Photos

Human Impact Versus Nature: The Abstract Aerials of Alexander Heilner (PHOTOS)

Photographer Alexander Heilner has long been captivated by humans' impact on the earth. He would often take photos out of airplane windows while traveling.

"For my entire adult life and much of my art career, a huge thing that's been central in much of my work has been the interaction of artificial and natural things in the world," Heilner explained to weather.com. "A large percentage of it is about what humans have done and how it sits in coexistance with, or contention with the natural world."

(MORE: Solar Power Farms Dot the Globe in Intricate, Puzzle-Like Patterns)

In 2007, while on a flight from New York to San Francisco, he became enamoured with the miles of red desert near Moab, Utah and the blue and white pools that he later found out was the Intrepid Potash Mine. The striking view inspired Heilner to hire a small plane from which he could photograph the potash mine from the open windows.

Potash is primarily used for fertilizer, and the Intrepid is the only producer of potash in the U.S. Its Moab, Utah mine is one of Intrepid's three mining sites in the country. It is very likely that your last meal included a vegetable or fruit that was grown using ferilizer that contained some of the potash from this very mine.

"It's easy to look at something like this and think, 'That's a crazy thing that someone is doing to the landscape,' but it's important to realize that it's something that we are doing to the landscape, that we are complicit in," Heilner said.

Heilner insists that he does not pass judgement on the lifestyles of others, but wants to show the world the stunning ways in which we've affected our environment. He has photographed everything from canals and communities built in Cape Coral, Florida, to Black Rock City built and taken down in Nevada each year for Burning Man, to the artificial islands build off of the coast of Dubai. The results are his abstract, painterly images seen above.

MORE FROM WEATHER.COM: Glaciers Then and Now