On earthworks/land art (Smithson, Holt, De Maria, Turrell, and Heizer):

“All are endowed with extraordinarily beautiful surroundings and enhanced by weather, seasons, light and shadow. They surrender scale to the adiacent spaces, while drawing their emotional power from distance-distance from people, from environmental issues, and even from places. Land art tends to be site-specific but not overtly place-specific. Local geology, history, and identity are secondary, if acknowledged at all. Local residents are considered primarily in their roles as workers and incidental audiences. The on-site viewer is as likely to be deeply affected by the landscape as by the art object. It is this combination that is so compelling.”

“We don't yet commemorate our eco-tragedies, leaving the task to artists, photographers, journalists, and science fiction. Landscape ruins are slaughtered forests, grasslands chewed down to the nub and gullied beyond repair, mountains decapitated by mining, acidified oceans of swirling plastics, oil spills, and crumbling corals, fields undermined or overbuilt, wetlands parched by drought, rivers sickened by pollution—the scorched-earth policies of a late and increasingly desperate capitalism.”