"A few minutes before my flight to Helsinki touched down, I looked out the window at Finland's flat, snowy, forested landscape. It appeared still and serene."

"It was December 2011, and I was moving to Finland to conduct anthropological fieldwork among experts developing what might, in the early 2020s, become the world's first operational geological repository for high-level nuclear waste."

"As an anthropologist, my goal was to examine how these experts think about the future, how they conceive of the world around them, and how they relate to themselves and to their colleagues."