Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2019)

We have grown used to seeing the ways in which humans are profoundly changing the natural world; the oceans, the forests, the wildlife. What Anthropocene offers is a devastatingly beautiful window into the ways we are rapidly and irreversibly changing the very skeleton of the earth through the volume, speed and scale of our consumption.

Scientists are asking whether we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where human impact has a greater effect on the earth’s systems than natural forces. Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicolas de Pencier’s documentary provides a compelling argument that this is the case.

In a series of chapters, each as disturbingly beautiful as the next, the documentary traverses the globe in search of some of the largest feats of man-made intervention.

It’s easy to watch parts of the footage in awe of the accomplishments and sheer destructive power of the human race. Take the scenes from the Norilsk heavy metal smelting plant in Russia, where an entire town has been built to power the biggest plant of its kind in the world: faced with the awe-inspiring images of tonnes of molten metals being expertly processed, it takes a moment to comprehend the scale of the extraction taking place, the impact of the extreme noise, heat and waste from the factory. Similarly, in a marble mine in Italy, it takes a few moments to be distracted from the sheer beauty of the vast expanse of the white rock to understand the scale of the project, the way in which the huge trucks strain to move as much marble as is physically possible in one movement before going back for more.

The footage triumphantly shows, again and again, the way in which we have built machines to take as much as is physically possible from the earth, and constantly push these machines to their absolute limit, at an incomprehensible scale and speed.

The cost of humanity’s endless consumption, our constant quest for expansion and technological advancement, is laid bare here in an urgent and unignorable way. It’s impossible to comprehend the scale of our destruction, impossible to visualise the tonnes of earth that have been shifted, tonnes of trees that have been felled, tonnes of acres filled with waste. Yet the long, sometimes unrecognisable shots of vast quarries or refineries bigger than cities, begin to paint the essential picture. Touching on more well documented aspects of humanity’s impact on the earth: deforestation, the rapid reduction in biodiversity, the change in the condition of the oceans, as well as much less widely publicised exploits: lithium mining in the Atacama, vast marble quarries in Italy, Anthropocene paints a comprehensive, unsettling and essential picture for the scale and of our effects on the planet from our very short time on earth.