Wheels Up

Photographs by Edward Burtynsky

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky has built a career documenting what he calls “altered landscapes”—tangled highway overpasses, sprawling oil refineries, mountainsides pockmarked by human exploitation. In 1999, he visited a tire-disposal site outside Modesto, California. It was surreal, he told me, almost sublime. He felt as if he had entered an entirely synthetic world: millions of tires stacked some five stories into the air, rubber hedgerows stretching to the horizon.

A few months later, the tire pile was struck by lightning and burst into flames. The fire burned as hot as 2,000 degrees and filled the sky with a thick black smoke. After a month, it was at last extinguished, but the tires had melted into more than 250,000 gallons of molten oil t