Richard John Seymour is a photographer and BAFTA-nominated film-maker. His work explores the often hidden effects of globalization and the way they are changing the planet and how, in turn, these human-made changes to the environment are affecting us.
On 30 January 2000 a tailings dam in north-western Romania broke, spilling cyanide into the Danube River and killing large numbers of fish and other species in Romania and neighbouring countries. Here, on an older lake near Bozanta Mare, Romania, where tailings were also dumped, a decommissioned pipeline acts as a monument to the heavy-metal mining techniques that feed global consumption.
I’m a photographer and film-maker. I grew up in the countryside in Shropshire in England, which is a very rural part of the country and one of the least densely populated. My background is in design and architecture – I was interested in the countryside as a design project and when I was studying to be an architect, I started to use photography and filmmaking as a way to document the kinds of spaces that I found inspiring. I wanted to have a discussion that explored the forms of design that aren’t usually talked about in the architectural profession but actually have consequences on our world that are perhaps larger than city or building design; this idea of how landscape and city are all part of the same process and how the countryside – where I’m from – is essentially designed to serve the needs of the city.
At first, I started out by visiting the buildings that I found quite interesting. Then I started travelling to Europe – to places where I found the architecture the most interesting – but what ended up becoming my first most notable work was the work I did in China. That was really when I started to use photography in a way that affected me and it motivated me to pursue it more. My first trips were with a group of artists, researchers and architects in 2014 and were designed to investigate, in as many ways as possible, the implications that our lives were having on places that we don’t often get to see, whether they be cities in China that are built to perform one specific task, or whether they be landscapes that are being ravaged and destroyed for the coal that fuels the steel industry that is required for architecture, for instance.
Each one of us on the trips were in essence part of a collective, but we all branched into our different areas of interest. For me, these visits to China were when I first started to realize that while these places in China were fascinating on one level and on a scale of which I’d never seen before, they were in effect designed and made to facilitate the lifestyles of someone like me. When I saw what kind of space and what kind of scale is required to fulfill the lifestyle we have in the developed world, I was inspired to create work that would communicate this hidden world to people.
A lone figure surveys the site of a new construction project in front of the new Shenzhen skyline in China, with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange building in the background.
For instance, landscapes that might appear to be quite beautiful, melancholic spaces are actually being completely destroyed. For me, beauty is a tool; it’s a way of attracting someone’s attention and for me it’s important to use all of the tools in the arsenal that you have as a visual artist. Beauty is one of the most powerful tools we have, because it immediately attracts people’s attention and perhaps gives them a bit more time with a subject than they would otherwise spend if they saw something that wasn’t so beautiful, that was easier to dismiss, gives them a perspective that they might not otherwise get. The power of imagery is such that it can transcend time, it can transcend language – it’s a very powerful form of communication.
‘These visits to China were when I first started to realize that while these places in China were fascinating on one level and on a scale of which I’d never seen before, they were in effect designed and made to facilitate the lifestyles of someone like me.’
‘If you think of the plastic that is on show in Yiwu – each one of those stalls can produce each object they have in thousands, or tens of thousands – so even if each one of those stalls sells, say, ten thousand plastic “things” a year, that suddenly becomes extremely scary numbers.’
Because I grew up in the countryside, I have a connection to it; studying and being interested in the environment from a young age, I think gave me a feeling that there’s a design problem happening. We’re using finite resources at a rate that is not sustainable. And it’s happening at a scale that no one can see – the idea that we can’t sustain life on this planet at the rate at which we’re using the natural resources of the world; the idea of what are we doing and how can we improve the situation?
About three hours outside of Shanghai, China, is a city called Yiwu where they have a market called Yiwu International Trade City [also known as Yiwu Market] and it’s the world’s largest small commodities market. I discovered it on one of my trips to China and it became something for me – the more I delved into it, the more interesting it became. For instance, sixty per cent of all Christmas decorations are made in Yiwu. The market itself has over 70,000 stores, exactly like the ones shown on pp. 250–5. And not only that, but each item in those stores is a one-off. You don’t go there, fill up your shopping trolley and leave. You find an object that you like the design of – of which there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions – and then you order it to be made in a nearby factory by the thousands. It’s for budget retailers or wholesalers, the products for sale are the kinds of things that you see in the Poundland or Dollar Store type of stores.
They’re basically showrooms for nearby factories. It literally takes days and days of walking just to cover a small percentage of what’s there. And there are many stories inside the building, it is almost a city in itself; people eat in that building, they sleep in that building, they have their kids in that building. The whole scenario is a really interesting pressure point in this global system we’re part of. Here you get to see a small, small percentage of what is happening in our world. If you think of the plastic that is on show in Yiwu – each one of those stalls can produce each object they have in thousands, or tens of thousands – so even if each one of those stalls sells, say, ten thousand plastic ‘things’ a year, that suddenly becomes extremely scary numbers. It’s almost impossible to comprehend.
