Doing time: the temporalities of environmental law

A disturbing way to visualise the Anthropocene is Google Earth's time-lapsed, bird's-eye panoramas. Launched in 2013 by the United States Geological Survey and NASA, Google displays vivid satellite pictures of Earth for each year since 1984.1 Users of the 'Earth Engine' can zoom into any corner of the planet to watch a time-lapsed sequence of images over about the past 30 years. Taken from Landsat satellites, they evoke a stunning historical vista of permutations in the Earth's landscape over a mere few decades--a fleeting moment in nature's timescales. One time-lapse series shows Dubai ballooning from a desert village into a metropolis complete with artificial islands; another tracks the carcinogenic-like sprawl around Las Vegas; while a further sequence depicts the ravenous deforestation of the Amazon.