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The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (Thematic Studies in Latin America)
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About The Tainted Desert: Environmental And Social Ruin
Product Description 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. Tainted Desert maps the nuclear landscapes of the US inter-desert southwest, a land sacrificed to the Cold-War arms race and nuclear energy policy. From Kirkus Reviews Nuclear waste meets Native American folkways in this garbled account of desert ecopolitics. Kuletz (Univ. of Canterbury, New Zealand) has turned her doctoral dissertation into a book, and its origins are evident. The text bristles with jargon and zigzags over a vast swath of territory, without settling on a single narrative path. 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''). That outback is the domain of Indians, who view it differently, as sacred geography; thus, Kuletz's argument follows, the government's misuse of Western lands is a form of environmental racism (``Those who benefit least from nuclear developments end up paying the highest price for the excesses of our nuclear culture''). More interestingly, but not necessarily to the point, Kuletz is interested in mapping out the spiritual geography of groups like the Western Shoshone and Paiute, who live near threatened places like Yucca Mountain, Nev.; traditionalists among these people consider the ecological despoliation wrought by nuclear-waste dumping and weapons testing to be a desecration. 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. Solid scholarship that doesn't translate into readable or pointed argument. (5 b&w photos, 24 illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review "This is an important and serious book that deserves a wide audience, both in and out of the classroom." -- International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters "...present detailed understandings of the environmental and social impacts of advanced industrial society on diverse American Indian communities...they make important contributions to understanding the broader differential benefits and burdens of science and technology in the late twentieth century, particularly as it concerns environmental degradiation...will be of particular interest to students of the American West, American Indian communities, and scholars of environmental justice and of societal change in the postindustrial world." -- Environmental History "The author's inclusion of Native-American perspectives and voices, her critique of the "objectivity" of science, and the timeliness of the topic...all make this one of the most important environmental books of our time." -- The Bloomsbury Review " The Tainted Desert brings to mind Rachel Carson's Silent Spring as a wake-up call to Americans." -- The Bloomsbury Review " Tainted Desert is a powerful, important, and readable explication of the nuclear devastation of the American Southwest." -- San Francisco Bay Guardian "[Kuletz] has written a striking...portrait of the consequences of `nuclearism' in the American West, and particularly of the tragic, largely unacknowledged overlap between the domain of Native Americans and that of uranium mining, weapons testing, and nuclear waste storage... Her study invokes the richness of a landscape that h
