There’s an obelisk of pure light off the I-15 between LA and Vegas. It’s the kind of thing you might expect Hunter S. Thompson to hallucinate in an ether-stupor while roaring along at 120 MPH. But if you’ve traversed that stretch of desert road in the daylight hours, you’ve probably seen it yourself: Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating Station. Three towers, each the height of a Giza Pyramid, absorbing redirected sunlight from a matrix of 347,000 mirrors, burning a hole of white pixels through the desert panorama.

A few years ago, I pulled off the highway at the odd casino-town of Primm, Nevada, and followed some dusty roads to get as close to Ivanpah as I legally could. Tourists in these parts are typically here to stop for a few uncomfortable hours in Death Valley, a stretch of desert that boasts the world’s highest recorded temperature of 134°F. Others of us, though there are few, are compelled to stand before an obelisk hot enough to melt a solid block of lead. Ivanpah is like a piece of the sun, visible only in the periphery, and utterly baffling in its intensity. Stay long enough, and you might even catch the sizzling evisceration of a yellow-rumpled warbler that crosses the facility’s focused beam of sunlight.

In technical terms, Ivanpah is a concentrated solar thermal (CSP) plant completed in 2014 that produces enough energy to power 130,000 California homes.1 It cost $2.2 billion to build, covers nearly six square miles of the Mojave Desert, and isn’t performing quite as well as expected. In hindsight, not a major surprise. The federal government covered 73% of its cost back in the Obama days, when coordinated top-down action on a clean energy transition felt possible. In reality, free-market forces drove the price of individual solar panels way down. Each successful deployment of distributed solar made gargantuan constructions like CSP that much harder to justify. To add insult to injury, the LA Times later called Ivanpah the “world’s ugliest solar power plant.”

For all its brilliance, Ivanpah is overshadowed by the vast resource and energy projects that keep this corner of the country humming and habitable. Travel a bit further on the interstate highway—itself a mesh of tentacles long enough to circle the Earth 160 times—and you can visit the Colorado River lifted a quarter mile into the air on its cross-desert journey to California, or the Hoover Dam, a 726-foot-tall statue of Atlas carrying enough water for 25 million people upon its back.

Great public works like dams and interstate highways were products of the New Deal era, when Washington answered big questions with even bigger infrastructure projects. That administrative engine, almost socialist-authoritarian in its scope, now lies dead. We may see its echoes in China, where 1.3 million people were forcibly displaced to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. But in America, we’re left with its tombs: the wreckage of the $100-million Teton Dam, which killed 11 people and dealt $2 billion in estimated damages when it collapsed, or the shuttered nuclear reactors at Three Mile Island, once thought to be too big to fail.

Whether monumental technological feats are “symbols of national pride” or an “insult to God’s Creation,” as Edward Abbey said of Glen Canyon Dam, is one of America’s longest-standing arguments. And like all family feuds, facts often matter less than how everyone feels. Infrastructure has an emotional register. Successfully building a monument can make the public feel part of something much larger than themselves, and that is often exactly what a generation needs. “Symbolic achievements,” writes Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, “mattered terribly in the thirties, and the federal dams going up on the western rivers were the reigning symbols of the era.”

I’m using the word “monument” intentionally. It’s a good term for this type of New Deal-era infrastructure. Big, symbolic, and built with viewing platforms for visitors to gawk. They are morally ambiguous, the good and the bad poured into the same ugly concrete. Is that dam providing drinking water for San Francisco, or did we flood Yosemite Valley’s twin? The answer is yes. And like all monuments, they’re memorials for an era that belongs to the past.

That’s not to say that U.S. government agencies aren’t doing everything they can to keep the infrastructure we’ve got from buckling. But the backlog is enormous, and things have gotten bad enough that a mayor fixing potholes in the country’s richest city counts as a legitimate achievement.

Michael Kimmelman wrote an article in the New York Times about the policy side of the U.S. government’s inability to build public works anymore. “The culprit,” he writes, is “layers of regulations and competing interests, litigated in an overloaded court system.” Is there any hope of becoming unstuck? Yes. But it’s not in “any single, epochal project equivalent to the Golden Gate Bridge.” It will be “in myriad steps and indicators, like the recent trimming of environmental regulations that have, for years, stalled housing growth in California.”

That cut red tape is opening space for a new wave of builders to claim. A growing number of hardtech startups are now making infrastructure more efficiently than the government, largely because they eschew the monumental approach. Whether for economic, ecological, or plain-and-simple permitting considerations, they are building solutions that are smaller, modular, and distributed. Silicon Valley—now a widening triangle with vertices in El Segundo, CA, and Austin, TX—has applied many of the tactics that worked for the digital boom to hardware. They innovate along tighter iteration cycles, deploy small then scale up, and do it all for cheaper.2 The result is something like the Moneyball-ification of infrastructure: no single energy project is a star, but in aggregate they can compete with a heavy-hitter like Palo Verde’s three gigawatts.

Thus, a more realistic vision of the ensuing infrastructural buildout is starting to look less like Hoover Dam and more like a fleet of drones seeding clouds. Power will increasingly come from distributed solar farms with batteries instead of oil piped 800 miles from a field at the northern edge of Alaska. Satellites the size of mini fridges will populate more of low Earth orbit than ten-billion-dollar telescopes that take NASA a decade to build.

For those of us who spend our weekends thinking about substations and sea walls, this is incredibly exciting. Infrastructure is the civilizational life raft we all cling to protect us from the raging tempest of storms and the floods and the heat. And the emergence of distributed systems, enabled by advanced technology, helps make communities more resilient. During Puerto Rico’s many blackouts last year, homes with rooftop solar and batteries were bright beacons amid an island of darkness. When a piece of distributed infrastructure fails, it’s a quick repair job. When a monument collapses, it wipes out a valley.

It’s funny how socialist this all sounds when you talk about the collective power of distributed energy and resources. And yet the state-constructed monuments we’ve staked our character on are far more undemocratic and un-American than technologies that make us self-reliant. Strip away the solarpunk murals of rooftop gardens and communal wind turbines, and what’s left of the distributed vision is about as American as it gets: a household that doesn’t need anyone’s permission to keep the lights on and water running, all with a smaller footprint on nature, the only real monument in America worth protecting.

The main problem with communicating the vision of this distributed future is that it is simply less visually appealing than objects of mass proportion. Big things have aura, literally in the form of gravitational pull. To work around this hitch, communicators in the tech space are leaning on monumental visuals to sell distributed solutions. You can see it at Starbase, SpaceX’s new launch site on the swampy banks of the Texas coast, where the grandeur of the Apollo missions is invoked at every turn. It’s there in the massive golden statue of Prometheus (a Greek titan) built next door by a charming but odd group of Frenchmen wishing to fulfill the “great dream of the West” and “rebuild Rome.” It is infinitely echoed in the complementary aesthetic of AI-generated, retrofuturistic utopias3, whose artistic style is conjured from “the last time the mass public believed the future would be amazing,” as Andrew Burleson points out.

What frustrates me about this Muskian brand of storytelling is the same problem I have with Ivanpah: it’s taking an exciting new trend in distributed technology and parading it as something it’s not, a monument. And now this misguided marketing has been picked up by the fastest-movers and worst communicators in the space, the AI labs, who are pitching their data centers, which can actually be a distributed technology, as the monuments of a new era of superintelligence.

But on a planet that’s unraveling in multiple ways, the utopian vision can feel like a load of bullshit. The world outside looks like a far cry from Rivendell-with-Waymos. And, given how hard it is to build these days, it would appear to stay that way for a long time to come. The reality is that our generation is entering a liminal stretch of history, caught between skyrocketing technological capability and Earth’s deteriorating physical systems. Like the New Deal era, we need to marshal resources on a scale never before seen. But unlike then, the public isn’t convinced.

Part of that is trust. In 1964, three-quarters of Americans said they trusted the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. Now it’s 17%, and Big Tech sits at about the same. Communities are right to worry about massive projects whose consequences no one can fully predict. Selling technology with utopian imagery only confirms the suspicion that the people behind it are out of touch.

The AI labs have so royally botched the marketing strategy that they’ve burned through what little trust the public had left in technology and ignited a new backlash against building. Local bipartisan opposition alone canceled some $260 billion in data center investments this year. Environmental groups are rallying to block any sort of meaningful permitting process for clean tech. Influencers make anti-solar videos on TikTok and pro-tech writers consider wind farm development a shame. Unease around infrastructure is moving from tin-hat, 5G cell tower territory4 into a credible policy position.

Part of what earned the 20th century’s builders that trust was a media strategy shaped around the technological sublime, “the feeling of awe, braided with dread, that can emerge in response to the engulfing possibilities of technology’s progress,” as Joshua Rothman describes it. Take the cover of LIFE magazine’s first issue in 1936. Margaret Bourke-White photographed the spillway of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam as a row of columns so massive that the two workers standing at their base barely register above the word “November.” The photo was composed to make readers feel the scale of what their country was building, and it worked. Nearly a century later, one of the easiest ways to get 24 hours of X-virality is to post a photo of an old megastructure under construction.

Throughout the decades, government programs regularly hired photographers and other artists to document infrastructure projects up close. California’s Department of Water Resources has had an active photography unit dedicated to its civil engineering projects since 1962. In more poetic terms, their photographs exist to “chronicle California’s ongoing pursuit of utopia,” as Ryan Christopher Jones puts it. In the South, “the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) deployed creative talent to voice the expectation of ‘utopian results,’ and tout the many tangible improvements to the region that the TVA delivered,” writes Ted Atkinson. “In so doing, cultural production helped amass a reservoir of public favor that would last for decades.”

That reservoir has run dry. My job, more or less, is figuring out how to fill it by writing and photographing the folklore of technologies better aligned with the planet. On a good day, I’d like to think of my career as an early version of Margaret Bourke-White’s, even if I can’t pull off the WWII-era beret. I’ve spent an inordinate, some might say concerning, amount of my life staring at infrastructure with three-sentence Wikipedia stubs. The habit crept in the way an addiction does. Slowly at first, in small moments hidden from friends who couldn’t understand why I was running 15 minutes late because I just had to stop and look at an electric substation framed by lodgepole pines. Then it’s all-consuming; suddenly no shoreline escapes a thought about which rocky jag is best suited for a lighthouse.

All that staring has taught me that the most interesting part of any piece of infrastructure is rarely the thing itself, but the people who put it there. At the end of the day, Hoover Dam is an impressive heap of concrete. But I bet the workers who poured it, my great-great-grandfather among them, have far more inspirational stories about what it was like to build the unthinkable, even if hindsight has complicated the picture.

I’m not what you’d call a journalist, in case that wasn’t clear. I want these companies to succeed because the alternative is unthinkable. I like looking for common sense answers to hard problems and sharing what I’ve learned. Documentary, as far as I can tell, feels like the right aesthetic fit for this moment, and that’s what I pursue.

Our generation isn’t going to build the gleaming interplanetary cities in the renderings. We have a gritty few decades ahead of us, deploying modular projects that lay the groundwork for a resilient civilization that makes more with less. Some of it will be ugly, and that’s fine. We tolerate power lines strung over every street because we know what they do. There’s grace for technology that plainly helps people.

We need more media to share the gritty stories of what real-world deployment looks like. Not every idea will work. We’re bound to see a few more sunlight obelisks before this transition is through. But trust grows from the record, and aesthetics emerge from documentation. Every company and community will find its own style, just as the TVA wove in local history and lore into its projects.

If we document the new infrastructure buildout honestly, I suspect we’ll get something better than utopia. We don’t have a name for its aesthetic yet. The only way to find out is to go and take a look for yourself. Sear your retinas with manipulated sunlight in the desert, then come back with a story someone might actually believe.

“It’s easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters, and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.” — The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein

“History shows that many battles are won by the side that can act and respond with the greatest speed. Wars, however, are only sometimes won by speed. More often, they are won by whichever side can doggedly outlast the other. Combat support helps win battles, but full-on sustainment is required to win a war. Sustainment comprises everything it takes to ensure prolonged endurance of capability.” — Stewart Brand, The Maintenance of Everything

I once lived in the active battleground of a war that the United States is losing. The fight precedes the country by a large margin and will outlast the empire by an even longer stretch. The enemy is material decay. Its banners are rust and rot.

Each day, the melee rages across the bunkers of the Presidio, a concrete fort at the edge of San Francisco originally built for an invasion from the Japanese that never arrived, now standing sentinel before a relentless, microscopic army. Propaganda posters plaster concrete walls, bearing a call to arms, “Beware Moisture Damage.” Rangers ax entire forests whose roots are infected with Laetiporus fungi. Brigades of burly workers enter the trenches beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, brandishing paintbrushes, hauling ammo of International Orange, dangling hundreds of meters in the air in a dogfight against corrosion.

The park’s dozens of employed painters are part of a battalion that spent $12 million in 2024 towards the noble effort to keep the most photographed landmark in western America from falling into the ocean. As a resident of the Presidio inhabiting a historic house on Pilots’ Row, I was enlisted in this fight, much in the way a boy is given an honorary sheriff badge to feel a part of the troop. I diligently wiped mold and kept spaces dry, doing my small part to stave off the inevitable. I roamed the battle from the overgrown and abandoned trenches, slipping past defenses to photograph mold growing across nuclear fallout shelters.

