一位飞行的摄影师带着敬畏和悲伤俯视着地球

一位飞行的摄影师带着敬畏和悲伤俯视着地球

Strap in, and "your body becomes the fuselage" — and you are the pilot. Your knees dangle into open air.

系好安全带，“你的身体就成了机身”——而你就是飞行员。你的膝盖悬在空中。

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.

15年来，这个被称为“机动滑翔伞”的装置，已经把摄影师乔治·斯坦梅茨带到了25个不同的国家。从一个机场到另一个机场，斯坦梅茨都带着他的私人飞机，这些飞机可以拆卸，装在3个袋子里，每个袋子重约50磅(约合48公斤)。

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 human). The accompanying text is by science writer Andrew Revkin.

斯坦梅茨从遥远的沙漠、荒芜的北极地形和紧挨在一起的海岸线上纵身一跃，从空中记录了人类活动塑造地球的方式。结果就是《人类的星球:人类之初的地球》，这是一部关于人类世时代我们星球的摄影记录——这个词指的是人类在全球景观上留下的印记(“anthropos”在希腊语中是“人类”的意思)。本文由科学作家安德鲁·瑞凯撰写。

NPR spoke to Steinmetz about what it was like to glide over some of the most isolated regions in the world — and about the overwhelming signs he saw of humanity's footprint.

美国国家公共电台采访了斯坦梅茨，他谈到在世界上最与世隔绝的地区上空滑翔是什么感觉，以及他看到的人类足迹的压倒性迹象。

What inspired you to begin working on

是什么激励你开始从事这项工作的?

The book came out of a project I did for the New York Times Magazine. They asked me to go and photograph climate change on all seven continents from the air.

这本书来源于我为《纽约时报》杂志做的一个项目。他们让我从空中拍摄七大洲的气候变化。

And it made me think more globally than I tend to do, and it filled in a lot of gaps I had in my coverage of the planet. After that was done, I decided it would be interesting to go back through my archive and kind of reinterpret what I've been seeing for the past 30 years, looking at our fragile planet in a different way.

它让我比以前更全球化地思考，它填补了我在地球报道方面的许多空白。在那之后，我决定回顾一下我的档案，重新解释一下我在过去30年里所看到的，用另一种方式来观察我们这个脆弱的星球，这将是一件很有趣的事情。

You'd been taking aerial photos for National Geographic as well.

你也为国家地理杂志拍过航拍照片。

I've been working for National Geographic for over 30 years, and [aerial photos] were always the most fun and exciting part of the story.

我为《国家地理》工作了30多年，航拍照片一直是这个故事中最有趣、最激动人心的部分。

I started doing that more and more, until finally, I wanted to do a story in the Sahara and realized I had to bring my own aircraft because there were no helicopters or planes to hire in these [areas of] Niger and Chad where I wanted to go. I had to learn how to fly my own thing.

我开始越来越多地这样做，直到最后，我想在撒哈拉沙漠做一个报道，我意识到我必须自己带飞机，因为在我想去的尼日尔和乍得这些地区没有直升机或飞机可以租用。我得学会自己开飞机。

Could you tell us a bit about what it was like taking pictures aerially?

你能告诉我们一些空中拍照是什么感觉吗?

It's kind of personal because your body is the aircraft. It is some physical risk to go and see the world. You have to have to be fairly committed to taking the picture. And that made it a much richer experience. Now, I used drones a lot.

因为你的身体就是飞机。去看世界是有身体风险的。你必须非常认真地拍下这张照片。这使它成为一个更丰富的体验。现在，我经常使用无人机。

A lot of the work was done with a motorized paraglider, which is the world's lightest and slowest motorized aircraft. You run to take off and land. It's a very personal kind of aerial photography, [because] there's no barrier between you and the outside.

很多工作都是用电动滑翔伞完成的，这是世界上最轻和最慢的电动飞机。你跑着起飞和降落。这是一种非常个人化的航拍，因为在你和外界之间没有障碍。

You have to watch out for your knees getting in the picture.

你得小心你的膝盖进入画面。

I had a lot of unusual experiences flying in very rare places — like getting caught in sandstorms, some bad crashes. You have a lot of really epic moments where you see things that no one's ever seen before.

我有很多不寻常的经历，在非常罕见的地方飞行，比如被沙尘暴，一些严重的坠毁。你有很多真正史诗般的时刻，在那里你看到了以前没人见过的东西。

What were some of those epic moments?

那些史诗般的时刻是什么?

In the empty quarter of Saudi Arabia, [I flew over] the world's largest sand sea. It's about the size of France, Belgium and Holland combined without a single permanent point of water or habitation, and it's [practically] just an endless field of orange sand dunes. You feel like you're hallucinating out there.

在沙特阿拉伯空旷的地区，我飞越了世界上最大的沙海。它的面积相当于法国、比利时和荷兰的总和，没有一个固定的水源和居住点，它(实际上)只是一片无边无际的橙色沙丘。你会觉得自己在那里产生了幻觉。

I also had a really amazing experience flying in the High Andes in the Altiplano of Bolivia. There's a salt lake there called the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat. It's very surreal, especially in the spring when the fringes of it are covered in water. You feel like it's like something out of a dream. It's really beautiful.

我还在玻利维亚高原的安第斯山脉上有过一次非常棒的飞行经历。那里有一个盐湖，叫做乌尤尼盐湖，是世界上最大的盐沼。这是非常超现实的，尤其是在春天，当它的边缘被水覆盖的时候。你感觉就像做梦一样。真的很漂亮。