The images document deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, hydraulic fracturing and mountaintop mining in eastern Appalachia, oil sands extraction in Canada and others. Together they constitute a bizarrely vivid spectrum of landscapes that the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith calls “a kind of toxic sublime” that brings to mind “slick, printed versions of Abstract Expressionist painting.”

Yet this reading quickly becomes as reductive as many of Mr. Fair’s images. In both of Ms. Smith’s references and Mr. Fair’s lack of criticality towards the representational traditions that his images evoke, these landscapes are framed as much by long-established compositional tropes as by the naive perception that they are discrete and spectacular ‘elsewheres’ in the North American landscape.

In the Romantic tradition, the sublime was the unknowable elsewhere; the spectacle encountered as man looked precariously across the threshold into the ‘abyss’. Ultimately what Mr. Fair’s images fail to capture is the difference between looking into the abyss versus the view up from the bottom. In this sense the viewer is left to question how to contextualize these techno-baroque landscapes as an abyss of environmental destruction that each of us pulls a lever on.

Landscapes of Extraction: The Collateral Damage of the Fossil Fuels Industries runs through February 26, 2011 at the Cooper Union Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. Gallery, 7 East 7th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY

Without a touch of irony, the growing environmental crisis has drawn a comparable (and perhaps analogous) type of cautionary focus. Yet, unlike economic and human capital, natural capital has no dedicated system of measurement, monitoring or reporting. However, a recent United Nations research initiative, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) suggests this may not be the case for long.

TEEB’s research seeks to develop new quantitative and evaluative tools to understand the inherent economic and external values embodied within specific ecosystems. Water filtration, storm management, waste treatment, climate regulation and the provision of food and medical supplies are all understood to be connected to direct social, environmental and economic benefits.

For example, a TEEB report describes that over 20% of the planet’s coral reefs are already seriously degraded or under imminent risk of collapse. While the global degeneration of coral reefs will impact different communities in different ways, those highly dependent on fish protein and local economic development through tourism could face dramatic loss. Coral reefs are therefore understood to embody a critical range of ecosystem service values. Preliminary TEEB estimates these to be 189,000 US$/hectare/year for natural hazard management; up to 1 million US$/hectare/year for tourism; up to 57,000 US$/ha/year for genetic materials and bio-prospecting; and up to 3,818 US$/ha/year for fisheries.

The study goes on to profile a series of other ecosystems including wetlands and forests, and provides assessed values for land use and certain genetic resources connected to major market segments such as the pharmaceutical industry.

Developing new mechanisms to measure the value of environmental services is of crucial importance, yet not without their limitations. These mechanisms may, after all, be vulnerable to the same flaws as those regulating the financial system. Without proper understanding and design, the invention of new markets and terminology for ecosystem services may undermine other, less quantifiable values such as those with moral or cultural significance.

The challenge in adopting the term “services” as a way to describe environmental benefits will be akin to adopting the term “growth” to describe financial gain- both risk a metaphor getting the better of initially good intentions. It will therefore be necessary to understand economic value as representing only one possible metric for benefits drawn from ecosystems and natural resources.

In the meantime, TEEB’s findings from preliminary reports prepared over the last two years will be presented next month at a global business symposium on biodiversity.