For those of us who spend at least a few hundred dollars a year to keep our things—homes, cars, clothes, gadgets—from undoing, we generally consider the slope of entropy an annoying feature of physics. Those with more metal in the game see it differently. The U.S. Department of Defense spends upwards of $20 billion a year fighting rust on infrastructure and military equipment, while the National Park Service currently sits on a $24 billion backlog in maintenance and repairs. By one estimate, the global cost of corrosion is $2.5 trillion a year.

Thermodynamics doesn’t care whether you call it corrosion, rot, climate change, or infrastructural decay. It’s the same war: critical infrastructure against the elements. If we want to hold the erratic weather at bay, we need to understand something about conservation that the military already knows, even if they won’t admit it: on a rapidly changing planet, the best defense is perpetual maintenance. Or, as they call it, sustainment.

The Presidio is not revered in the same way most national parks are. It is full of ruins and traffic. A golf course occupies a tenth of its acreage. Its fragrant eucalyptus trees, as neighbors are eager to point out, are invasive. Owls and coyotes live in the margins. Pelicans occasionally drop fish from overstuffed beaks on the lawn, often undetected until the reek of rot can be ignored no longer.

And yet there’s something unequivocally charming about it all. Despite its historic importance, San Francisco has invested nearly $1 billion to renovate the Presidio’s businesses, housing, and recreation. The park is even set to turn a profit, all while investing in emissions-free transportation, storm drainage systems, and a whole other slew of green buzzwords associated with the IRA era. If you can handle the occasional clueless tourist smashing their car into your front porch, it’s bar none the best SF neighborhood I’ve lived in.

This type of mixed-use approach to land management and development is uncommon for a state better known in recent years for environmental lawsuits than for its ability to build a single railroad or any semblance of affordable housing. You can code sentient software that threatens centuries of world order with barely any guardrails, but don’t you dare suggest permitting a two-person condo.

This instinct to protect physical landscapes is understandable. But conservation taken too literally becomes preservation, and preservation on a planet that never stops changing is its own form of neglect. The wildfires ravaging California are exacerbated in one part by converging climatic conditions and in another by a long history of land mismanagement. Against the advice of Indigenous communities, the Forest Service suppressed wildfires at all costs, inadvertently allowing fuel loads to accumulate. As the atmosphere warmed, the tinder dried out. The rest just takes a spark.

Until Smokey Bear rolled out the red tape, wildfires were recognized as endemic to California’s ecosystems. The perverse logic, now scientifically accepted, is that one of the safest ways to protect the state’s remaining wildlands is to deliberately let them burn. Unfortunately, that approach clashes with an environmental movement built around sanctifying the remaining parcels of wilderness. These days, National Parks are treated much like the Shroud of Turin or the tooth of the Buddha, vestiges of a holier world. All are welcome to visit the temple and have a mystical experience, so long as it’s at a respectable distance.

There’s no closer emblem here than Yosemite, whose temple iconic valley is just a few hours’ drive away from the Presidio. Yosemite is the darling of the American environmentalist. It is the birthplace of the Sierra Club, forever embalmed in the stunning black-and-white photos of Ansel Adams. As John Muir put it, “No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite.” It was the first stretch of land federally protected and is widely regarded as one of the finest pristine wilderness areas remaining in the continental United States. Conveniently removed from many a narrative is Yosemite’s artificiality.

Yosemite, as early Western explorers found it, was actually a garden tended by Indigenous peoples for millennia. Its iconic, sparse valleys are a product of the Miwok burning undergrowth to nurture black oak groves and pulling invasive seedlings from the meadows by hand. Before them, its stewards were mega-glaciers, which ground the valleys to and fro for a few million years. We could speed-run back through Yosemite’s evolution for another few eons, but the gist here is the same as it is elsewhere: landscapes are eternally in motion.

When issues of conservation come up, the problem for me is how we choose to drop the pin in any given location’s 4.5 billion-year-old cycle and say, “Here,” then slap a Don’t Touch sign on the entrance. Before I get drawn and quartered for suggesting we turn Yosemite into a data center, or, god forbid, another Hetch Hetchy, I’m merely trying to point out that any act of conservation through preservation is a subjective choice. Yosemite is worth protecting. But which version of it?

Whether you drop the pin at pre-industrial or pre-Cambrian doesn’t really matter. The clock can’t be rewound to a time when fewer than a billion people roamed the Earth. To a time before human-made objects outweighed the planet’s total biomass, and microplastics hadn’t invaded every porous membrane available. We can and should lower carbon concentrations, but even at 280 ppm, the Earth burns, corrodes, floods, and erodes. Viewed one way, climate change is simply an acceleration of entropic decay.

Yosemite is just about the most gorgeous landscape I’ve set foot in, but it is not a paradise. It is fighting unprecedented drought conditions, bark beetles, and over four million pairs of Tevas tramping through its trails every year. That doesn’t make it any less beautiful. It’s just a landscape shaped by anthropogenic forces like any other. And fencing doesn’t work as a conservation strategy when what you’re trying to keep out is the weather.

If the Yosemites of the world can’t be encased in amber for eternal preservation, then they need to be equipped to withstand the intensifying barrage of extreme and erratic elements. Stacking lawsuits upon legislation, and legislation upon lawsuits, is making it impossible to intervene in Earth’s physical systems at exactly the time we need to most. Like the fuel loads accumulating over two centuries of fire suppression, preservationist policies towards land conservation are their own kind of timber. The longer they gather and dry, the less room there is to act once it all ignites.

A few summers ago, I visited a bunker in the Arctic that contains over six thousand varieties of crop seeds. It’s a doomsday vault, a ship meant to securely sail upon the battering sea of entropy for centuries. But by the time I had arrived at its doorstep, just sixteen years after its christening, the surrounding permafrost had melted, and water had found its way through the cracks. The ark had a leak.

The Svalbard Seed Vault is an imperfect treasury, but a perfect encapsulation of the idea that preservation on a changing planet is a fool’s errand. I don’t presume to know more than a multi-national, multi-million dollar consortium, but there seems to me a simpler, cheaper way to conserve seed varieties: let them grow.

The seeds buried beneath the permafrost represent 13,000 years of agricultural history; an atypically peaceful time in the turbulent story of Earth. This is a library constructed from the toil of deliberate breeding, hybridizing, and nurturing varieties across countless generations, with the one goal in mind: to withstand a harsh world today and an even more unforgiving one tomorrow. But instead, these seeds are wrenched from their adaptive evolution and suspended in a sort of cryogenic limbo. Given the planet’s trajectory, it is difficult to imagine any seed stored in 2008 might flourish in the nitrogen-depleted and parched soils of 2088.

Another great mascot for preservation’s absurdity is the Tollund Man. Here’s a guy who has nary a wrinkle on his face despite being born a few centuries before Christ. If you can look past his leather-sack complexion and the noose around his neck, the Tollund Man appears as spritely as they come, perhaps even cosmetically gorgeous. Dermatologists hate his one simple trick: die, and sink to the bottom of a peat bog.

A bog’s chemical conditions drastically slow the cycle of decay. Before the booming anti-aging industry gets any ideas, let me say that I don’t think the Tollund Man’s fate should be envied. Sure, his death mask is serene, but at what cost? Complete preservation leaves no room for adaptation. Something cannot endure the test of time if it’s locked in a sterilized vault. It has to be constantly rebuilt, iterated upon, and improved.

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Every 20 years, Shinto priests remake the Ise Jingu shrine from scratch. The entire process takes 9 years itself and costs close to half a billion dollars. The architecture, joinery, and craft are continuously passed down through the generations, reflecting the Shinto belief in the renewal of nature and the impermanence of all things. They’ve been at it for 1300 years. How’s that for an answer to the Ship of Theseus?

If some devilish woodboring beetle attacks their temple, I do not doubt the priests’ ability to rebuild, but I hold less faith in the modern craftsmen tasked with renovating stone cathedrals; a struggle I saw up close one summer working for an architecture firm. The knowledge to build has always been more perishable than the structure that it produces. Once we stop practicing it, no vault or monument can get it back. Just ask Ozymandias.

Rot is gathering in force. It is claiming roads by the pothole and the atmosphere by each emission, thriving on inaction. Keep the Yosemites. Preserve what we can. But an increasing share of our landscapes and infrastructure will need to be treated less like temples and more like the Presidio: actively managed, constantly rebuilt, and allowed to evolve.

In a profound and symbolic moment, the Golden Gate Bridge will ultimately splash into the Bay and rest below the sharks. Rust plays the long game. But every second that bridge stands is a testament to humanity’s profound ability to maintain and adapt in accordance with nature. It is a cathedral of sorts, whose nave connects the protected Marin headlands to a new experiment in landscape sustainment, puncturing the fog with two towering middle fingers pointed at thermodynamic decay itself.

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

Inspiration for many ideas in this essay came from The Maintenance of Everything by Stewart Brand.

One of the few ways to kill an afternoon in New York City for only $25 is to bet on the weather. All you need are two apps (Kalshi and CloudSpotter) and a loose understanding of atmospheric thermodynamics.

Kalshi characterizes itself as a platform that measures risk. More realistically, it is a digital gambling platform that lets you wager on anything. I have no interest in mainstream betting, but when I learned that users with handles like bloody.mollusk and ButterMyBiscuit were making small fortunes on daily temperature swings, I figured it was worth a look.

The one book I’ve read on commodity trading taught me that to win a buck in this business, you need an edge. Fellow weather gamblers spend hours consulting real-time data from a few dozen publicly and privately owned meteorological sensors located around the city, then predict outcomes based on probability. The experience is designed to feel like a Wall Street trading pit, but it looks more like a casino floor crossed with a crypto Discord server.

I decided my edge should be something decidedly uncool. I would go for a walk and use CloudSpotter, a cloud appreciation app that’s been dominating my daily screen time. It essentially lets you collect cloud sightings, scored by rarity. Snap a photo, and the app provides reference images and descriptions for comparison. Or you can let the AI decide whether that bulbous mass of moisture is a horseshoe vortex (5 stars) or just a routine stratocumulus (1 star).

CloudSpotter also hosts a Tinder-esque feed to rate the accuracy of other people’s sightings. The first time my girlfriend caught me swiping late one night, she seemed worried. But when I explained what the app was, I swear she looked more disappointed. I try to convey the riveting highs and lows of cloud hunting, the gambler’s reward for being in the right place at the right time, or the quiet joy of reading that a mêlée of currents organizes a tuba cloud.

But I hold back from sharing the real reason I’m hooked. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I believe cloud spotting is a way to measure the sublime.

Certain entities are so powerful that they can only be perceived by their peripheries. Systems like the economy, the climate, or a black hole are incomprehensibly large and, as a consequence, entirely unobservable. The only way we can begin to comprehend them is through a correlated and finite proxy: GDP, CO₂ ppm, or an event horizon.

A crude outline emerges if you put enough pieces together, like the edges of a puzzle. To visually represent a black hole, astronomers synchronized a planet-spanning matrix of telescopes to scan for traces of radiation where gravity eats light. Five terabytes of data were compressed into a blurry, albeit historic, jpeg. That smudged orange ring is the event horizon—not the black hole itself, but the edge of what we can perceive before our understanding of physics breaks down.

The same logic applies closer to home. To understand Earth’s previous climates (and predict its altered future), we have to infer from the edges. Paleoclimatologists analyze gases trapped in ancient ice cores to reconstruct atmospheres dating back nearly a million years. Researchers study the skies in Romantic-era paintings to estimate historical volcanic aerosol concentrations, which explain the hues in The Scream. Ancient cultural texts—the Bible, Plato’s dialogues on Atlantis, or the Epic of Gilgamesh—preserve flood myths that historians believe reference actual inundation events from when the Last Glacial Maximum ended over 10,000 years ago.

Scientists modeling the past are confined to what remains—ice cores, pigment, myth. But in the present, we can instrument proxies in real-time.

Data is now collected from an impossibly vast constellation of endpoints, as distant as a handful of satellites stationed nearly a million miles away at Lagrange Point 1 and as close as the phone in your pocket.

One of these instruments is a NOAA-owned ocean buoy in the Pacific Ocean that certain ski bums consult as Odysseus might an oracle. The bums have discovered that when the buoy records a significant increase in wave height—known as a “Buoypop”—there will be snow in the Intermountain West about 2 weeks later.

The accidental discovery of this correlation reveals there is an iceberg of environmental patterns hiding in plain sight. AI and greater computing power accelerate how fast we can decode these connections, sifting through the noise of that vast sensor network to surface patterns no human would think to look for. But these digital revelations still depend on the decidedly analog presence of physical sensors. The buoypop could not exist without a buoy. A weather report is useless without a few hundred thermometers. And our understanding of a climate-impacted future is nonexistent unless we have many ways to measure it.

