TORONTO - Art and environmentalism collide in "Manufactured Landscapes," with results that are more fascinating for their ambiguity. An easy sell to art lovers, it also offers a new tangent for discussions encouraged by "An Inconvenient Truth." Prospects are good in the doc arena, where it appeals to two niches that don't always overlap. The film follows photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose signature subject is the massive detritus created by the modern world. In enormous, high-resolution photographs, Burtynsky finds the beauty in a house-sized pile of discarded plastic goods or rotary-dial telephones, documents rivers with more chemical runoff in them than water, and witnesses entire vistas that have been transformed by mining or garbage disposal. Those sights are sometimes awe-inspiring: mountains of coal to rival Egyptian pyramids, quarries where ore extraction has left behind massive inverted temples, shipyards full of decaying freighter hulls. Though his work emphasizes the aesthetic qualities of such locations, it also naturally prods the viewer to consider how his lifestyle on one side of the world is leaving a moonscape of waste in hidden parts of the globe where a village's main source of income may be, for instance, tearing apart discarded PCs and sifting recyclable metals from toxic substances. In his work, Burtynsky aims to remain morally neutral. Although in voiceover interviews he muses about the consequences of consumerism, behind the camera he insists that "this is what it is" - beyond simple right and wrong, a fact of existence that requires new kinds of debate. A large chunk of the movie is devoted to a place where these issues are particularly relevant: China, where the shift from agricultural to urban life is unprecedented in world history. Burtynsky studies the Three Gorges Dam, the largest (by a wide margin) ever built by man, and Shanghai, where traditional dwellings are vanishing to make way for high-rises. With cinematography that is sometimes so grainy it's the opposite of the photographer's massively detailed pictures, director Jennifer Baichwal and D.P. Peter Mettler find ways to convey and augment Burtynsky's work. Where they can't capture the resolution visible in a gallery print, they give viewers a sense of it by presenting a small detail and then pulling back to show a frame hundreds of times that size; in one particularly effective opening shot, they track through a factory floor that seems to go on forever. The filmmakers also provide the micro realities behind Burtynsky's macro visions. In one particularly effective sequence, we watch a single factory worker assemble and test scores of tiny spray valves that are then incorporated into steam irons. After watching this industrial process, we cut to a field of refuse where, in the center of the frame, a similar iron lies discarded. The result is a highly unusual viewing experience that stimulates the senses and the conscience simultaneously. Burtynsky may be reluctant to pin his images down by attaching morals to them, but viewers will be unable to ignore the troubling questions they present.