A lot of related questions about two paragraphs

1. Does the red sentence mean "to raise the awareness of people of the real status quo"?

2. Does the yellow "one" refer to "environmentalism" or "proposal"?

3. Does the green sentence mean "in spite of what was said about him, Smithson likely had some hope to stop the destructing forces of industries"?

4. Does the blue sentence mean "not later than (around) early 1970s artists had started to..."?

5. What does the pink section mean? Does it mean "artists by combining nature and art were somehow constructing nature instead of artwork"?

6. Does the orange "in a different fashion" mean "different from earlier art-historical categories"?

7. Does the gray sentence say that Smithson is among those artists who by early 1970s started to create art in a different fashion? And does it say that "modern sculptures are those kind of sculptures that place in earlier art-historical categories, while new land art sculptures like Smithson’s Spiral Jetty place in the category of postmodernism?

Context:

In the case of even the most degraded landscapes such as Passaic, Smithson appeared to want to limit this destruction by means of his own representation of it—even as he recognized the pollution itself as though it were a kind of sublime force or an empirical fact, and thus irreversible. Even if it is not always explicitly stated, Smithson’s essays have an aspect of dawning ecological consciousness to them. Recent reconsiderations of Smithson’s art have pointed to unpublished plans Smithson developed around 1972 for an artwork in southern Ohio on land the Hanna Coal Company intended to redevelop. Smithson stated that he meant for this artwork to encourage “a concrete consciousness of the present as it really exists.” Certainly environmentalism would
have been part of this proposal, one that sought to contribute to a larger reclamation project. This unrealized project also indicates that Smithson was likely not as resigned or pessimistic about the possibility of stemming the forces of industrial decay on the land as has been claimed for him. His embryonic engagement with ecology calls into question earlier art-historical categories that distinguished land art as engaged neither with changing consciousness about the land nor with reclamation or ecological activism.

Artists by the early 1970s were constructing “nature” by incorporating the landscape into art in a different fashion. Large-scale outdoor sculptures such as Smithson’s Spiral Jetty break with modern sculpture in their exploration of an “expanded field” at the limits of the notion of sculptural scale, as the art historian Rosalind Krauss discussed in an influential essay, “Sculpture in the expanded field” (1979). These post-modern sculptures, she claimed, became sites that renegotiated a relation to architecture or landscape or both. However, artists also worked on a large scale to posit other relations to the land that were not exclusively aesthetic experiments or modernist investigations of medium; these artworks ruminated on the relation of industrialization to the land.