resources
Dark satanic steel
The raw materials of society
A big hole in the ground: This is where most of the raw materials of an industrial society come from. To appreciate the scale of this excavation, note that the bright blue object on a shelf near the center of the image is a Porta Potti.
The dragline
A dragline is the largest of the machines used to strip away the overburden and mine the ore layer at an open-cast mine. A bucketload for this particular dragline, one of the world's largest, is 220 cubic yards. Note the school bus, which would easily fit in the bucket.
A metropolis for hydrocarbons
An oil refinery suggests the image of a metropolis for hydrocarbons, the pipe manifolds like expressways, the distillation towers like skyscrapers.
Urban form and grain
One square mile of different cities' street networks, held at the same scale to compare the urban form and grain.