Introduction: Along the Aesthetic-Ecological Edge

This Special Section on 'Imaging the Environment' is a companion to Archiving the Environment', and our task has likewise been to question how techniques of imaging such as photography affect environments, and vice-versa. This Introduction considers how the question of extraction is deeply enmeshed with the ethics of seeing, and how we are frequently made aware of the problem even as the medium is part of the problem. Our starting point is a specific focus on medium and mediation in relation to rapidly changing ecologies, but the issues have demanded that we also think about time and scale as we push further towards a sense of anthropocentric displacement. What is crucial here are new modes of looking, and experimental practices of visual and sensory encounter that turn attention to nonhuman worlds in ways that might alter conceptions of human life.