Mother Earth is fickle: a battered muse; a living mural; a sanctuary under siege. The essence of humankind is reflected on her skin with every footprint in the soil, every exhale vanished into the air. How can Earth’s inhabitants be both beneficiaries of her existence and agents of her demise? New monograph, Remembering the Future—a joint effort between photographer Mark Klett and writer, art critic, and cultural geographer William L. Fox—details this delicate balance through a monograph of shared experiences and visuals—a striking documentation of life turned cold.

Out this February via Radius Books, Remembering the Future will be Klett and Fox’s fifth book collaboration, detailing two trips taken together throughout the Republic of the Marshall Islands—both exploring the nuclear legacy left behind from atomic testing after World War II and the impact of climate change in the mid Pacific archipelago. Hailing from America, the two had previously spent time detailing the intertwined histories of the Wendover Airfield and Hiroshima in their preceding book The Half-Life of History (Radius Books), viewing the subsequent as a continuation of that work with additional considerations of the unceasing climate crisis.

In Remembering the Future, Fox’s words speak for themselves, but Klett’s photographs document a meticulous arrangement of found textures and perspectives—no detail too trivial and no scene left untouched. A handprint on the wall, a door left ajar, washed up shoes on the seaside: each a revived piece of life, yet a story left untold. The photographs serve as an ill-starred time capsule for a region burdened by both human action and an untamed biosphere. The book depicts art as emotional, historical, and communal processing—a collective memory of what came before and what lingers after.

It’s a quiet kind of thing, the chill that seeps in over time—climatically, emotionally. Art is a vessel of reconciliation, a pair of eyes into a world just beyond reach. Remembering the Future brings us closer to what we were never supposed to see. It offers fragments of a labyrinthine history of nuclear fallout and climate impacts in the Marshall Islands that prove unforgiving.

Fox quotes T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men” in this work, whispering, “This is the way the world ends… Not with a bang but with a whimper.” And so I whisper it, too.

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Written by Taylor Stine.