Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape | David T. Hanson

In Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape, photographer David T. Hanson presents a picture of our environment that is unfamiliar and deeply disturbing. It is, however, a picture that must be looked at and contended with if our environment is to survive. In the words of the writer Wendell Berry, Hanson has "given us the topography of our open wounds." Waste Land is a powerful book that will not permit us to turn our backs on the declining state of our environment.
During fifteen years (1982-1997) of his career as an artist/photographer, Hanson documented—often in aerial photographs that are deceptively, inexorably beautiful—some of the devastations that humans have inflicted and continue to impose upon the environment. A different look at the consequences of our actions is provided in each of the four photographic series in this book: Colstrip, Montana; Minuteman Missile Sites; Waste Land; and The Treasure State.
This volume includes an essay by the author, a Preface by Wendell Berry, an Afterword by Mark Dowie, and poignant commentary by Susan Griffin, William Kittredge, Peter Montague and Maria B. Pellerano, and Terry Tempest Williams.
“The power of these photographs is in their terrifying, because undeniable, particularity....What we can see in these vandalized and perhaps irreparable landscapes we are obliged to understand as symbolic of what we cannot see: the steady seeping of poison into our world and our bodies.”—Wendell Berry, in the Preface to this book