The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.65 (909 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0415917700 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 368 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-11-01 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Valerie L. She has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and currently is Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Kuletz, the daughter of a weapons scientist, grew up near a Department of Defense research and testing center in the Mojave Desert. . Her work on this book won the American Sociological Association's 1997 Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology and Humanism
John M. Bradley said One of the most important books on the environment.. For anyone who is at all interested in the environment, or the American West, or issues of nuclear waste, this book is a must. Kuletz does something that is lacking in our radio, t.v., news magazine, and newspaper reports on environmental issues--she reveals the cultural biases in our Western, "objective" perspective. She also listens and presents the testimony of Native Americans on their desert homelands. This . Former Student Russell J. Parker Interested in this book because the author is a former high school student of mine.
For decades, nuclear testing in America's southwest was shrouded in secrecy, with images gradually made public of mushroom clouds blooming over the desert. Now, another nuclear crisis looms over this region: the storage of tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste. TaintedDesert maps the nuclear landscapes of the US inter-desert southwest, a land sacrificed to the Cold-War arms race and nuclear energy policy.
Kuletz (Univ. Kuletz does a solid job of presenting their views, but she doesn't pursue the harder story: Tribal medicine elders don't command much respect in Washington, but tribal attorneys do, and these attorneys have made concessions for half a century to allow the testing and dumping Kuletz rightly decries in places like Alamogordo and Fallon. All rights reserved.. At the heart of her discussion is a truism, well reported in the current literature: The American West has long been seen, at least by the powers in Washington, as a dusty outback that is just right for testing nuclear weapons and dumping toxic wastes of various kinds (``these dry, arid regions are perceived and discursively interpreted as marginal within the dominant Euroamerican perspective''). The text bristles with jargon and zigzags over a vast swath of territory, without settling on a single narrative path. More interestingly, but not necessarily to the po