 Pictures are so much more communicative to the brain and data. Humans have always been limited by the environment, just that we have become better and better of solving the limitations that the environment imposes on us. Here's a picture in 1984 of Shenzhen. It's a city that was maybe a village of 40,000 people and it's now a metropolitan area of some 40 million people. The more we understand our impact, the more we will be able to behave in such a way that we minimize it.