The tech giants of the past two decades had it easy. Likes and clicks are discrete proxies to help map out nebulous ideas of human interactions and consumption patterns. Deploying an exoskeleton of sensors needed to predict climate impacts is a more daunting task than Instagram calculating Braden’s close friend group. Only a minuscule percentage of the atmosphere, oceans, and landmasses are digitally monitored. At present, there are simply not enough sensors to map out the gargantuan complexity of the ecological and atmospheric crises we face.

Our inability to properly measure these behemoth systems is a defining challenge of this century. One version of the story involves the international community coming together to build a sort of Oura Ring for the planet, deploying millions of sensors to biometrically monitor Earth’s vitals in real-time and dispatching a solutions crew any time an ecosystem flatlines.

The path we’re on looks nothing like that. The U.S. government has never weighed the threat correctly, but the current administration is now actively dismantling the very infrastructure built to monitor the health of the environments upon which its very prosperity depends. Take it from the EPA, which just decided not to consider “lives saved when setting rules on air pollution.”

This federal retreat has opened room for companies to lay digital claim to Earth’s physical realm. SpaceX owns over half of the satellites in orbit, with governments increasingly contracting private companies to provide space-based capabilities. The picture is looking less like an Oura Ring and a bit more like the U.S. health care system: fractured streams of vital data siloed across various public and private organizations.

Private sensors aren’t inherently a problem. A better-informed hurricane forecast powered by corporate weather balloons can theoretically save thousands of lives. But now it can also make someone a killing trading futures. The same infrastructure that protects people can be turned against them. Sunday’s Super Bowl featured a Ring commercial promoting an AI feature that uses neighborhood doorbell cameras to find lost dogs. The backlash was bipartisan and immediate—if the cameras can scan for a lab, they can scan for a person. The line between a useful sensor network and a surveillance state is thin, and it moves depending on who is in charge.

Researchers using AI-satellite algorithms to track melting ice sheets and a doorbell camera scanning your block are both sensors embedded in physical space, but programmed with vastly different incentives. Without public oversight or shared standards, the financial motivation of data collection doesn’t have to align with human or environmental good. Companies measure what’s profitable. What isn’t profitable often gets ignored. And in the gap between what’s measured and what matters, certain vital signs slip through.

For the past few years, global temperatures have surged beyond what scientists can fully explain. The models have struggled to account for each factor contributing to Earth’s rising energy imbalance. Two recent studies found the missing variable: the loss of clouds. Low-lying clouds reflect sunlight back to space, and satellite data shows they’re disappearing—accounting for the missing 0.2°C of planetary warming. Worse still is that this might just be the start of a feedback loop: warming reduces cloud cover, which further accelerates warming. Earth is losing its radiance.

A Washington Post article comments that “scientists have struggled to incorporate clouds’ influence into the large-scale climate models that help them predict the planet’s future.” Most existing studies on changing cloud cover rely on government-owned satellite data. But during the four years I worked for a satellite provider, cloudy images were simply ignored—filed away and forgotten. They block the view of the ground, and the ground is what people pay to see. It is not profitable to look at clouds.

Last year, I spoke with Gavin Pretor-Pinney, the founder of CloudSpotter, after he had called for a renaissance in the study of clouds in The New York Times. Here was a man who had spent decades looking up, and argued we all should be too. I wanted to know how scientists might continue climate research when government funding dries out, and private institutions own a greater share of the sensors. CloudSpotter’s answer is to disguise a proxy data stream as a hobbyist app.

Every time a user photographs a cloud and tags its type, they’re feeding a growing dataset that researchers can use to study how cloud cover is shifting over time—citizen science wrapped in a collector’s game. It’s an alternative pipeline: privately funded, publicly sourced, and designed to benefit anyone who depends upon cloud cover.

CloudSpotter exemplifies what a properly incentivized model can look like. But its architecture and financing are clearly unsustainable. The app’s main revenue driver is a premium subscription that grants users access to a cloud-a-day email list. Education and entertainment only pay the bills so far, especially when the business model requires your customers to crane their necks. Though imperfect, I respect the vision.

This is how I ended up working for the algorithm in downtown NYC late last October, looking for cirrus and cumulus clouds that might portend rainfall the next day. I saw a few, not enough, and figured the forecasted rain would hit the day after. So I wagered all $25 that there would be no rain in New York City on October 21, 2025. My bet was looking great all day until a bit of moisture fell just 9 minutes before midnight. I deleted my empty Kalshi account and took the L home.

I can make peace with a daily temperature prediction market. But I have trouble stomaching other entries in Kalshi’s climate category. One asks whether a supervolcano will erupt before 2050. Another asks if an 8.0 magnitude earthquake will strike Japan before 2030 (65% say yes). Prediction markets measure risk, but they also crowdsource people’s convictions about tragedy.

It’s a strange reality that one group watches a storm report to check if they should evacuate their loved ones, while another tracks its trajectory to place short positions. The same data that saves lives can make someone rich. That asymmetry isn’t new; commodity traders have always profited from the weather. But prediction markets have democratized it in a way that feels different, turning the forecast into a spectacle.

Despite my fundamental aversion to prediction markets, I recognize a perverse logic that they might incentivize companies to build the very sensors I support. If users are eager to gamble on the weather, then perhaps there is a market opportunity to provide them with better data. The speculators may not be in it for the “right” reason, but the result might just generate better information streams that impacted communities can also use.

The more we measure, the better we understand the incomprehensible systems that dictate our welfare. The ultimate question is whether that understanding gets used to protect people or to trade on their misfortune.

In Tamil, there’s a saying, “When the dragonflies are low, a storm is coming.” This is a useful proxy, though the idea of an insectoid swarm in New York makes me anxious—not because I find it gross, but because I fear that they know something I don’t.

It dawned on me that in the absence of centralized information, the record of these crucial years will be written in proxies: company datasets, sentient infrastructure, headlines, geo-tagged photographs, prediction markets, and whatever other correlations the AIs uncover.

Like paleoclimatologists probing tree rings, future archaeologists may reconstruct today’s anthropogenic climate using prediction markets as a primary source. In a strange parlay, they might cross-reference temperature data on Kalshi with a magazine article that decomposing mountains are killing more climbers in Patagonia.

Or they’ll look through CloudSpotter’s archive of hundreds of thousands of clouds and note, with dismay, that at some point the stratocumulus disappeared, and find that an anonymous gambler bet the under.

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

There is a blooming rainforest in the foothills of Arizona’s Santa Catalina Mountains, where irrigated rain dampens cockroaches scurrying about the undergrowth. This is Biosphere 2, a 3.14-acre indoor living laboratory where researchers use five synthetic biomes to study how species respond to extreme conditions. Meaning that even the insects are not a bug of this artificial garden but a feature, and they’re having a grand time.

Biosphere 2 was initially built in 1991 to test what would happen when seven people live, eat, and breathe inside a hermetically-sealed, self-sustaining vivarium for two years. Each planted species was a variable in an optimization equation to determine what ecological configuration humans actually need to survive. The answer would have profound impacts for understanding interspecies relationships and building extraterrestrial colonies.

Today, Biosphere 2 is owned by the University of Arizona to test a different form of survival: which species are most resilient to the impacts of climate change. It is a miniature and controllable Earth—an artificial playground to study things like how much heat a tropical rainforest can handle or whether combining different species of coral can create a reef better adapted to the planet’s boiling oceans. Within these geodesic halls is a preview of the Anthropocene’s liminal future.

Biosphere 2 is hot, smelly, and wildly fascinating. The air in its rainforest room is so thick it feels material, not least because the 2.6 million-liter ocean next door provides no breeze to filter the intermingling scents of rot and growth. Things here simply sit and stew. My body was telling me to sprint to the gift store’s AC, but my mind was captivated by the sheer oddity of the place. My decision to leave was made, however, once I watched the only other visitor lean over to smell the flower of a money tree (Pachira aquatica) and water its fronds with dripping sweat, his wet face beatific.

Outside of its research applications, Biosphere 2 is a microcosm of an accelerating trend happening on Biosphere 1 (planet Earth): the emergence of artificial landscapes against a backdrop of ecocide. It is an odd and fascinating moment. There are Rainforest Cafes, animatronic Jurassic Park rides, and Sonoran Desert-themed mini golf courses. These are places where a tree’s shadow is cast in four directions and boulders are papier-mache. The trajectory they define doesn’t have a proper name yet, but I think fauxliage describes it well.

For the past few years I’ve collected examples of fauxliage like an actual botanist might do with real plants: an ad displaying an LED sunrise in a smoggy city or an indoor ocean in Japan. It’s a digital archive modeled after the halls of natural history museums. Dioramas are perhaps the original example of fauxliage, with their slain and taxidermied wildlife and painted pastel horizons.

As someone who was raised in museums like these—and whose early fascination with the far reaches of the planet came from these exact dioramas—it’s hard to say they’re categorically bad. What they are, for certain, is uncanny. Dioramas are part exhibit, part mausoleum. A theater where undead actors gaze outwards with glass eyes and the stage is a painting of where they were slaughtered. The eternal production is then billed as a sort of paradise—a word derived from the Old Persian term for “enclosed garden.”

The Truman Show (1998) is a play on the diorama, placing the life of an unwilling participant in the spotlight for spectators to enjoy. The film critiques the entertainment and surveillance industries as it follows Truman’s slow discovery that the world he lives in is actually a reality TV studio. After he notices an isolated patch of rain and later a stage light falling from the sky, Truman decides to escape this uncanny labyrinth. By the time he crosses the manufactured ocean and walks up the staircase to the limit of his enclosure, the viewers don’t know whether to cheer or cry.

It is becoming more difficult to separate the artificial from the natural; the staircase is blending into the sky. But some photographers are starting to notice the ripples in the fake stage, and together their images represent a sort of LED ‘exit’ sign pointing the way through.

The images in Zed Nelson’s “The Anthropocene Illusion” and Nicolò Rinaldi’s “W.E.I.R.D.” reveal the delusion of our age, where reality feels just a little off and authenticity is in short supply. The gaze of a taxidermied animal is a far cry from the wild look we’re genetically-coded to recognize, but it instills a primeval fear all the same. It is the uncanny valley incarnate, separated only by a pane of glass. It’s hard to tell whether we’re outside the diorama or a part of the display, but the proximity is suffocating all the same.

What these projects hint at is that fauxliage is creeping out of its enclosure. It is no longer confined to taxidermied polar bears and airbrushed vistas. Fauxliage has adopted a more sinister camouflage in the form of genetic-modification and geoengineered environments. It is beginning to infiltrate the very substrate of nature. It is not hard to imagine where this trend will logically end: a diorama reversal, where park limits confine the few remaining wildlands behind panes of glass.

But there is another, perhaps preferable, path for fauxliage, and it is already well-named: biomimicry. This practice asks, can really build designs better than nature, with all its eons of tinkering amid life-or-death stakes? The plane takes after the pigeon and brainless slime molds design railways in cities in the most optimal configuration. Solar panels copy photosynthesis and scientists are building terrestrial stars to power civilization with no emissions. Fauxliage is a parody, but biomimicry is flattery.

There is a difference between replacing nature and emulating how it works. This is probably why I find cell towers disguised as palm trees off-putting, but I believe in a decentralized Internet that operates similar to how trees communicate through mycorrhizal networks.

Biosphere 2 exists in an uncanny landscape because it is part diorama and part biomimetic. It is also an uncomfortable reminder that fauxliage is becoming a reality no longer confined to a few acres of Arizona desert. As it spreads and more of the natural Earth resembles a synthetic hybrid, it is worth questioning how we can steer this new techno-nature towards biomimicry and not fauxliage. One answer may just lie in a place without soil.

Landscape architect Bas Smets and neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso just showcased an experimental biosphere at the Venice Architecture Biennial that harnesses plant intelligence to control a microclimate. The prototype garden relies on a monitoring system to translate plant behavior into actions: dispense synthetic rainfall or disperse LED sunlight.

Its designers ultimately envision cities where individual organisms act as local sensors and nature is given agency to produce optimal environmental conditions for a range of species. Smets and Mancuso built the stage, and the subtropical trees are the first biospherians to enter this cyber-flora paradise.

What a fantastic idea. Just don’t hand the controls to the cockroach, who knows what it will do.

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

“These places look inhuman, for their scale and for their poisons and hazards, but they’re the landscapes on which most human beings now depend.” — Rebecca Solnit, “Creative Destruction”

There’s just something about someone holding a gun that compels me to take what they’re saying seriously. They might be asking why I’m on this particular stretch of Nevada desert, or if that loud drone pestering golfers is mine. The answers don’t really matter. I just find myself nodding along in agreement, eyes fastened on the sidepiece.

When I eventually must explain to this particular man why I’m on private property, I respond that I had no idea. Of course, I had some idea; a lot of people ask me how I make my images and the answer is that I trespass—or usually my drone does. In the end, I’m not sure if he was police, private security, or an uppity caddie, but he seemed adamant about my leaving.

What a shame. If he had asked me to stay and chat awhile, then maybe he could have joined me in trying to answer a burning question of mine: is there such a thing as sustainable resource extraction?

