A Flying Photographer Looks Down On Earth In Awe And Sorrow

He describes it as a “leaf blower with a parachute overhead.” Strap in, and “your body becomes the fuselage” — and you are the pilot. Your knees dangle into open air. For 15 years, the contraption, called a motorized paraglider, has taken photographer George Steinmetz across 25 different countries. From airport to airport, Steinmetz carried his personal aircraft, which could be disassembled and stashed in three bags, each weighing about 50 pounds, that he would proceed to check in. The rice terraces of Yuanyang County, China, are among the largest in the world. George Steinmetz Launching himself over remote swaths of desert, stark Arctic terrains and cheek-by-jowl shorelines, Steinmetz has documented, from the sky, the way human activity has shaped Earth. The result is The Human Planet: Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene , a photographic record of our planet in the anthropocene age — a word that refers to the mark humans have made on the global landscape (“anthropos” is Greek for