The captain who unloads waste in the high seas has never seen, or rather has never let, the countless smiles of the gods emerge; that would be too demanding, or even creative. Shitting on the world, has he ever seen its beauty before? Did he ever see his own beauty? And so, he who dirties space with billboards full of sentences and images hides the view of the surrounding landscape, kills perception, and skewers it by this theft. First the landscape then the world.

This quote from Michael Serres’ compelling book Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?, in which he compares our despoiling of landscape through physical advertising, rubbish dumps and industrial waste with the territorial marking of other animals. What began with piss and shit has evolved into numerous forms of hard and soft pollution.