Can China step back from its frenzied progress? That's the question anyone who listens to a 20-minute presentation made earlier this month by the photographer, Wang Jiuliang, is forced to ask.

Titled "Every bit of earth in China", the presentation looks at where the raw material for China's growth is coming from and depicts the devastation this growth has wrecked. Seeking to establish the "relationship between every individual and this land beneath their feet'', Wang points out that the skyscrapers of Beijing were once mountains; their steel reinforcements cannot be separated from the people whose lives have been blighted by steel plants. Indeed, the source of the smog Beijingers complain about lies in "the demands of each of us".

Wang discovered the wastelands that now dot his country when he went back to his home town after a long time, hoping to go grape-picking as he used to. But the grapes didn't taste good, and the mountains around his home town were no longer as he remembered them. His home town had become a stone processing base; its mountains "wounded", the faces of workers there masked with dust, their expressions impossible to read. From then on, Wang travelled across the country to find out where the everyday comforts he and other urban Chinese take for granted came from. He discovered that the electricity to his home town came from a place 1,000 km away. Going there, he found, as his photograph showed, "a piece of desolation''. He photographed ravaged mountains, rivers red with effluents. Have you been paid compensation for this takeover of your mountain forests, he asked villagers? "Compensation? This belongs to the State, they do whatever they want," they replied.

Grim picture

Wang tries to make his audience feel a direct connection with the hell that parts of China have become. Don't think your home town is still untouched, he says. "If it's still beautiful, it's because there's nothing there to mine. As long as there are resources and profit, the tanks of power and capital will inevitably come rolling in.''

Wang became famous in 2010 when his collection of photographs, Beijing besieged by waste, won first prize in a prestigious festival. Later made into a documentary, it showed the capital ringed by almost 500 landfills filled with trash, where people lived and raised children as they sorted out the waste. Such was the impact of his photographs that the Beijing authorities closed down half of these landfills.

The documentary earned Wang an invitation to UC Berkeley, and there he found the germ of his second documentary. Obsessed with waste, he started tracing garbage vans to their destination. That's when he learnt that America's plastic waste is shipped to China. His documentary, Plastic China, following the life of a girl who works with her parents in a plastic recycling unit, has won an international award and will be shown at the Sundance Film Festival. One particularly shocking still from it shows a child happily squirting water into her mouth from a discarded syringe.

Wang's first film was partly funded by a government film institute; he has been somewhat of a celebrity. But his latest talk may end that. Full of references to the "arrogance of power" and the "savagery" with which local governments respond to protests about pollution, its solution is Gandhian: "Challenge everything we consume. Even though we are in an ocean of consumerism, we can reject over consumption."

Wang ends by telling his audience to hold people accountable, to inculcate "doubt and resistance" by drawing upon their "innate courage" which they have forgotten. "No one will give that courage to you. Be under no illusion that power and capital will give it to you."