“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.”

“The Trinity Site in southern New Mexico, where the world's first atomic bomb was detonated—an event far more globally significant than 9/11–is marked by a modest, almost abject, monument, a roughly mortared mini-obelisk of stone. It can be seen as a cairn, the oldest known human mode of memorializing, communal and participatory. Cairns grow organically over time, measuring the extent of loss, stone by loosely piled stone, more likely to be destroyed by time than by violence, or recycled for other uses when the original one is forgotten.”

“The puzzle that no one has solved concerning nuclear waste is how to mark its deposits in a manner lasting for the thousands of years that constitute the half-life of radioactivity. This is the so-called Forever Problem.
No culture has lasted that long, and we have no idea who if anybody- we might be contacting in ten millennia or more. It is entirely possible that no language or symbol system now known will be comprehensible then, even the trefoil (radioactive!) symbol. So the markers have to be visual and "uni-versal." It's an unmet challenge for artists. Competitions and exhibitions for long-term nuclear markers have drawn artists, scientists, futurists, and experts in linguistics, anthropology and semiotics to design ‘landscapes of peril.’”