In 1980, more than 400,000 toxic waste sites existed across the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency declared 400 of these highly hazardous and in need of immediate attention. In just a few years, the number of these "Superfund" sites more than tripled. Though they constitute a shocking degradation of our landscape, Superfund sites are never seen by most Americans.
In the course of one year (1985–86), David T. Hanson traveled to 45 states to make aerial photographs of 67 of them, documenting both US geography and its ravaging by industrial waste in one artistic odyssey.

Hanson's Waste Land series, published here in its entirety for the first time, is a photographer's meditation on the country's most dangerously polluted places. Each work in the series juxtaposes the artist's photograph with a modified topographic map and the EPA's own description of the site's history and hazards.

Although the photographs were made over thirty years ago, they seem even more relevant today, given our growing concerns about energy production, environmental degradation, and climate change.