It is August 2023, there is a heat wave, and I am taking images of water-intensive golf courses and lithium mines. I am mostly interested in the latter, for the lithium pools slowly evaporating in the Nevada desert are a glimpse into our weird energy future. They are the beginnings of what might be called a post-extractivism frontier. Does that sound too academic? Allow me to try again.

The standard image of an ecotopia is a green field with slowly rotating wind turbines, rooftop solar with pollinator-friendly front yards, and electric vehicles that make cute little sci-fi noises. These ideal visions are surely part of the picture, but they conceal the reality that enables them. Travel to the bottom of their supply chains and you’ll find the substrate: the bituminous coal mines that produce steel turbine blades and the heavy element mines that power batteries.

Thus, the future will not be solarpunk; the green utopian vision we’re building today is still entangled with extractivism. It will be pock-marked and cratered with those hallmarks of industry: mines, smokestacks, refineries, and transmission lines. But if there is a sign that the times are changing, that a new approach to resource extraction is possible, it just might exist among the sky blue pools of lithium evaporating in the desert.

Lithium’s story begins with the Big Bang, making it both old and important. The primordial metal then spent a few billion years doing god knows what until we Homo sapiens, critters of stardust too, discovered its medicinal benefits as a sort of psychiatric panacea. Its early promise to cure all ailments proved mostly incorrect, but its potential to store energy in electric batteries sparked a new mania.

Any TSA agent can tell you how important lithium is to the modern economy; in fact they do every time they tell you to put your lithium-ion devices in your carry-on. In a few short decades, this prehistoric metal has dominated the rechargeable battery market. Its end products are now found everywhere, but its raw deposits are unevenly distributed. Reserves are mostly found in places like Chile, Australia, Argentina, and Bolivia. It is also found in the United States, though the Silver Peak Mine is currently the only active one. Thus securing lithium supply lines has become the material focus of the race to electrify everything. And it is a race the US is sorely losing.

And that’s literally all I’m going to talk about the markets of lithium and critical mineral extraction in general. For more, check out the NYT’s “The Lithium Gold Rush”, Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara, and Material World by Ed Conway.

In lieu of all that, I’d rather spend these meager paragraphs discussing the problem of long-term vision, environmental infighting, sacrifice zones, and a paradox of the moment: lithium won’t solve the climate crisis alone, but without it there’s likely no hope.

Algae blooms are darkening the color of the ocean. Air pollution is obscuring views of the Himalayas. The consequences of unfettered carbon emissions were already difficult to visualize—scattered in time and place as they are—but they are now clouding our very very ability to see.

Good photography and reporting helps cut through this haze. But there is a new uncanny challenge: solutions to the climate crisis are now more difficult to communicate than its catastrophic impacts. This might be better called a crisis of vision: what we collectively imagine a civilization cured of its fossil fuel addiction to look like at a high-level.

Part of this is due to the competing interests of different environmental groups. Let’s generalize the infighting for a moment. Group 1 wants to decarbonize transportation through EVs. So Company A builds EVs for Group 1. Company B builds a lithium mine to supply Company A. Group 2 sues Company B because it threatens an endangered species of buckwheat. Group 1 begins to question the moral character of Company A’s founder and wonders whether EVs and, while we’re at it, recycling are really making a difference at all. Companies C through Z then come along and build AI programs to compound the energy demand responsible for this whole predicament in the first place. And the whole time most of us are simply asking for more fucking trains.

I question how we keep on track when one environmental group’s solution is another’s apocalypse. And when I find myself asking that question, I think of evolution, geoglyphs, and cathedrals—as pretentious as that sounds.

I think of evolution because it is a design process with no end goal. It simply iterates to solve immediate environmental challenges. Do that long enough and harmonious structures of infinite complexity emerge.

I think of geoglyphs—in particular the ancient ones found in what is now Peru—because they were made without an ability to perceive them on the whole. The Nazca people carved hundreds of feet, sometimes miles, of material out of the landscape to create a sprawling series of biomorphs. Their creators could trace its outlines or catch an acute glimpse from a nearby hill. but it wasn’t until the advent of the plane, and then later the satellite, that an aerial view would be capable of beholding them in their entirety.

And I think of the stonemasons of Medieval Europe who took centuries to build the Gothic cathedrals still standing today. These were, like the Nazca Lines, made according to a plan. But where the Nazca people couldn’t see physically, the stonemasons couldn’t see in time. A generation of workers might only lay marble without ever witnessing its spires rise skyward.

Three generative processes that transform the material stuff of the world into constructions for posterity. There was no master architect perched above, shouting down instruction to the craftsmen. And yet they were built anyway.

The question is now whether we can do that with our energy system.

Stand on the shore of California’s Salton Sea and squint your eyes. Peer out beyond the oppressive sun, through the clouds of carcinogenic dust, over the blooming algae, and you might catch sight of a dream. Whether it is dead or dying will be determined in the following years.

Near the Mexican border, tucked between San Diego and Joshua Tree, is the Inland Empire’s inland sea. The Salton Sea is an ancient basin, but the water there today was collected in 1905 after an irrigation canal broke. As the waters rose, capitalists sniffed an opportunity and flocked to its shores, much like the millions of birds who were now adding a new stop on their migration. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, tourism was so explosive that it surpassed the number of annual visitors to Yosemite.

But the area never quite shed its agricultural persona. And the nitrogen runoff from fertilizers seeped into the Salton Sea. With nowhere to go, it stayed put, adding algae to the briny mix. Unsurprisingly, tourism soon crashed; sunbathers found it hard to lay down a towel on a beach covered with the skeletons of dead fish. And thus the vision of a ‘Southern California Tahoe’ imploded.

Walk along the Salton Sea’s shores today and a smattering of neighborhoods sit among the relics of that hope-filled era. Experimental communities like Bombay Beach and Salvation Mountain speak to its marginal standing. But it is the alarming rate of asthma among the area’s children (20-22%, 3x the national rate) that is most damning.

The Salton Sea is a sacrifice zone: places where the health of local populations are sacrificed for the economic prosperity of others. They are the coal mines in West Virginia and the petroleum refineries in Mississippi, also known as Cancer Alley. Sacrifice zones are penned by similar historical, political, socioeconomic, and racist lines. But unlike the Salton Sea, most zones didn’t just find $540 billion worth of lithium reserves beneath them.

The solarpunk vision for what happens next in the Salton Sea involves flipping the sacrifice zone model on its head. It is to create a system that improves the welfare of the local population while also providing materials the world needs. It accounts for the millions of migratory birds, the farmers sharing resources with the mining, and, reluctantly, the shareholders of the lithium companies.

There is a short window to get it right. Otherwise the Salton Sea’s lithium development will simply mirror the state’s gold rush history: a few obtain a fortune, most remain impoverished, and a handful receive a pickaxe to the back of the head. A vision is as much defined by what’s included as what’s left out. And for now the vision set forth by critical minerals like lithium leaves out plenty.

To place our full faith in lithium is to cement the extractive and pollutive systems already in place. It is a fantasy that pretends lithium is a panacea instead of an excuse to make minimal changes to the capitalist approach that got us into this mess in the first place. We can buy an EV or stick with the gas guzzler, we can exit right or burn on straight ahead, but we are driving on roads we did not build.

The gun has lingered in memory primarily because I can’t help but admire how effective it functions as a communication device. The contraption requires no description. It compels you to look at it, as if it holds its own visual gravity. But more importantly, the message it sends is unequivocable.

I had once thought that images of environmental ruin might serve as a similar device, an effective shorthand to trigger a common emotion. But images of the new extraction frontier challenge this idea. The industrial sites of extraction appear jaundiced, not bloodshot. The message is muddy. Contamination is tempered by symbols of progress. At their best, these photographs illuminate the perils of supply lines and compel buyers to hold institutions accountable. Yet so often they fall short, leaving their viewer to ‘bear witness’ and ‘start conversations.’

I am rapidly losing faith in this type of imagery’s capacity to influence, the currency of which is either anger or temporary inspiration. And I didn’t feel either of those as I stared out across the pools of lithium, shimmering under the August sun like a cerulean mirror or a puddle of Dr. Manhattan’s piss.

No, what I found staring back in that lithium reflection was an uncanny despair that the vision of so many environmentalists, myself included, are placed in pools of brine, waiting to crystallize in the greenhouse heat.

If you squint your eyes in that desert sun, the line between miracle and mirage is thin. The vision should materialize if you just keep looking long enough. Wait there a while. Find a new height to perceive it. Ignore the briny sweat seeping into your eyes, and don’t anger the man with the rifle telling you to move along.

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

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Politicians don’t usually make videos of incomprehensible horror. And yet one of the most unnerving clips on the Internet is a political speech by Simon Kofe, the minister for the large ocean state of Tuvalu. What begins with “warm Pacific greetings” from the tailored politician ends in a liminal place somewhere between Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone.

The soundtrack has the hollow and harrowing tone of impending doom as his sentences build to something resembling a righteous threat: “since COP26, the world has not acted, and so we in the Pacific have had to act.” Then, amid glitching pixels and distorted visuals, he states, “as our lands disappear, we have no choice but to become the world’s first digital nation.” The camera pulls away from the standard podium-and-flag close-up to reveal a small island with white sand and a black sky looming above. He is not speaking from Tuvalu, but from the cloud.

Scientists predict that rising sea levels will consume 95% of Tuvalu by 2100. The country, situated about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, has contributed less than 0.003% to global greenhouse gas emissions. That places like Tuvalu are positioned in the vanguard of severe climate impacts is tragically unethical. That their only recourse in the face of annihilation is the digitization of reality is uncanny.

Tuvalu’s “Future Now Project” entails uploading the country’s islands, structures, and physical beauty to the metaverse. Its purpose has a very practical aim in the preservation of the nation’s maritime boundaries and sovereignty—the first of what will surely become a growing number of legal actions as global warming alters borders and threatens statehood. But Tuvalu’s project has an emotional dimension too. It is a radical act of cultural preservation, a message in a bottle cast into the hungry tide, a seed launched into the digital cloud where there is no wind.

Enter the Digital Dungeon

Tuvalu’s entrance into the Matrix is but one of a growing number of digital replicas that, in one way or another, respond to the existential crisis of climate catastrophe and global unrest. But what Tuvalu is creating by necessity, many are entering voluntarily. As global warming renders swaths of the globe in “un-s” (uncomfortable, unraveling, unsafe, uninhabitable), the shimmering online mirror gains appeal.

You don’t need a magical wardrobe to enter these fairytale worlds, just a cellphone. In fact, these dully glowing portals are helping create virtual worlds too. The countless number of images and data points uploaded each day is transforming the material stuff of the Earth into the immaterial cloud, pixel by pixel. It is only happening slowly because there is so much of it.

This great open-source project has unfolded mostly innocently. For decades the Internet acted as a global repository for data; each uploaded text and image sent to this nascent planet like comets containing the raw materials for life. In the digital space, the infinite can be compressed. Structures rapidly emerged and the blueprint for civilization became accessible for (almost) all: Wikipedia—the great Library of Babel; social media—the human network; and Google Earth—the endless atlas.

There’s been no shortage of discussions pointing out this digital retreat. Each new generation enters a world ecologically diminished but technologically abundant. Escapism is so far-reaching that not even our poultry is safe. A new study found that chickens raised among projected virtual reality free-range environments were healthier than those without. The advances are developing so fast there’s no time to fly the coop.

Digital Twins

These digital replicas are so convincing because new technologies have revolutionized how objects are represented in virtual spaces. Point clouds model objects by plotting their surface with numerous “dots” in 3D space. Sensors like LiDAR can then scale this ability to create digital representations of entire cities or the Amazon rainforest. Pair this with cutting-edge video game engines and anyone with a controller can manipulate whole ecosystems.

But the same technologies that help chickens and Homo sapiens temporarily escape our confines have found another purpose. Enabled by recent advances in AI and computing power, Earth’s virtual domain no longer acts as a warehouse for data, but a playground for simulations. Companies have taken the two-dimensional copy and turned it into a three-dimensional model, like building a breathing being from a string of DNA polymers.

At its most basic level, a digital twin is a virtual representation of reality. It is an online model of something—a house, a wind turbine, Tokyo—that can be poked, prodded, altered, and studied. It is not a static snapshot. It is dynamic, alive (in a sense), and able to map the interactions between subject and influence. Simulations in the contained, digital world then provide insights about the physical outside.

Take Singapore, which recently finished firing lasers at itself to create Virtual Singapore. It is a detailed digital twin, modeled in 3D, and fed by real-time data. The government uses it to run simulations to triage climatic threats like heat urban island effect or find the areas most vulnerable to sea level rise. The engineered solutions based on these models are more effective and by extension save more lives—all for the cost of colossal computing power. Energy use aside, it’s already paying dividends, but it’s really just practice for the real challenge: a digital twin for the Earth itself.

Simulation Manipulation

To model the Earth is to gain unprecedented power—a literal orb to peer into and run simulations of various scenarios, say, the impact of a policy to reduce carbon emissions or what might happen if we nuked a hurricane. Like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, this virtual Earth could be abused with all our hedonistic fantasy so that real Earth can remain relatively healthy. In the near future, this engine of prediction will undoubtedly save time, resources, and lives. Already AI is synthesizing multiple datasets to generate images of storm damage before it happens, helping to convince those in its way to move to safety.

