Radium
Acrylic, charcoal, paper on wood panel. 14 x 11 in. 2026.

When we were in Utah last spring we stopped by the small but mighty Moab Museum. It’s mission is to share stories of the cultural and natural history of Moab and the Canyonlands region, a mission it interprets broadly, and when we were there it included a small exhibition on low-rider culture. And, serendipitously, history came to life: It just so happened that over the weekend there was a Classic GM Truck meet happening in town! We first figured this out as the lot of our humble budget motel slowly filled with gorgeous, lovingly restored El Caminos, maneuvering ever so carefully in the tight parking spots.

But the major exhibit at the Moab Museum when we visited was about the element that first made Moab famous: uranium. The U92: Moab’s Uranium Legacy show filled half the museum with somewhat shocking memorabilia, including an alarming cabinet full of uranium glass decor glowing in eerie colors. And a Revigator, used to irradiate your drinking water with invigorating radium and uranium.

The reminders of the uranium boom are everywhere in the southern Utah, from the famous Uranium Building in downtown Moab, sealed-off mines in national parks, and the Moab uranium mill tailings pile. I remember this mountain of toxic soil from when I would visit in the 80s and 90s, sitting right on the bank of the Colorado River outside town and slowing leaching radiation into the water. It is now a Department of Energy remediation site, and so far 16 million tons of tailings has been sealed into containers and shipped by train to the poor folks in Crescent Junction, Utah, to be buried in “disposal cells”.

Let me be straight with you, my friends: Humankind is not up to the challenge of handling radioactive materials safely. Even the disposal of our low-level radioactive medical waste – the proverbial “gloves and booties” – is a problem we do not actually have a solution for. I’m afraid a new generation of humans is falling into the trap of viewing nuclear energy as “clean” energy because it doesn’t produce carbon pollution. But what about the radioactive waste, my friends? What about the waste? That is not clean. It will never be clean. It will always be dangerous. And it will never go away.

Earlier generations figured this out and fought to put the brakes on. Will new generations also open their eyes?

The uranium boom petered out with the denouement of the Cold War, but guess what: The desire for the earth’s minerals and, thereby, the potential production of piles of toxic by-product is with us always. Now the must-haves are Critical Rare Earth Elements for powering electronics, etc., and the Mojave Desert turns out to be one of the plum targets for mining as the Trump Administration clears pesky regulations out of the way and declares open season on the earth and its communities. One of those targets is maybe five miles south of me, on the border of Joshua Tree National Park, and I’ll be writing more about it another time.

But it was not these thoughts that produced “Radium”, the image at the top of this post. Actually, I had begun work on it last winter, before all of this. Before the trip to Utah, before the rare-earth mining on my doorstep. I had no particular plan to engage with the subject. It’s true that these fears and understandings, like radiation, lodge in the being over a lifetime. Most of us have lived with this threat our whole lives. And for me, personally, far older and more dangerous than atomic peril is the human inability to resist the lure of power and profit.

But no, it was not conscious thoughts like these that generated this work. It was the eerie colors, the dancing atoms, the sense of almost magical danger that said to me: Radium.

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