Robert Smithson’s earthworks Spiral Jetty (1970) and Broken Circle /Spiral Hill (1971) are located in sites ravaged by mineral extractions. Both have their origins in the artist’s idea of “entropic landscape,” and are localities where the encounter between two temporalities can be apprehended: geology’s deep time, which has shaped the landscape over millions of years, and the “intensive,” or “superficial,” time of human culture and its extractive processes that revolve and devastate the surface of the Earth in a mere few years.

Across the country there are many mining areas, disused quarries, and polluted lakes and rivers. One practical solution for the utilization of such devastated places would be land and water recycling in terms of “Earth Art.” Recently, when I was in Holland, I worked in a sand quarry that was slated for redevelopment. The Dutch are especially aware of the physical landscape. A dialectic between land reclamation and mining usage must be established. The artist and the miner must become conscious of themselves as natural agents. In effect, this extends to all kinds of mining and building. When the miner or builder loses sight of what he is doing through the abstractions of technology he cannot practically cope with necessity. The world needs coal and highways, but we do not need the results of strip-mining or Highway trusts. Economics, when abstracted from the world, is blind to natural processes. Art can become a resource, that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist.