Field Notes: Visualizing the Environmental Costs of Agriculture
In this edition of Field Notes, visual culture scholar Siobhan Angus explores how images have shaped our understanding of land, agriculture, and environmental change. From the nineteenth-century origins of chemical fertilizers to today’s critical minerals, her research examines how visual culture can reveal the political and environmental forces behind the way we use the planet.
What is a question you hope to answer with your research?
As a visual culture scholar, I’m interested in how images shape our understanding of the political structures behind land use, resource extraction, and environmental damage—and how art might offer alternative stories that reshape how we understand climate change. Put simply, how did we arrive at the current crisis, and what new ways of seeing and imagining might help us think about where we go next?
What are you focused on these days?
I’m interested in how chemically managed agriculture reshaped our world. My current book project, which I’m cowriting with Jennifer Raab, turns to the nineteenth century when fertilizers made from materials like bones, guano, and rock became vital tools of agriculture. Fertilizers helped feed a rapidly growing global population, but they’ve also driven environmental damage, extractive industries, and forms of colonial control over land and people.
The elements that make crops grow—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—also underpin the vast system of chemical fertilizers that sustain modern agriculture. We often think about fertilizers as purely technical or neutral tools, simply a matter of feeding crops more efficiently. That framing treats agriculture as a problem of inputs and outputs, rather than as something shaped by history, politics, and power. These elements have transformed not just ecosystems, but economies, labor systems, and entire landscapes.
What interests me most is how all of this was made to seem normal. Images played a critical role. In maps, advertisements, paintings, scientific diagrams, and photographs, fertile land was portrayed as abundant, empty, and ready for improvement, helping justify agricultural expansion and resource extraction across the Americas. My research traces how these visual and scientific ways of seeing turned soil into something to be managed and optimized. At the same time, I’m exploring how art and visual culture can tell different stories—ones that make these histories visible and open up new ways of thinking about land, responsibility, and the future of food on a changing planet.
Why is this work important right now?
Much of the conversation around environmental change focuses on carbon, which frames climate change primarily as an atmospheric problem. But earth system scientists identify nine planetary boundaries that regulate the stability of the biosphere—the limits within which humanity can safely operate. One of these, the boundary for biogeochemical flows, tracks nutrient overload, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, and it has already been crossed due to excessive fertilizer use. When too much of these nutrients runs off into lakes and rivers, it fuels rapid algal growth. As the algae die and decompose, they consume oxygen, creating low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ where aquatic life cannot survive. This growing crisis raises a fundamental challenge: how can we feed the world without destroying the planet?
What is something people would be surprised to learn?
One thing that often surprises people is just how literal the phrase “feeding the soil” once was. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, farmers relied on ground-up bones as a key source of nutrients for crops. Animal remains were the primary source, but contemporary reports also suggest that bones were taken from battlefields, tombs, and catacombs, and shipped to factories to be processed into fertilizer. While not all of these accounts can be fully verified, they circulated widely at the time—and align with documented shortages and missing remains—pointing to a moment when agricultural progress was, quite literally, built on the dead.
What’s the biggest misconception about your research area?
A common misconception is that visual culture and media studies are purely interpretive fields. In reality, they intersect with areas like political economy, science and technology studies, and even data analysis. Together, these approaches offer rigorous and wide-ranging ways to understand how images and media systems shape everything from everyday experience to large-scale political and environmental issues.
Any new projects you’re excited about?
I’m working on a project on critical minerals and media technologies in collaboration with Gustave Lester. Critical minerals have become central to contemporary geopolitics, shaping domains that range from energy transitions to digital infrastructures and military systems. Initially defined through the lens of national security, the category has expanded to encompass materials essential to renewable energy systems as well as media technologies such as smartphones, computers, and data centers.
We are seeing a resurgence of policy and public discourse on critical minerals, and this project examines how the designation itself emerged, how it informs governance and policy frameworks, and what consequences it carries for the environment and media infrastructures.
What’s your favourite class to teach?
I teach a special topics class called Material Histories of Photography which involves object-based study at the National Gallery of Canada, Library and Archives Canada, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Canadian Museum of History. It’s a great opportunity for students to work directly with photographic materials and histories—and for all of us to get off our screens! I also really enjoy teaching Environmental Communication, where we explore how environmental issues are represented, mediated, and contested across different platforms and publics.