<p><b>Questions the literal burying of the nuclear threat and how it relates to expectations for our future</b></p> <p>A rising ocean. A falling building. A toxic river. Species extinguished. A nuclear landscape. In a world so configured, the state of contemporary ecological thought and practice is woefully-and perilously-inadequate. Focusing on the government's nuclear waste burial program in Carlsbad, New Mexico, <i>Signs of Danger</i> begins the urgent work of finding a new way of thinking about ecological threat in our time.</p> The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad began receiving shipments in 1999. With a proposed closing date of 2030, this repository for nuclear waste must be secured with a sign, the purpose of which will be to keep people away for three hundred generations. In the official documents uncovered by Peter van Wyck, we encounter a government bureaucracy approaching the issue of nuclear waste as a technical problem only to find itself confronting a host of intractable philosophical issues concerning language, culture, and history. <i>Signs of Danger</i> plumbs these depths as it shows us how the problem raised in the desert of New Mexico is actually the problem of a culture grappling with ecological threats and with questions of the limits of meaning and representation in the deep future. The reflections at the center of this book-on memory, trauma, disaster, representation, and the virtual-are aimed at defining the uniquely modern status of environmental and nuclear threats. They offer invaluable insights into the interface of where culture ends and nature begins, and how such a juncture is closely linked with questions of risk, concepts of history, and the cultural experience of time.Winner of the 2005 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize of the Canadian Communication Association