Studies like these are already blurring the line between model and reality. Exponential advances in computing power and game engines only further place us closer to seamless simulation. It doesn’t take much imagination to realize where a model of this ability may lead. Once advanced enough, there will be opportunities to run risky geoengineering simulations, like cloud seeding, or to calculate whether a certain endangered species is worth protecting.

Running these simulations in the cloud is a good step away from the historical norm, in which things like a nuclear reactor meltdown are tested in real life. But there is a risk of jumping from the simulation to reality. The neat lines of code and computerized data points don’t always translate into the messy natural world of atoms and physics.

Take, for example, the recent “resurrection” of direwolves, a canine species native to the Americas that went extinct some 10,000 years ago. It is the first experiment of a private biotechnology company on a mission to de-extinct species by splicing preserved DNA into those of a common ancestor alive today. But whether Romulus and Remus—the two puppies teething in some secret laboratory—are actually direwolves or just genetically modified gray wolves is debated. Is a species defined by a sequence of genomes, or is it also dependent upon its behavior in relation to the world in which it lived? De-extinction technology is one answer to today’s extinction crisis, but it raises a more profound question: what is the point of reviving a species without addressing the reason they went extinct in the first place?

To believe in the dire wolves' resurrection is to believe that complex systems can be conjured from simple symbols. It is a comforting thought: that if all else fails, we can preserve that which we cherish most with some code and a cloud, whether it be woolly mammoths, Tuvalu, or humanity itself.

Digital Seed Dispersal

At the time of writing, Voyager-1 is 15,523,096,451 miles from the sun. It travelled another 42 miles in the time it took you to read that sentence, assuming you skimmed over the 11-digit figure (which you did). The satellite was hurtled into orbit in 1977 along with its (physical) twin, Voyager-2, and has been beelining through the cosmos ever since. It contains nothing short of humanity compressed.

Its famous passenger-payload, The Golden Record, represents a seed of Earth and a “warm Earthly greeting” for aliens. Etched into its gold-plated copper are the sounds of thunder, whales, birds, musical compositions, sentences in 55 languages, and 116 images that include the location of our solar system (which could prove to be a bad move), a fertilized ovum, and a man eating a constellation of grapes.

The statistical probability of aliens ever finding Voyager-1 is likely low, partly because space is big and partly because, despite the rather large number of planets, it appears so barren of life. The Fermi Paradox puts the statistical fact that there should be abundant intelligent life in the cosmos against the cold hard reality that we haven’t found any satisfying evidence of extraterrestrials yet.

There are a number of answers to the paradox, including one that suggests we live in a "dullsville suburb,” as the SETI Institute puts it. But another theory has a more sinister answer to this great silence. It proposes that aliens might just be living in virtual heaven, a computerized serenity of sorts. The end stage of all intelligent evolution might just be the development of a blissful simulation to escape bodily mortal coil. Voyager-1 would then pass by unnoticed as it beeps idly into the void.

But if life exists and they were to lift their alien faces from the proverbial sand or perhaps some viscous goo, see our little seed, and grab it, they would find an incomplete representation of Earth. Voyager-1 includes no images of war, suffering, or evil. It makes no mention of how deeply we’ve ravaged the planet.

The grand project of creating a virtual Earth may not save us—modeling climate scenarios and acting on their outcome are two very different challenges. If that’s the case then perhaps we’ll use the last of our resources to launch a Voyager-3 carrying a hard drive with Earth’s digital twin to sail through that black firmament in search of another hospitable planet. Perhaps this version will hold the memory of simulated floods and wildfires etched into its code, a warning of our folly and the message that some of us tried. Over that glitchy simulation a voice might say, “as our lands disappeared, we had no choice but to become the universe’s first digital species.”

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

The Bible got most of Earth’s narrative wrong. Noah’s Ark has some ecological plot holes and six days is far too short to create the world. But the Book of Revelations nailed the ending: when the world ends, the Trumpets will blow and the rivers will run red.

These are some of the things you think about while standing at the edge of a church parking lot on Sunday morning. Hymns emanate from inside the red-bricked-chapel, but there is a louder entity humming above. It is a DJI Mavic 2 drone. Put your hands together and this device lets you peer at wastelands not readily visible to the naked eye. Study these patterns long enough and you can even see the future.

From space, Sudbury appears as a kaleidoscopic stain of sunset amid Ontario’s boreal green. It’s an industrial city where smokestacks rise like cathedral spires and Ford F-150s outnumber strollers. Mining in the area started with the Plano people at the end of the last glaciation period 11,000 years ago. Then prospectors discovered ample deposits of nickel and copper in the 19th century and the holes started growing. These reserves have helped transform Canada into a powerhouse of mineral production and position the country to favorably meet growing demand.

The largest end use for nickel is steel. For copper, it is electricity and power transmission. But the importance of both metals in this next decade’s decarbonization and electrification race cannot be overstated. Nickel produces the cathodes in lithium-ion batteries, which reduces their size and considerably improves performance. And as Ed Conway writes in his brilliant book, Material World: “Copper is the great, unseen substrate that supports the modern world as we know it. Without it, we are quite literally left in the dark. If steel provides the skeleton of our world and concrete its flesh then copper is civilisation’s nervous system, the circuitry and cables we never see but couldn’t function without.”

An investor could point out how much demand for these minerals is expected to rise as our hunger for electricity deepens. A historian might mention the precedent set by the 1973 CIA-backed coup to overthrow Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, whose agenda notably included the nationalization of mostly U.S. owned copper mines. But it doesn’t take an investigative journalist to point out the obvious: a colossal environmental toll is enacted as resources are extracted. That this degradation is done in the name of creating green energy infrastructure is best left to the cynic comedian.

The word for Nickel (Ni) comes from the German “kupfernickel,” which, despite its rather frivolous pronunciation, has the sinister meaning of ‘Devil’s copper.’ We are confronting the terms of the Faustian bargain we made: sacrificing the local for the sake of the global. Its conditions may not always be written in blood, but they are awash in hues of rust and crimson—places where the invisible architecture of the world is laid bare across its surface. One does not have to look far to find it. It is in your car, your walls, your pocket. Its impacts are here in Sudbury, triggering fatal landslides in Indonesia, and overtaking islands in the Pacific too.

Treasure is buried beneath the surface of the Earth, but dig deep enough and you’ll uncover curses too.

About 22% of the Northern Hemisphere is a permanently frozen layer of soil, organic matter, and rocks that store twice as much carbon as currently exists in Earth’s atmosphere. It’s called permafrost and it is decidedly no longer permanent nor frosty. Planetary heating is melting this layer and threatening to tip Earth’s carbon balance even further out of whack. It is also unleashing horrors beyond comprehension: thawing carcasses are circulating known bacterial infections like anthrax and introducing potentially long forgotten ones we’ve lost immunity to. It is releasing methane that triggers explosions so large they create sinkholes visible from space. And this thawing is also turning rivers orange.

In Alaska’s Kobuk Valley National Park, the largest and most remote protected place in the US, rivers that were formerly pristine are now rusting. From above they appear as copper snakes winding through the tundra, the area around them scarred black from dead vegetation. It’s not exactly pollution that’s causing this, but iron. Researchers are still studying whether this leaching is from acidic minerals touching bedrock or from bacteria, but the implications are certainly damning.

In the mountain ranges of Peru, red water is trickling down its craggy rock faces and collecting in what appear to be pools of blood. It is a sight of particular concern, not least because Indigenous cultures in the Cusco Region believe that the sacred glaciers are inhabited by divine spirits. What’s happening here is somewhat similar to the Kobuk Valley: melting ice is exposing rocks and leaching toxic metals into the water in a process called acid rock drainage. It is a corrosion not only of freshwater, vital glaciers, and ways of life, but of normalcy too.

Even for those who never really believed in the idea of “untouched wilderness,” there is something particularly demoralizing to hear about pollution in the last wild corners of the world; a plastic bag found in the Mariana Trench or swarms of space debris orbiting the Earth in metallic silence. The reach of our impact is both impossibly vast and poorly understood.

The connection between the red rivers of nickel-copper production and the acidification of riverways is not just visual. They are both uncanny manifestations of our reliance on and submission to the material reserves of Earth’s resources. Critical minerals are the lifeblood of the modern energy system; freshwater the blood of the Earth itself. The fate of each is ultimately intertwined in an electric acid reckoning.

A wound is a reminder of a surface’s fragility, and the surface of the Earth is less stable than we’d like to believe. It is a porous threshold. We do not sit atop it so much as within. Rivers flow both underground and in the sky. Somewhere in all that flux is a promise of the perfect electric battery to power our crossing over this torrential tributary. As above, so below—but for now the gods lie bleeding.

In Greek mythology, the River Styx flows in darkness and separates the boundary of the living from the dead. Its black waters, poisonous and corrosive to most materials, represent a liminal threshold between worlds. To cross it and enter a form of eternal salvation, one must pay the ferryman Charon an obol, perhaps a totem or a gold-foiled ornament. But in most cases a copper coin will do.

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Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.” — Herman Melville, Moby Dick

A monitor on the ship’s bridge illuminates the X-band radar pings of surrounding icebergs. The dots are so numerous it appears as if we’re sailing through a celestial mist of LED stars. We’ve just crossed 82° North and the Arctic Ocean heaves with bright ice that radiates an unsettling clicking noise.

While studying that nebula of pings, the founder of the residency I’m on told me that once during a previous trip their GPS display said they were smack in the middle of a glacier. Being in motion and all, they were evidently not shackled in the ice. The glacier’s terminus was a mile away and the moment of panic was due to a deficit in the GPS data—the glacier had melted considerably since the last time it was mapped years ago.

It is August 2024—the hottest month recorded on Svalbard—and I’m told a lot has changed here over the years. That’s to be expected for a glacial archipelago warming six times faster than average. But I am not here to collect data—I leave that to the scientists—nor to ‘raise awareness’ by photographing starving polar bears—I don’t know how many more images of that we need.

I’m here because I haven’t been able to create a decent picture of this place with my (now former) employer’s satellites. It is a landscape that resists our attempts to map it. It alternates between months-long polar darkness and blinding white. I’ve spent hours poring through this pixelated void, my retinas seared like hanger steak, cursing at its noncooperation.

At some point it can even feel like a digital version of a white-out: a polar phenomenon that occurs when low-lying clouds reflect sunlight in such a way as to annihilate shadows and depth perception. It is said to be a disorienting experience. The horizon is indiscernible and the very senses we use to comprehend the world come into question.

I’m not the first person to struggle with Arctic documentation from a Western standpoint—it’s practically the place’s heritage by now. Early European explorers of its choppy waters brought along parchment and wooden blocks to document the strange sights and creatures they expected to stumble across at the end of the Earth. In the late 16th century, Thomas Ellis, the artist onboard one of these endeavors, struggled to visually depict an iceberg. Its dimensions appeared to challenge Euclidean space like a Mobius strip, its colors ill-defined like a shifting aurora. As Christopher P. Heuer writes, Ellis was perplexed in his confrontation of an object that “simply did not fit into European schemes of pictorial composition, space, selfhood, and communication.”

The frontiers of the scientific unknown are undoubtedly exciting and our species has a knack for plunging headfirst into them. Some of these boundaries are absolutely worth pushing, albeit cautiously. Mapping the human genome will help us better treat genetic disorders, and deciphering why we dream may answer why I have visions of an enormous glowing obelisk most nights.

But as we approach these boundaries, it’s worth asking what lines we shouldn’t cross. Prometheus gave us fire, Oppenheimer nuclear weapons, and Altman et al. AI. There is promise in each: the latter, for example, is helping to decode the language of sperm whales—a discovery that could radically advance our definition of intelligence and spur newfound compassion for animal life. Or, as is often the case when our species encounters the unfamiliar, we may ask them to direct us to the nearest deep sea mineral deposits.

A map can be seen as a virtual projection of ourselves onto a territory. Its imperfect representation of reality used to be evident in its obvious approximation: elements were always left out and what was included was subject to distortions like the Mercator projection. But the reflection seen in today’s maps and models has an unnerving shimmer. They are impossibly complex, radiometrically precise, and vastly improving every day. What began as a tool for navigation has evolved into something verging on an instrument of control, a digital twin of the Earth to virtually prod and study.
There is a limit to what we can know about the world. For some that limit is a taunting challenge, an invitation to explore and push the edges of the unknown. For others it is a sacred boundary, a recognition that some places on the map are best left uncharted. The places across the Earth that defy our attempts to map them are the last holdouts of a mysterious planet, one that we’re making less wondrous and more threatening each day.

In 1961, MIT meteorology professor Edward Lorenz was running a simulated weather program when he rounded 0.506127 to 0.506 thinking it wouldn’t change the results to any significance. He was wrong. So he published a paper with the findings and titled it “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow” and if you fell asleep reading that you’re not alone. It sat in relative obscurity until he was invited a decade later to give a talk about the study and he chose a different title, one you surely recognize: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”

There’s a lesson about effective communications in that anecdote, but the more important point is that Lorenz was onto an idea simultaneously revolutionary and one that any farmer could already tell you: the weather is a chaotic system. The natural world is vast, complex, and asymmetrically organized. In a word, unpredictable. And yet that fact does little to prevent our species from trying to predict the future.

By now our atlas of the world is both encyclopedic and somehow entirely inadequate. The NASA-CNES SWOT satellite just mapped the seafloor, but the best climate models were unable to anticipate significant changes to the natural carbon cycle. Scientists can analyze gases from air bubbles trapped from ice cores and reconstruct what past climates generally looked like nearly a million years ago, and yet tomorrow’s weather is forecasted with margins of uncertainty.

The headlines say our climate models are breaking. Others think they were incorrect all along. All models are approximations of the world, but maybe the gist is all we really need.

Zoom far enough into any photo and you’ll see squares, the building blocks of an image, the almighty pixel. Put enough together in an organized sequence and you get everything from Earthrise to the latest meme. Seen up close like this and you may even recognize a map—one whose contours are defined by shadow, its landmarks a gradient of color.

An image like this is actually how sea ice area is calculated. Satellites use passive microwave sensors to distinguish between sea ice (which is light) and open water (which is dark). The scan creates a grid where each pixel, or cell, covers tens of kilometers and contains a number based on its water-ice ratio (0 means entirely water and 100 means entirely ice). If it crosses the 15 value threshold, then behold, sea ice!

Unfortunately, each year less of these cells are able to celebrate their quinceañara. Sea ice area and extent are rapidly declining, and researchers at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center just announced a record low for March 22nd, the part of the year it should be reaching its peak. One could pore over the data, but the gist is enough: record ice loss with catastrophic implications.

One of these consequences, however, is particularly concerning, a potentially civilization-ending one at that: the collapse of Greenland’s ice sheet. It’s one of the planet’s tipping points, thresholds where a single small change could lead to massive and irreversible impacts, the last pebble that triggers an avalanche.

For Greenland it’s not a pebble but many molecules of frozen H2O, and not an avalanche but an icy collapse so grand it would raise global sea level by 7 meters (23 feet). It is such a colossal amount of water that it would slow Earth’s rotation and increase the length of the day by about 2 milliseconds—an amount of time far too little to help billions of people relocate from global coastlines.

What has kept that ice locked away is stability. And each day that stability teeters closer to chaos as we chip away at it like Jenga tower. Every block of ice removed pushes this 12,000-ish-year Eden just a bit closer to the edge.

The Goldilocks Earth that allowed civilization to flourish exists in large part because of ice’s sunlight-reflecting properties. Places with lower albedo—meaning “whiteness” in Latin—warm the Earth by absorbing more sunlight, while brighter places have a higher albedo and cool them (think of wearing a white shirt on a sunny day). Sea ice is particularly effective, reflecting about 80% of sunlight that reaches it back into space.

Its loss is momentous. Unlike our calculations for its extent, there’s never been a clear threshold for declaring the emergency we’re in. But if there was one, we'd have passed it long ago.

The etymology of the word “apocalypse” means to ‘uncover, reveal’, and “emergency” means to ‘arise, bring to light.’ Our language holds the memory that a disaster can expose who we really are.

The hemorrhaging of polar ice is, among associated but far more catastrophic consequences, categorically dimming the planet. The Earth now absorbs more, its colors shine less. A sphere not quite as radiant, a world more exposed. It is losing its reflectivity, and with it its ability to resist documentation.

We are obsessed with finding the edge of what we know. But rarely do we reach that yawning abyss, gaze upon it for a few moments, and turn around. Instead we plunge headfirst, often heedlessly, into the gaping maw, barely taking a moment to drop down a few glow sticks before the descent.

I don’t want to live on a planet easily understood. The aspects of life that are difficult to measure are precisely the parts most enjoyable: love, faith, community, a beer with friends by a fire. I’m sure someone, undoubtedly fun at parties, will explain that any emotion like love is a chemical byproduct of neurotransmitters to promote genetic continuation. I recognize the technical truth in that answer but I still believe some forces are more than the sum of their parts. An image is not just a collection of colored squares.

The destruction of the world and our quest to nail down every molecule to a map is a desecration of the sacred. I’m not talking about spirituality specifically, but phenomena that we know to be true but can’t exactly explain within scientific parameters: respecting your elders or honoring the dead. These lack evolutionary or utilitarian advantages, but they compose the bedrock of decency. They are boundaries we, for the most part, do not cross, but their value is not always explicit in measurable terms.

I often think about this when I come across reports on “ecosystem services,” or studies that tabulate the value of nature. They represent an attempt to compress the incalculable utility of, say a mangrove forest, into a measurable framework, like how much money it will save local communities from storm surges. I understand that these figures do matter in the practical world of climate summits and environmental policy, and yet what they actually provide cannot ever be numerically summarized. Using economics to explain why clean drinking water is beneficial feels, well, ridiculous.

What matters for the purpose of this essay is the interface between climate science and public persuasion. Climate models are undoubtedly important—determining the underlying causes of ice loss and methods to slow it should be pursued at all costs. But if the value of healthy polar ice caps is not effectively translated in such a way as to support that science, then the data is meaningless. What good is the ability to calculate the trajectory of a rancid tomato with geophysical precision if it's just to smack us in the face and cut our computation off at the fourth decimal?

A new illusion has emerged: the extent at which we believe this data is going to change us. The variable least understood in the climate models is not the flap of a butterfly’s wings, but the human response to this polycrisis. We communicators point to the numbers and tell people to feel scared like Innies in Severance, but statistics only underscores the spiritual deficiency of the modern world. It is impossible to grasp the importance of nature with numbers alone. We need something else to pick up the mantle when models run into their limit.

Cartographers used to illustrate the uncharted swaths of maps with mythical monsters and dragons. Our innate terror of the unknown likely explains some of our unease around those ship-sinking icebergs. The metaphor they’ve become synonymous with is that there’s always more below the surface than visible on top. But what if we viewed that hidden 90% not as a challenge to uncover but an invitation to let be. To model the world in its entirety is to annihilate the few enchanting remnants that still remain and leave its last dragons slain.

I hope our models improve so that we can better forecast damaging storms, but I hope we have the wisdom to turn around at some thresholds too. Not everything needs to be uncovered, not everything explained numerically. For those of us looking to make sense of the chaotic systems around us, sometimes an approximation and a bit of mystery will do.

While writing this last week, The New York Times published an article with a mythical title: “In Japan, an Iceless Lake and an Absent God Sound an Ancient Warning.” It is the story of a town that has recorded a mysterious phenomenon since 1443. At some point in the depths of winter, a ridge of jagged ice would emerge from the frozen and rumbling Lake Suwa, “meandering like the spiked back of a twisting dragon.” Locals originally believed it was the sacred wake left by a passing Shinto god, and the rare winters it didn’t appear was seen as a bad omen.

It has been 7 years since that sacred ridge formed, and Lake Suwa has been iceless for 18 of the past 25. The scientific research on this planetary heating is robust, readily available, and the reason why so many of us are working on this problem. But as the article’s authors later write: “science has also robbed the ice ridges of their mystery by explaining how they arise.” They then articulate the process, which involves contraction and expansion of the ice. There are no wandering gods as far as the studies are concerned. What a shame.

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

In the American Museum of Natural History there’s a massive hall depicting already and possibly-soon-to-be extinct marine species of magnificent design. Tucked in the corner beneath a life-size blue whale is a model of this sperm-squid battle. It’s not quite like the other dioramas. It’s intentionally obscured, lit only by a soft blue light, and there’s no glass pane to separate the viewer from its catatonic plaster violence. It’s eerie, but if you poke your head far enough inside the exhibit you might just learn something about the current state of the world. Or, like me, get scolded by a guard.

It’s not the first time I’ve been questioned by private security over the past few years. It actually happens quite often during my attempts to document another shadowy battle best understood through scars: the fight over mineral resources in North America.

In 2021, I started visiting sites of critical extraction because I’m artistically intrigued by changes to the surface of the Earth—especially ones painted in odd hues. But my interest endured because the rules of this energy conflict are so baffling and often hypocritical. Environmentalists fight environmentalists, innovation embraces degrowth values, and viable green futures are cast as green-washing propaganda. To complicate the picture, the terms & conditions are rewritten with each shifting administration, and now the fate of 200+ million acres of US land and the sovereignty of Greenland hang in the balance.

The hype and heat of it all is understandable. The entire geopolitical and ecological stability of the planet hinges on a smattering of nickel, copper, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth reserves and their capacity to transform our energy industry.

Ultimately the critical mineral question is about the sad realization that the time for slow deliberation was decades ago and the acceptance that some sacrifices must be made during this industry-scale sprint to decarbonization. But once we move past that we can perceive the hopeful recognition that, if done right, we can truly build a system that weighs lighter upon the Earth.

What constitutes “done right” is up for debate. The material production of a renewable revolution comes at a cost and at the moment no one quite knows who will foot the bill. Historically that means it’s placed on planet Earth’s tab. But that tab is overdo, and its enforcers—heat waves, wildfires, supercharged hurricanes—are here to collect.

To achieve renewable energy dominance at the cost of Earth’s biodiversity is a pyrrhic victory. But to continue this unabated fossil fuel regime is nothing short of planetary suicide. We have one shot to split the difference and create a system that meets our growing energy demand while exerting as little impact on the environment as possible. It can be done, but it will likely be the hardest task our species has collectively faced yet.

Over the following months I’ll periodically share writing, images, and data for a few of these critical resources—lithium, copper, nickel, sand, uranium, and time—including the work of others tracing these supply chains and the companies innovating them. My disclaimer is one of bias: my pragmatist view is that we need these resources if we ever want a shot at modernizing our energy system and harmonizing our civilization to the planet’s tune. But I also believe we need to fundamentally change our relationship to resources too—consume less, extract responsibly, recycle frequently. Such apparent inconsistencies are common when you write from within the entanglement.

It is an exciting story to tell in part because of its fantastical and sci-fi elements. There are scientists pioneering ways to extract minerals like nickel from soil through hyperaccumulator plants and companies blasting lasers to prospect the sea floor for mineral deposits. The unfolding map is landmarked by aquamarine pools of lithium brine that shimmer in the desert like a mirage, obelisks of concentrated sunlight so hot they disintegrate passing birds, and cathedrals of inverted stone carved by machines of gargantuan proportion in pursuit of alchemical wealth.

That resource extraction scars the Earth is no secret—all industry has a cost that artists and journalists do well to tally. But today’s impacts are increasingly difficult to map and, in many cases, even see. They lurk both in the ocean’s depths and behind backyard picket fences. They’re sunk in the soil, emitted invisibly into the air, or obscured behind the murky misinformation swamp we find ourselves trudging through.

Climate change and the energy system are hyperobjects: entities of such enormous proportion that they bend the rules of perception. We are forced to infer their dimensions through brief glimpses, like suction marks on whale skin. These essays will share the technologies and ways of thinking that are decoding the arcane markings of this material edifice and helping us conceptualize the scope of the new energy domain.

The most effective investigations into this underlying material world act like that museum diorama. Remove the glass apparatus separating the viewer from the spectacle. Close the distance. Show the horror and the possibility of it all—how the use of a few elements determines whether we survive this crucible.

To hunt giant squid, the sperm whale must dive to epic depths. It holds its breath hours at a time as it echolocates prey, and if it finds a giant squid it must hunt many to fulfill its appetite. It is a high price to pay for calamari.

As we rummage the dark bowels of the Earth for critical minerals, so too must we decide the cost of our efforts, find the limit of our environmentalism, and determine whether we have the constitution to cut an ensnared leg to save the whole.

New reserves are found each week, from deep-sea hydrothermal vents to melting Arctic ice sheets. But time, perhaps the most critical resource of them all, is dwindling. The pressure builds the deeper we plunge. The whale can handle it. Can we?

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

I’m not sure how many satellite images I’ve seen over the past few years. Tens of thousands, probably. But two have stuck with me most. The first is of algae pollution. The reason is simple enough: it's unusual, a little off-putting, and I enjoy the fact that one of the few organisms you can see from space is one of the planet’s smallest. The second is a high-resolution satellite capture of the word “children” painted in large Cyrillic letters (дети) outside of a theater in Mariupol before it was bombed on March 16, 2022.

The surface of the Earth is particularly scarred with destruction these days and I’ve seen plenty of it both near and afar. Yet it was this latter image that first made me stare out the window, eyes bleary and mentally numb. That’s probably why it has stuck with me, but I’ll get to that in a second.

I first need you to consider how many material layers exist between your eyes and the satellite data on your screen before you. That camera is some 400+ km above Earth’s surface, collecting bands of data across and beyond the visible spectrum, while traveling so fast it circles the planet every 90 minutes. These scanned data strips are then transmitted via radio waves down to ground stations to corners of the Earth with names I can’t pronounce, and sent through undersea fiber optic cables to data centers for processing by code I don’t understand.