I wasn’t able to really investigate beyond the ‘shop window’, but I managed to get the contact for someone who worked in one of the Christmas decoration factories and I managed to get in there. It was the middle of summer in Yiwu, eighty-five degrees [Fahrenheit, thirty degrees Celsius] and there were just dozens and dozens, hundreds, of people making Christmas decorations and wearing Santa hats. It was just the most surreal thing ever. Seeing that puts a sour taste in your mouth when you go home and in just a few months the Christmas decorations start to go up and you know that there’s somebody who’s been working in a spray room and is probably developing all sorts of health problems to spray the red glitter onto the holly decorations. That really changes the way you see those sorts of objects.
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One of the biggest takeaways from everything that I’ve done so far, is that I think about these things as design problems and the thought-process behind the way we design the things that we use has to extend beyond not only their manufacture, not only their use, but also what we do with them afterwards. Changing the way we look at the world, or at least changing our economies from a linear into more of a circular idea, is a really important change that needs to happen. And that probably is happening, but what I hope to do with some of my work is contribute to it speeding up – I hope that maybe by people being so overwhelmed by, for instance Yiwu, by confronting people with the scale of the problem, is a way of helping them think about it. Looking at the bigger picture, looking at the way in which things are connected, looking at things beyond the scale of the nation state and the scale of the planet. That’s the only way we can solve most of the biggest problems that we have. CO2 doesn’t understand a national border. Cooperation at a planet-scale is required.
One of my projects, Landscape Healing, was a documentary about a large-scale rewilding project in Norway conducted by the Norwegian military. In Norway there is a law that determines that polluter is responsible for the pollution,6 so the Norwegian military is taking seventy-seven square miles [20,000 square hectares] of former shooting ranges – which are full of heavy metal pollution and unexploded ordinance – and attempting to turn them back into wilderness.
There are two parts to that story. The first part is that Norway produces a lot of oil which is its primary source of wealth and that wealth has been put into a sovereign wealth fund which is now approaching around a trillion dollars, so it means there is a lot of public money to invest in projects like this. But the real reason the military is doing it is because they’re legally obliged to clean up after themselves and because they’re responsible for it, they’re the ones who have to pay for it, but in turn funded by taxpayer’s money. That’s almost the only way to get corporations and institutions as big as that to spend that much money – it’s a twelve-year project and I think it will cost them about half a billion Norwegian Krone [approximately US$50 million]. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not that much money – it just scratches the surface relative to the amount of oil Norway is shipping to be used by the rest of the world – but if we were to follow through with that law globally, I’m not sure how we would manage it, but now’s the time to start trying.
The Landscape Healing project was really interesting for me as a design idea because it asks the question, ‘Can humans create wilderness?’ And, the idea of the Norwegian military rewilding a large part of their landscape is a really interesting way of using national resources that begins to address the scale of the action required. It requires architects, it requires biologists, it requires all manner of scientists, it requires the labour of the military – all instigated by a piece of legislation. For me, that’s extremely inspiring, because it shows what’s possible. Nature can heal itself, but it shows that it also requires a big action on our part. Maybe it’s not possible through individual action for us to do what’s needed anymore?
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‘In the last fifteen years we’ve produced half of the plastic ever made and in the last twenty-five years we’ve emitted half of the CO2 ever emitted in the history of humanity. Since we’ve had the information that we’ve needed to change our habits, we’ve massively done the opposite.’
Stores in Yiwu International Trade City, China. Also known as Yiwu Market, it is the world’s largest small commodities market and holds over 70,000 showrooms representing neighbouring factories that produce a variety of products for the world market, including toys, household cleaning equipment, knitted hats and scarves, balloons, car accessories and artificial plants.
‘All of a sudden, governments are forced to admit that they can afford to do things that they’ve been saying they can’t afford to do for decades. My biggest hope is that this will embed itself into our subconscious and that we will start to think more radically about what’s possible.’
Right now [when this interview took place] we’re in a moment in which the Coronavirus – Covid-19 – has forced many countries to be in lockdown. There are huge amounts of death and illness, which is a tragic scenario, but there are glimmers of hope on a larger scale if you ignore the pandemic itself and look at the action that’s been taken to stop the spread. I think if you had told anyone two, or even six, months ago that planes would be grounded, car manufacturers would make medical supplies instead of cars – not in a matter of years or months but literally in a matter days – and that as a result humans are stopping pollution on a level that has never been seen before, I don’t think anyone would have believed that to be possible; which is also a really big barrier to stopping large-scale concerted action. But we’ve been forced into it by this pandemic and it proves that big-scale change is possible. And that it’s not the end of the world! Most people are managing to adjust and all of a sudden, governments are forced to admit that they can afford to do things that they’ve been saying they can’t afford to do for decades. My biggest hope is that this will embed itself into our subconscious and that we will start to think more radically about what’s possible.
