Environmental Justice, Vital Materiality, and the Toxic Sublime in Edward Burtynsky’sManufactured Landscapes

Manufactured Landscapes, the 2006 film directed by Jennifer Baichwal, is a documentary portrayal of the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. The film explores Burtynsky as he documents sites of extraction, factory production, and waste disposal around the world. This article provides an environmental justice reading of the film and the photographs. It focuses on representations of materiality, such as how the bodies of workers interact with the environmental toxins with and in which they work, and the limits of an aesthetics of beauty to account for global consumer complicity and risk. Burtynsky’s deployment of a “toxic sublime” (Peeples 2011) and the film’s depiction of vital materiality ask audiences to reckon with the “dirty ecologies” (Morton 2009) of risk society’s “storied matter” (Bennett 2010), such as oil, e-waste, and invisible toxic fumes. Burtynsky’s photographs foreground toxicity in ways that suggest that “beauty” is not a grounds for environmentalism in the Anthropocene, colluding with a paradigm of “health” that evades the “trans-corporeality” (Alaimo 2010) of human bodies. Moreover, attachment to beauty and health might, in fact, ironically engender toxicity. Through the film, Burtynsky’s works make visible the externalized costs of global consumerism to very specific bodies and very specific environments, and draw audiences materially into relation with those costs, emphasizing what is termed in this article a material relationality. The author concludes that, despite eliciting sharp scholarly criticism, the film and Burtynsky’s photographs call for an aesthetic sensibility and form capable of revealing how materialism facilitates global environmental justice.