By the time someone like me gets their hands on it (to stitch, color correct, and further compress), a Ship of Theseus paradox takes hold: are those pixels from orbit really the same beamed before you? The technical answer is yes (give or take a few distorted artifacts). But I’ve held a suspicion that something else is lost in all that compression of space and time and data optimization. I haven’t been able to name it, though I guess the French art-world might call it ‘je ne sais quoi.’

I got close to confirming this suspicion after a visuals editor told me that all drone shots look the same. I later looked over my aerial portfolio and muttered a single shit. The monotony was glaring. There’s a rigidness to the aerial perspective that creates a serene sterility best reserved for a screensaver—just look at any photo taken from a plane of a braided river in Iceland.

A similar uniformity is found in satellite imagery, but it’s easily forgiven. Satellites are specifically designed to standardize each capture so that any two scenes can be easily compared and analyzed. I’m probably not stressing enough how important this alignment is, and I’m definitely not giving enough credit to the countless hours spent orthorectifying data so people can actually use it to make decisions and not just look at it like I do.

I greatly enjoyed pestering people smarter than me—the engineers, data visualizers, perhaps even the office dog—for information on this process. It only took a few of these conversations before I understood something about satellite data that dispelled my original suspicion: what we call a satellite image is just a single configuration of all that data collected from orbit. It may be the most popular one, but there are many other arrangements. I realized that no meaning is lost because there’s no intention behind the image. There’s no photographer in the original sense of the word. The pictures are a byproduct.

Compelling satellite imagery, then, is incidental, like a Ring camera recording a meteor entering the atmosphere or a trail cam capturing deer frolicking in a field. I suppose it’s not the worst way to view the wonders of nature. Sit back and observe from the corner of your eye permutations of the sublime… or the horrifying.

I never formally studied photography so I don’t know what the textbooks say makes a good picture, but over my decade-long obsession with images I’d say this: the most compelling are the ones that pierce through whatever medium they’re contained in and make you see or feel something in an entirely new way. The rest is aesthetics.

For all the human-created infrastructure and damage etched across the planet’s surface, humanity is not often visible. The weight of those letters written on the ground in Mariupol pierced through every atmospheric and digital layer to grip me and others in a way none had before. It was the first time I truly recognized a satellite’s capacity to act on par with the finest artists and photojournalists. It wouldn’t be my last.

Astronauts often speak of an Overview Effect upon first seeing the Earth from orbit. A state of awe overwhelms their emotions. They float by the porthole, self-transcendently, as they gaze down upon our infinitely complex but explicitly finite home and experience a cognitive shift as a profound sense of empathy, interconnectedness, and humility rewires the synapses of their brain…

Cool. But what about the rest of us?

Early remote sensing adopters played with the idea that the growing availability of satellite data could trigger this same cognitive shift. For those of us unfit for the ISS—the scientist’s equivalent of an Ayahuasca trip, I’d imagine—viewing digital images of swirling cyclones and steaming volcanoes would have to do.

A large part of my job was to extend this mission—specifically by tempering the shimmering red stake of depressing news with hammers of humor and curiosity. Each day I’d scour the scanned Earth for data that I believed might lead to a sense of awe, however small. I’m told it had some success. But the truth is the Earth makes it easy. Every landscape has some intriguing element to discuss, and the complexity of life is visible at every scale.

When I found that monotony closing in, that standardization of perspective I formerly maligned, I’d hunt for that piercing element. Something that made the viewer question what was before them or look at a landscape entirely new, like calved glaciers turning fjords to blue galaxies or a monsoon dripping green through the Australian Outback.

War photographer Robert Capa said, “if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” It pairs well with environmentalist Edward Abbey’s advice that when driving through a landscape it’s best to “get out of the goddamn contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees… When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you’ll see something, maybe.”

I’ve come as close to crawling through these high-resolution satellite pixelscapes as I can. My eyeballs, just inches from the screen, run red, tracing fractals in the canyons of some desert I’ll likely never visit. I crawl a little further and watch blood trace the contours of dried lakebeds millennia old and pool in the nuclear craters made from atomic bombs tested in the atolls of the Pacific or the hinterlands of Kazakhstan.

It’s easy to get lost in these data-labyrinths. Orienting yourself isn’t so easy. Shadows are sparse, depth is nil. Optical illusions are common, obscuring clouds even more so. But then you see something, a needle—some Cryllic word or cryptic desert scrawl—puncturing the pixelated tapestry and leading you out by a red thread.

What you learn over 22,000 orbits is that satellite data is revolutionizing the maps we create to understand the world in a way only a few have fully caught onto. It documents changes by the day and provides an unbiased reflection on how we shape the Earth and how it shapes us back.

Like any good map, satellite data orients its users and provides the information most needed for a given context. It uses different spectral bands to uncover the formerly invisible and further deepen our understanding of Earth’s properties. Its standardized perspective but mutable content is best equipped to track the rapid pace of our changing world. Its altered pixels keep the score.

But like any good image, it has an emotional resonance. The capacity to persuade. To puncture its bird’s-eye caging and fly right into the heart of whoever is trying to make sense of yesterday’s wildfire or today’s flood.

A map that both informs and influences, documents the past and points to the future. And to think I haven’t even mentioned AI…

In Borges’ 4-sentence story, “On Exactitude in Science,” he imagines a map of a kingdom so exact that it’s as large as the entire empire itself. The paradox being that the only perfect map in existence is the one that’s as precisely detailed as its subject. It’s an anecdote about the compression of data (and meaning) and one I think about often when my computer freezes while downloading gigabytes of satellite files.

My suspicion that something is lost in all that compression was to some degree right—something always is. But what I didn’t realize was that something else is gained at this unique scale: the awe of Earth’s interacting systems or the heart wrench of human suffering visible from orbit. These are not qualities typically found in maps, but we live in a time that demands technologies better able to handle the profound change around us. Data is no longer as rigid as it once was. It’s beginning to speak back. Satellites won’t solve our problems alone, but I’m listening with rapt attention.

Written by Ryder Kimball. Satellite data by Planet Labs PBC, processed by Ryder Kimball.

All thoughts and opinions are my own and not reflective of my former employer.

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There’s a popular Tweet that’s gone viral during recent catastrophic weather events. It reads: “climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you’re the one filming it.” It’s pithy and true. Climate cataclysm will, sooner or later, reach us all.

But before it’s your unenvious turn to pull out your camera and hit record, there will be a notification and an alarm. An emergency one. It should inspire a degree of terror the first time you hear it—that’s what it’s designed to do. But when it inevitably rings again years, months, or—increasingly likely—days later, the emotion it may elicit is far more sinister: complacency.

The Emergency Alert System (EAS) is arguably the government’s best tool to rapidly provide people information on an impending disaster. What began with Paul Revere on horseback has evolved into the likes of civil defense sirens and TV broadcasts. The latest iteration—brought to you through your phone—acts like a techno song: succinct and repetitive text scored by abrasive noise with the implicit appeal to move your feet.

One of the few actions an individual can do to avert a weather-related disaster—at least in the short term—is to move out of harm’s way. But as climate change supercharges their frequency and intensifies their impact, the number of emergency notifications is rising so sharply that, as Zoë Schlanger reports, alert fatigue is already setting in.

The latest emergency alert in my phone reads “TSUNAMI WARNING.” The one from two weeks prior says “TORNADO WARNING.” A few hundred miles south in Los Angeles, the advanced warnings of wildfire’s rapid movement saved lives. For now it’s one of the few areas of climate communications that work. But as the frequency of disasters rises and trust in media platforms disintegrate, some are already acclimatizing to the blaring toll of the climate apocalypse’s seven trumpets. Others are just hitting snooze.

EAS alerts have worked so far because they match a palpable concern to a decisive action. The alarm + instruction experience is still a novelty. But with each alert that fails to materialize and every spike of adrenaline with nowhere to go, we lose yet another precious resource: fear.

Most of us have failed to convert the existential terror of climate change into the physical consequences threatening us now. Its impacts are often abstract, distant, and poorly-represented. We remember the handful murdered by Jack the Ripper but not the thousands killed by the Great Smog of London because a shadowy man with a knife is a more salient symbol of fear than an anticyclone trapping industrial emissions at ground-level.

And when that existential terror does manifest itself closer to home, like the devastating scenes of fire-blackened ruin in Los Angeles, we’re left with little time to process before the next event strikes. But our minds can’t operate in a constant state of fear, so we break the doomscroll with stories of hope. Until our attention—that other precious, dwindling resource—cycles back to the weather’s latest lash… “with time, vigilance tends to relax, because all horrors are dulled by routine.”

Is there, then, a way we can preemptively prepare for the alert fatigue and design a system that lasts, one that can perpetually trigger our fear response when it matters most but without crying wolf?

“Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture… This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.”

How do you communicate that a buried tomb contains an ancient affliction, a curse of sorts, for a span of 10,000 years? Do you write out the warnings in a smattering of languages in the hopes that future generations can decipher them? Do you make the mausoleum’s architecture so imposing and physically threatening that it fills any wanderer with dread? Or do you genetically modify cats to glow in its presence and anoint a priesthood to interpret the bioluminescent fur like scripture? The answer, it turns out, may just be all of the above.

In 1945 the world was introduced to a particularly acute form of annihilation in the atomic bomb and years later its stagnant, but no less ruinous, counterpart of nuclear waste. The accumulated material posed an intractable communications dilemma: humanity’s language and symbols evolve on orders of magnitude less than the material’s radioactive lifespan. (Not convinced? Try reading the 1,000-year-old Beowulf in Old English).

In something akin to an Ocean’s Thirteen-themed plot for sci-comms nerds, The Department of Energy assembled a task force of linguists, archaeologists, and climatologists to break into that labyrinthian bank of human stubbornness and figure out how to overcome our innate curiosity. The field of research they devised is called “nuclear semiotics.” It incorporates writing, symbols, audio landscapes, architecture (like spike fields), and myths to create an enduring fear of an entity hard to comprehend, lethal, and largely invisible.

It’s impossible to prove the effectiveness of long-term nuclear waste messages for another few thousand years. But I’d wager you wouldn’t wander past multiple hazard symbols and the insectoid click of a Geiger counter for a gander at some dying uranium. The success of nuclear semiotics is evident in our hesitation around and fear of radioactivity. And if there’s another force equal in terror to the sun’s ripping of atoms, it’s the wrath of the carbon-charged Earth.

Climate change most desperately needs a lobbying firm, but after that it could use a PR team too. One that could build a system of semiotics to communicate not only the path of a storm but to also continually convince people to move out of its way. To emotionally equate 9 millimeters of additional rainfall to a 9 millimeter bullet. To create an ecosystem of fear interlinking its forecast of destruction. A communication system that leverages every page in the horror playbook to haunt each of us and ensure that our baselines don’t shift—for what’s happening is not normal, and it is nothing short of utterly terrifying.

I’m talking of curating a very specific type of fear: not fear of the planet itself nor a paralyzing terror that leads to inaction. But an eerie one closer to the Lovecraftian horror of encountering an entity uncannily colossal, violent, and entirely indifferent. A fear borne of respect and humbleness—God-fearing, perhaps. A recognition that our millennia-long efforts to tame the wild are backfiring. To conjure that primal memory of a life-giving yet unforgiving Earth, still there, just below the surface.

In mountaineering the term is called exposure—sections of a route where a single, simple misstep can be catastrophic. Our exposure deepens with each life support system we tear away from the Earth and each further step we take teetering through tipping points. Perhaps a new field of ‘climate semiotics’ can strengthen the awareness of our fragile foothold on this hurtling rock and engender a new generation of Earth-fearing stewards. It may just help us listen when the alert rings once, twice, then again, and again.

When it’s your turn to film the next disaster, will your camera shake as you run for your life or as your hands tremble with fear?

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

Last year, a Harvard astrophysicist claimed to have found objects of extraterrestrial origin at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. If true, the discovery would open up the unnerving possibility that aliens not only exist, but could have visited us before. The leading research suggests, however, that these objects aren’t the stuff of cosmic horror but of something far more sinister: industrial coal ash pollutants.

Confusing a human-created material for an extraterrestrial gadget is, in many ways, understandable. Our constructions taken out of context are strange. But so too are millipedes. What qualifies as otherworldly depends, of course, on perspective and experience.

A place can only be considered “alien” in reference to a familiar baseline. That explains why images of the Atacama Desert look far weirder to most of us than strip malls, even though the latter is objectively stranger. And yet despite this subjectivity it feels as if there’s a collective alienation of Earth’s environments underway—a global weirding and a cultural severance from them.

Earth’s aliens arrived not by invasion but by invention. Industrial empires, climate change, and ecological ruin have fundamentally reshaped every coordinate of the globe into something new and unfamiliar. Interviews with survivors of climate catastrophe or journalists reporting on capitalist wreckage gravitate towards "otherworldly" as a qualifying adjective. What other word is better suited to describe liquified aluminum dripping from a car melted by wildfire or the skeletal crypts of bleached coral reefs? These sights, they suggest, are so strangely devastating that it’s hard to fathom they are of this Earth.