A frozen river of tailings from a nearby mine cuts across the lake in Geamăna, in Translyvania in Romania. Geamăna is an abandoned village which was sacrificed to make way for a tailings lake for the nearby Rosia Poieni copper mine. All that remains is the top of the church spire.
Văcăreşti, a neighbourhood in south-eastern Bucharest, Romania. Construction of a huge artificial lake was started here under communist leader Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime, but never completed and the land is now used as an unofficial city wilderness with unauthorized livestock grazing and settlers occupying the vacant land.
I hope what will come out of the Coronavirus-crisis and what I’ve seen through the Landscape Healing project, is that ultimately what’s required to make the scale of change needed is legal action – we need to change the rules of the game. We like to think of corporations as ‘people’, but they’re not. They don’t think like humans, they don’t have empathy and I think that we’re in a position where, even if a large percentage of us make huge changes to our own lives voluntarily, the only way to make sure everybody acts in the same way and in a fair way, is to make sure the rules we all abide by are fair and adequate to protect us all.
And that’s going to require political movement and it’s going to require political participation. Hopefully when young people are old enough to vote, that will be a great change in the tide. We see them getting more engaged with the Greta Thunberg movement and she is proving that voting is not necessarily the only option we have – we can also protest, we can also become politically motivated – and for me that’s the first step to becoming more politically engaged. Voting, but with the ultimate goal of changing the legal system, changing the rules of the game.
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I’m constantly inspired by the ability of humans to adapt to their environment and to adapt their environment to themselves and while that can play out negatively as well as positively, it gives me a sense of optimism that huge scale change is possible. If you look at a city like Shenzhen in China, in much less than one lifetime it’s gone from a fishing village to a global metropolis. It can be easy to be stuck in the moment and not understand the level of change that’s actually possible, but it’s not something that’s specific to China; we’re starting to see that that change on a huge scale is possible wherever humans are involved. Humans are very good at adapting themselves to their own advantage and right now, the question now is about making the system and the circumstances right for that to happen in a positive way for our planet.
A toxic tailings lake in the city of Baotou, the largest city in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China and location of one of the largest steel processing factories in the world.
But in a certain way what I find the most inspirational, can also be the most disturbing because it’s not only for the good that humans adapt themselves and adapt their environments. In Romania there is a place called Geamăna, in Lupşa in Translyvania in Romania (pp. 256–7). Geamăna was a small village situated slightly below a copper mine further up into the mountain. The copper mine needed the area that the village was in as a waste dump, so they built a dam wall and forced the residents to move out. Slowly but surely the tailings lake grew and grew and eventually covered the village and now all that’s left is the village church; the spire is all that’s visible. For me that image is a powerful symbol of capitalism superseding religion – a church spire drowning in the waste from a copper mine. I think photography is very good at that, at communicating facts in an emotional way.
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‘The thought-process behind the way we design the things that we use has to extend beyond not only their manufacture, not only their use, but also what we do with them afterwards.’
‘Nature can heal itself, but it also requires a big action on our part. Maybe it’s not possible through individual action for us to do what’s needed anymore?’
We’ve had a lot of the data that we’ve needed to save us for a very long time, but we’ve been relying on individual action and that’s very problematic because not only have we not been able to solve all of our problems with individual action since we’ve known about the data, it hasn’t resulted in much. For instance, in the last fifteen years, we’ve produced half of the plastic ever made. And in the last twenty-five years, we’ve emitted half of the CO2 ever emitted in the history of humanity,7 which is actually after we’ve known about the damaging effects. Since we’ve had the information that we’ve needed to change our habits, we’ve massively done the opposite.
What needs to change now is that we need to see a level of political activism at a scale that we haven’t seen before and however we do that is different for every country and every situation, but at an individual level voting is an incredibly important factor. It can literally change the world. You can be creative with the ways in which you do that. Even something as simple as writing to your elected representative and telling them, ‘I won’t vote for you if you don’t make improvements to the way you look at the environment’. They’re people, they’ll read it, they’ll think, ‘Somebody is sending me this. If one person is sending me this, maybe hundreds of people are thinking it’. So it might feel small, but I think individual action has to be more in the area of politics and less in the area of personal consumption habits, in order to make a big difference.
Blåisen, part of the Hardangerjøkulen glacier in the Hardangervidda mountain plateau in Norway. Hardangervidda is one of Europe’s largest remaining wilderness areas but despite this, the glacier is reducing in size and some scientists project it will have fully melted by 2100.
A satellite image of the earth’s surface taken from NASA’s Landsat 8 satellite. Satellite data is used to analyze weather patterns, crop yields, environmental catastrophes and even evidence in cases of international crimes, but increasingly is being used for mineral prospecting. By interpreting non-visible bands of the electromagnetic spectrum captured by satellite, prospectors can analyze satellite images for signatures of potential mineral deposits.
