Remembering the Future

This monograph—a collaboration between photographer Mark Klett and writer, art critic, and cultural geographer William L. Fox—emerged from expeditions the two men were a part of in 2023 and 2024 to the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a remote nation in the mid-Pacific. The book extends the work of their previous collaboration, The Half Life of History (Radius Books, 2011), engaging the RMI’s devastating nuclear legacy after WWII, and continues into the present with the existential threat of climate change.

Weaving together historic images with photographs Klett took on these trips and Fox’s writings in the form of both narrative journal entries and short essays, the project uses the case study of this small island nation to consider future implications of nuclear testing and accelerating climate crises for the entire planet.

It is estimated that nuclear testing in the 1950s and ’60s put four tons of plutonium-239 and 240 into the stratosphere. That means everyone born after BRAVO has been exposed. Our human bodies are part of the stratigraphic record of the Anthropocene. Dendrochronologists—the scientists who study tree rings—have identified a radiocarbon spike in every tree worldwide that dates specifically to 1954. Every tree alive then shows that spike, and that spike is also embedded in the strata of sediments at the bottom of BRAVO crater.

— William L. Fox

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