The BEST: Mines #19
This week Chaim Strauchler relaunches his popular “The BEST” series, a bi-weekly feature in which writers consider what things “out there” make us think and feel. What elements in our culture still inspire us to live better? We seek to share what we find that might still be described as “the best that has been thought and said.” Click here to read about “The BEST” and to see the index of all columns in this series.
Edward Burtynsky, Mines #19, Westar Open Pit Coal Mine, Sparwood, British Columbia, Canada, from the series Breaking Ground, Mines, 1985 (printed 2013)
Click to enlarge
Summary
Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s Mines #19, Westar Open Pit Coal Mine appears at first to be a massive mountain landscape with rugged edges, blue sky, and puffy clouds. Only when looking closer does the viewer notice the striation in the mountain and the small toy-like yellow vehicles in the foreground. The mountain is being disassembled before us. The photograph, at the same time beautiful and horrific, is mesmerizing.
Burtynsky’s large-scale photographs explore the deep imprint of human industry on the natural world. His images are both striking and unsettling. Vast mines, quarries, oil fields, shipping yards, and polluted rivers are rendered with the grandeur of a classical landscape painting. Seen from above or at a distance, these places reveal sweeping patterns, colors, and geometries that can look mesmerizing. Yet beneath the beauty lies a sobering reality: each scene reflects environmental degradation and human exploitation on a monumental scale.
Why this is The BEST
The power of Burtynsky’s art lies in its tension between destruction and beauty. He avoids propaganda and sentimentality, instead documenting how human ambition reshapes the earth. His photographs elevate environmental imagery into moral inquiry, forcing us to wrestle with uncomfortable truths: the same beauty we admire is born of consumption, extraction, and waste. By framing industry as part of nature’s story — not separate from it — Burtynsky invites awe, but also demands responsibility.
This tension echoes two biblical visions of humanity’s role in creation. Genesis 2:15 presents us as stewards, charged to “work and guard” the garden, while Genesis 1:28 commands us to “conquer” and “rule” the earth. Jewish life and art — from children’s pre-Shavuot drawings of Har Sinai to Tu BiShvat murals of Israel’s fields and orchards — often celebrate beauty while masking the costs of excess. Burtynsky’s work challenges us to see ourselves and our communities within our “small” contributions to the vast refuse preserved in his images, to ask what legacies of beauty and destruction we are creating, and to imagine a more balanced partnership with the world that our Torah teaching might yet shape.
Chaim Strauchler, an associate editor of TRADITION, is rabbi of Cong. Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck.