to do just that with the subject of global population growth and its effect on our planet.

The nonprofit environmental and social justice group’s book contains images from all over the world, from a Brazilian Farm to the Atlantic Ocean, each intended to show the “ecological and social tragedies of humanity’s ballooning numbers and consumption.”

“We sought to present a range of images reflecting how the human demographic explosion—7.3 billion people and still growing by over 1.5 million every week—has diminished Earth’s richness and beauty, and contributed to so much misery among people,” says one of the authors, Tom Butler, of the Foundation for Deep Ecology.

Even people who tend to shrug off environmental and global problems as either overhyped or insurmountable will be struck by the photos in “Over.” There are images of endless seas of people crowding through cities around the world, farm animals in pens too high to count, and surfers riding a garbage-filled wave. It would be hard to look at them all and feel good about humankind’s stewardship of our planet.

“Even after months of researching, editing, and choosing images, our editorial team sometimes would stop and sit in silence while assembling the photo essays in the book, amazed at the behavior of our species and fearful for the future of nature and people,” says Butler.

“Over” shows how creativity and artistic skill can help get a message heard, and we believe it embodies the Maker movement. Butler selected a few images from the book to highlight here on Yahoo Makers, and you can view the entire collection on Population Speak Out’s “Over” site. He also wrote the captions that appear with the photos.


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