Hanson has documented, often in aerial photographs, four photographic series which show some of the devastations that humans have inflicted upon the environment. The book opens with photographs of Colstrip, Montana and its strip mines, trailer parks, company houses, mine, power plant, and industrial site. The next series is the Minuteman Missile Sites which focuses on one aspect of the American industrial and military landscape: bleak aerial views of silos. The centerpiece of this book is Waste Land, a study of sixty-seven of the most dangerously polluted waste sites in the United States. In this series of triptychs, Hanson juxtaposes an aerial photograph, a modified topographic map, and an EPA site description exposing some of the strategies that corporations and individuals have used to avoid taking responsibility for the contamination. The final sequence is "The Treasure State": Montana 1889-1989. Here, the photographer begins with an aerial view of a site that affects one of Montana's imperiled species, and overlays each image with a sheet of glass, discreetly etched with the name of the impacted animal.
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