But to think in radiological time is also, necessarily, to ask not what we will make of the future but what the future will make of us. What legacies will we leave behind, not only for generations that succeed us but also for the epochs and species that will come after ours?
-- Robert MacFarlane; the narrator (chapter 12)

Importance: This quote appears near the end of Underland as MacFarlane begins to deeply contemplate the effect humans have had on the underland and on nature in general. In particular, Chapter 12 takes on the issue of nuclear waste and its storage as MacFarlane visits the storage facility at Olkiluoto Island in Finland, meant to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years. In this quote, MacFarlane asks readers to think in "radiological time," or a time scale that is much longer than what we are used to thinking in. He asks a central question of the book as well: Are we being...