And they’re correct. In its simplest form, climate change is a set of numbers marking our deviation from the atmospheric and biological parameters that allowed civilization to arise. It is therefore a warning: stray too far from this habitable Goldilocks zone and that which you’ve built will crumble. Earth has been here before. Travel back some 600 million years ago and the planet was entirely ice. A few billion further and it was all molten lava. We’re discovering that anything beyond this comfortable 200,000-year present stretch is as inhospitable to human life as the surface of Mars.

In this way, the idea of Spaceship Earth is less an invitation to explore the stars and more a claustrophobic clusterfuck of steaming vents, closing airlocks, and mad dashes to the control room to stabilize our descent. With a pinch of effort and plenty of luck, we’ll land. Then comes the next problem.

Had the Harvard professor searched near a mid-ocean ridge, he might’ve actually found alien life—or the closest there is to it. Deep sea hydrothermal vents are the most alien-like environment that could exist on Earth. Visited only by submersibles, these vents pump black and white plumes of sulfur and barium; volcanic cathedrals erupting in a darkness more complete than night. Life thrives here in the absence of photosynthesis. It’s thought that all life today can trace its roots to these boiling dark waters. And if the crustacean swarms and Pompeii worms make do, then perhaps life might just exist in the dark seas of Jupiter’s moon Europa. The only group more excited than the marine- and astrobiologists are the miners. For these deep-sea smelting towers contain critical minerals—lots of them.

Our species’ track record when confronted with the unfamiliar is damning at best. Our innate fear of the unknown translates to a damaging tendency to transform the alien into the familiar. During the colonization of North America, Amitav Ghosh writes about the English’s mission to terraform the land into familiar neo-Europes that suited European ways of life, itself a form of warfare via environmental manipulation. And, “consequently, narratives of terraforming draw heavily on the rhetoric and imagery of empire, envisioning space as a “frontier” to be “conquered” and “colonized.”

Centuries later and these colonially-terraformed landscapes continue to wreak havoc. A European approach to wildfire suppression (and general suppression of Indigenous practices) has contributed to the excess fuel loads that kindled a new era of Californian wildfires. On the other side of the country, invasive east Asian kudzu vines—alien-like in their tentacular swarm—have overrun native ecosystems and instill fears of choking infestation. America’s popular culture deems vine an invader and sterile lawns a sign of home.

It’s hard to find a foothold on land so fundamentally altered. The air’s a bit harder to breathe. The sun feels hotter than usual. We’re stepping out of the capsule onto new terrain and quickly finding ourselves in need of a space suit.

I write this from a non-native eucalyptus forest (planted by the U.S. army) with a selection of photographs I took of recently-melted glaciers in Svalbard (the fastest-warming place on Earth). At this point in time it’s hard not to find terraformed landscapes, and even harder to traverse familiar ones.

I find our response when confronted with alien landscapes confounding. Why do we protect Yellowstone’s tie-dye hot springs but mine deepsea thermal vents for minerals? Geologists often call this era the Anthropocene to signify the outsized role of human activity on the Earth, but at no point in history have we ever known ourselves less.

“Alienation” is rooted in the late Middle English word for “estrangement.” And, besides the violence of colonial terraforming, I think this is where much of the problem lies. For Earth’s landscapes turning alien and our species’ alienation from them are separate but connected issues.

Estrangement often leads to othering, terraforming, and exploitation. It’s the basis of disconnection. Most of us in modern society are so divorced from our material support systems that the minerals in our phone battery might as well have come from a passing asteroid. We’ve spent centuries alienating and abstracting the outdoors while acclimatizing the indoors that we’ve forgotten which is truly more otherworldly.

And for many of us attempting to overcome this separation by deepening our connection with nature, we’re finding it’s not as we remembered. Like the astronauts in Planet of the Apes, we’ve returned to a planet we don’t quite recognize. This glacier used to be longer, these corals not quite so white—did that primate always have a vengeful glint in its eye?

Can we counteract estrangement with our tendency to terraform the alien? If our innate fear of the unfamiliar catches up to the unfamiliar Earth we’re creating, then maybe we’ll reverse our systems to bring us back to that habitable Goldilocks zone. That solution, however, entails some degree of geoengineering: contentious high-tech solutions like stratospheric aerosol injection or reflective mirrors placed in orbit. Solutions, in other words, so far into the realm of science fiction that they risk even further alienation from the nature we know.

For now we seem to be stuck in a closed loop. It’s so hard to envision a different, better world that a growing number of people are seeking refuge in colonizing new planets. But that just shows our lack of imagination. Thinking we’ll be just as comfortable in a geodesic dome on Mars is like thinking industrial pollutants are the trappings of an alien.

Alleviating our alienation requires answering a question: is a particular landscape alien because it’s unfamiliar to us or because it’s genuinely gone awry? This is the difference between encountering a deep-sea geothermal vent versus a graveyard of bleached coral; the distinction between wonder and estrangement.

If we can’t separate from our terraforming ways then it only makes sense to bend it towards good. To invent new aliens that combat the old: gene-spliced bacteria to consume plastic or specialized rocks to remove atmospheric carbon. That world may ultimately feel unfamiliar to those of us alive today, but it represents an end to a harrowing voyage nonetheless. To arrive at a new Earth, crowded with aliens and strange encounters, wondrous in its own way, and with an atmosphere we can actually breathe.

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

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The sky is baby blue, the sunlight is a thousand incandescent light bulbs, and it smells of stale cigarettes and chlorine. Welcome to The Venetian, Las Vegas’s take on a city claimed by rising seas one inch at a time. I can’t say I like it much. This replica lacks the charm of the real thing, and I just lost fifty dollars in the other room. I’m unnerved by its fakeness, but I’m drawn to its shimmer. Its alluring horror is exactly why I’m here.

Las Vegas is the best example of what I call an “uncanny landscape” that I can reach in a weekend’s drive. The term merges our increasingly climate-altered environments with roboticist Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley”—the idea that our affinity for robots increases the more human they look, but only until a certain point. There’s a threshold a few steps before perfectly life-like where our affinity plummets into revulsion.

I’d argue that climate change is pushing Earth into the uncanny valley—a liminal area where nature is increasingly unrecognizable and terrifyingly strange. We’ve left 10,000 years of familiarity at the door and crossed the threshold into a new frontier—one we’re wholly unprepared to navigate. Our eyes (and even our cameras) are struggling to adjust to its strange new light—not a familiar sunshine but one cast under the muted glow of wildfire’s orange hue and scattered by artificial clouds.

Earth’s properties are beginning to feel off. And our constructions, particularly the ones attempting to replace nature, are unnervingly artificial. We’ve arrived not at the dystopia envisaged by post-apocalyptic movies but the opening scenes; the first zombie encounter where the characters realize the sick person before them is not just sick and the world they’re accustomed to is already lost. Unseasonal temperature and extreme weather events are really just the superficial tip of this hyperobject-iceberg. It goes much deeper. Here’s a quick list of the climate uncanny.

• A sunrise broadcast on an LED screen illuminates a smog-heavy Tiananmen Square

• Warmer temperatures promote algae growth and are turning Earth’s oceans—that lend our planet its somewhat famous blue complexion—green

• Tuvalu is creating a digital clone of its country before its islands are consumed by the rising tide

• The mass of human-made stuff now outweighs biodiversity

• There’s a black fungus that feeds on radiation in Chernobyl

• Melting polar caps are changing the distribution of mass around the planet, slowing its rotation, and increasing the length of the day

This weirdness is the often overlooked but far more common impact of the climate crisis in the near term. A cumulation of small moments and sights that bend our perception of normality until the crisis is fully at our door. Boundaries are being erased. The contours of our old maps are shifting. We need a new atlas that can somehow reconcile our existence with this epoch’s rapid rate of change and bizarre unfoldings. It’ll be a foggy atlas, surely. One with hybrid creatures scrawled by the margins and where uncharted regions warn: “Here be dragons."

You’d think that walking through Excalibur’s casino floor with a medium format camera and tripod would attract suspicion. But I just walked by a man sucking a pacifier and no one seemed to notice. The ability to divert attention here is almost like magic. And like any good magician, the city knows to draw the audience’s eyes to one hand while the other performs the real trick.

Vegas abides by a simple formula: remove the windows and clocks, pump enough AC and spectacle into a labyrinth of glitzy machines, and the impossibility (and unsustainability) of it all is forgotten. Its greatest illusion is the annihilation of nature and its rhythms. Step inside and the harsh conditions of the outside world disappear (which, in this case, is a 105°F+ heatwave). Vegas understands something most places don’t: the show must go on—at least as long as there’s enough power for the generators.

By many metrics, Vegas should not exist. It’s arid, parched, and the fastest warming city in the US. Neon signs are common, heat-related deaths more so. Yet Las Vegas continues to grow in a sort of reverse climate migration. Multi-billion dollar buildings and population numbers increase alongside the temperature gauge. For a city whose existence is dependent on understanding the odds, perhaps it’s fitting that it continues to defy them.

It’s a recipe destined to be replicated the world over in the coming years, and is already a blueprint for cities like Dubai and Saudi Arabia’s The Line. Water a patch of desert with enough money, willpower, and human labor and watch the hypermodern city—and all its uncanny imitations—emerge. In the desert at night, the heat is just tolerable enough to walk outside on the Strip. Stroll a few blocks and even the moon is visible. Not the one you’re thinking of, though, but the newly-built $2.3 billion dollar arena lit up in its image.

If Vegas is a microcosm for the uncanny cities of our future, then I’ve learned that swallowing the absurdity is a bit easier along with a drink. Three more and for a fleeting moment I could swear the Sphere’s pale glow of technicolor advertisements was enchanting and the coins shimmering below the Venetian's chlorine canals divine. Wait just an hour though. The hangover hits hard.

What does it actually mean if the climate, Earth’s landscapes, and our constructions become uncanny and weird? Maybe nothing. Children born in the following decades will likely not pine for an Earth abundant—it’s hard to miss something you’ve never experienced. Like nuclear weapons, this existential threat may just be something we live with. At that point we’ll have traversed the uncanny valley—diminished, battered, blasé to our monstrous creations—and arrived at Earth 2.0, a stranger, faker planet—but one we’ve accepted as our own.

But those of us making the long walk between the two will need some kind of thread to lead us through the labyrinthian hall of climate horrors, for it’s quite possible there’s no turning back. Like a messy crime scene, our fingerprints on the natural world are everywhere, from the genetics of corn to the microplastics in our bloodstream. Accepting that some uncanniness is here to stay could be healthy. Perhaps Antarctica is a place best visited in virtual reality.

That’s not to say we should bury our heads in the refrigerated sand and accept our fate. We should fight like hell to conserve what nature remains. Not to keep the uncanniness at bay—even if that is a welcome outcome—but because the health of the planet and those who depend on it is at stake.

But, for now at least, witnessing the weirdness as we slide towards futures far worse is mesmerizing in its own way. Start recognizing the patterns of uncanny landscapes and suddenly they’re everywhere. Its unsettling language can, however, help us realize just how far the baseline has shifted from normal. Or, more likely, tallying these strange sights won’t change anything in the end at all. Like the monsters that adorned the edges of old maps, they’ll simply illustrate our terror of the unknown.

Even so, I find writing this atlas therapeutic in its own way, like dropping breadcrumbs while entering the dark woods. I want to believe we’ll be alright, that we’ll pass through this weird climate crucible and arrive at another end, changed, weary, but fundamentally okay. But I’m also taking a page out of Vegas’s book and playing the odds, even if I’m starting to suspect the game is rigged.

Written and photographed (unless otherwise indicated) by Ryder Kimball

Climate change has pushed Earth into the uncanny valley, a liminal area that is increasingly unrecognizable and terrifyingly strange. We’ve left 10,000 years of familiarity at the door and crossed the threshold into a new frontier—one we’re wholly unprepared to navigate.

Like the blank margins of old maps, this uncharted valley is filled with monsters. It’s a place where not even genetics are safe from the scalpel. Where cultures are digitized before they disappear under the rising sea and ice from a melting glacier can cool a cocktail in a bar half a world away.

Charting a course through this monstrous fog is this century’s ultimate expedition. I’m curious whether we’ll adopt this strangely-altered world as “our new nature” or lament what we’ve lost? Will we stay in our air conditioned and filtered homes, eyes glued to VR, or step into the dampened sunshine and inhale deeply the acrid smoke?

Uncharted will be about the often overlooked but far more common impact of the climate crisis in the near term: weirdness. Most people won’t experience a wildfire in their life but they will breathe in toxic particles from its smoke. This gray area is hard to define and even harder to make sense of—but it’s our new unnerving reality.

I don’t know how to get out of this mess but I suspect, maybe even fear, what happens when we’ve crossed the valley and the monsters we’ve created are indistinguishable from what once was. When kids play on refrigerated sand in indoor beaches and lovers lay on gene-spliced grass to gaze upon clouds seeded by silver.

Every few weeks I’ll post a visual essay on climate uncanniness and the visits I’ve made to these strange lands. My goal is to help define the contours of the valley as we chart a course through it, observe just how fucking weird this all is, and leave a trail of breadcrumbs in the hope we may one day find our way back.