In 2005 environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote a short essay titled “Imagine That: What the Warming World Needs Now is Art, Sweet Art.” Art, he suggests, can turn what is abstract, too big or distant to be easily grasped, into something we can feel or measure. This may be of particular significance when the problem is as large as a mining site and working on a geological time scale.

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Leslie Ryan, “Art + Ecology: the land reclamation work of artists Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison,” Journal of Environmental Philosophy 4 no. 1/2 (2007): (95-116)