Monochrome Landscapes - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 114

SHADES OF GREEN
Barcelona, 2010—Shades of Green was produced for the group exhibition Anti-
photojournalism at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona in 2010. The show
examined new modes of producing images of news events. I had become interested
in the clearing of old-growth forests by fire, rather than by logging, and I thought
it would be possible to continue the project begun with Monochrome Landscapes
by using satellite images to show the black of the burned rainforest.
I called François-Michel Le Tourneau of the Centre National de la Recher -
che Scientifique (CNRS), an expert on this, and asked him for some coordinates,
which I thought I would give to GeoEye when placing an order. To my surprise, he
laughed. Because of the fast rate of growth in the Amazon, he said, I would have
had to know the exact time and date of the fire. After the forest is burned, the
vegetation grows back very quickly.
So, deprived of black, I returned to green. Building on the color scheme implied
by Le Tourneau's analysis, I decided to highlight the shades of green that are now
the hallmark of vulnerable rainforests—new crops of palms and soybeans, in con -
trast to the surrounding trees and mature plant life that they quickly deforest
and replace.
These images, acquired by satellites in 2008 and 2009, show the transformation
of forests in Indonesia and Brazil under the pressure of agriculture, settlement,
fire, cattle ranching, and logging. Change, or “forest cover loss,” is registered in
different shades of green: dark green for original forest, green for recently burned
and depleted forest, and light and very light green for pastures or crops.
According to the 2010 Global Forest Resources Assessment from the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, deforestation—the conversion of
tropical forests into agricultural land—shows signs of decreasing in several coun -
tries, but continues at a high rate in others. Around 13 million hectares of forest
(32 million acres) were converted to other uses or lost through natural causes each
year in the last decade, compared with 16 million hectares per year (just under
40 million acres) in the 1990s. Both Brazil and Indonesia, which had the highest
net loss of forest in the 1990s, have significantly reduced their rate of loss today.
Nevertheless, forests continue to disappear.