Met History wrote:

> In Desoto County outside Arcadia, several dead cows, wrapped in barbed
> wire, littered the roadside.

"Photographer Richard Misrach shot this sequence of 8 x 10 colour
photographs in 1985-87 at dead-animal disposal sites located near
reputed plutonium 'hot spots' and military toxic dumps in Nevada. As a
short text explains, it is commonplace for local livestock to die
mysteriously, or give birth to monstrous offspring. Ranchers are
officially encouraged to dump the cadavers, no questions asked, in
unmarked, county-run pits. Misrach originally heard of this 'Boschlike'
landscape from a Paiute poet. When he asked for directions, he was
advised to simply drive into the desert and watch for tell-tale flocks
of crows. The carrion birds feast on the eyes of dead livestock."

<>"In his most recent collection of cantos, Violent Legacies (which
includes 'The Pit'), Misrach offers a haunting, visual archeology of
'Project w-47', the super-secret final assembly and flight testing of
the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hangar which housed the
Enola Gay still stands (indeed, a sign warns: 'Use of deadly force
authorized') amidst the ruins of Wendover Air Base in the Great Salt
Desert of Utah. In the context of incipient genocide, the fossil
flightcrew humour of 1945 is unnerving. Thus a fading slogan over the
A-bomb assembly building reads 'Blood, Sweat and Beers', while graffiti
on the administrative headquarters commands 'Eat My Fallout'. The rest
of the base complex, including the atomic bomb storage bunkers and
loading pits, has eroded into megalithic abstractions that evoke the
ground-zero helter-skelter of J.G. Ballard's famous shortstory, 'The
Terminal Beach'. Outlined against ochre desert mountains (the
Newfoundland Range, I believe), the forgotten architecture and casual
detritus of the first nuclear war are almost beautiful."

Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country
Journal article by Mike Davis; New Left Review, Vol. a, 1993

][<en (doing research on Chernobyl & the American West)

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