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.
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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
"Tainted Desert is a powerful, important, and readable explication of the nuclear devastation of the American Southwest." -- San Francisco Bay Guardian - 11/98
"[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 has been overlaid with devestation.... This is an important and, at times, eloquent book." -- Audubon --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
"[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 has been overlaid with devestation.... This is an important and, at times, eloquent book." -- Audubon --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the most important books on the environment.,
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This review is from: The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (Paperback)
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 belongs on the bookshelf with Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_ and Carole Gallagher's _American Ground Zero_.
0 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
On a crisp autumn afternoon in 1995 my husband and I drove west from Albuquerque to the Laguna Pueblo and then to the small village of Paguate to interview Mrs. Dorothy Purley, a Laguna Pueblo woman who had worked in New Mexico's Grants uranium district when its mines were viable. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
interdesert region, cultural resource representatives, nuclear waste crisis, nuclear colonialism, cultural resource studies, nuclear landscape, ecological ethos, cartography production, senior environmental scientist, burying uncertainty, experimental landscape, radiation ecology, nuclear wasteland, pinyon forests, naval weapons center, aboriginal homeland, human radiation experiments, storied land, transuranic waste, sacrifice zone, outdoor laboratories, nuclear waste repository, intersubjective perspective, uranium production, uranium mining Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Yucca Mountain, Western Shoshone, Nevada Test Site, United States, Department of Energy, Southern Paiute, Los Alamos, New Mexico, Native American, Death Valley, Great Basin, Timbisha Shoshone, Ward Valley, Owens Valley Paiute, Cold War, Mescalero Apache, Las Vegas, Atomic Energy Commission, White Sands, China Lake Naval Weapons Center, Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Zone One, Zone Two, Department of Defense, Oasis Valley New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
On a crisp autumn afternoon in 1995 my husband and I drove west from Albuquerque to the Laguna Pueblo and then to the small village of Paguate to interview Mrs. Dorothy Purley, a Laguna Pueblo woman who had worked in New Mexico's Grants uranium district when its mines were viable. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
interdesert region, cultural resource representatives, nuclear waste crisis, nuclear colonialism, cultural resource studies, nuclear landscape, ecological ethos, cartography production, senior environmental scientist, burying uncertainty, experimental landscape, radiation ecology, nuclear wasteland, pinyon forests, naval weapons center, aboriginal homeland, human radiation experiments, storied land, transuranic waste, sacrifice zone, outdoor laboratories, nuclear waste repository, intersubjective perspective, uranium production, uranium mining Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Yucca Mountain, Western Shoshone, Nevada Test Site, United States, Department of Energy, Southern Paiute, Los Alamos, New Mexico, Native American, Death Valley, Great Basin, Timbisha Shoshone, Ward Valley, Owens Valley Paiute, Cold War, Mescalero Apache, Las Vegas, Atomic Energy Commission, White Sands, China Lake Naval Weapons Center, Nuclear Waste Policy Act, Zone One, Zone Two, Department of Defense, Oasis Valley New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 93
books:
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23
books
cite this book:
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- Environmental Science by Daniel D. Chiras on 7 pages
- Fundamentals of Ecology by Eugene Odum on 6 pages
- In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations by Jerry Mander on 5 pages
- Energy Basis for Man and Nature on 4 pages
- Environment, Power, and Society (Environmental Science and Technology Series) by Howard T. Odum on 4 pages
See all 93 books this book cites
- Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation by Maralee Mayberry on page 338, and Back Matter
- Feminist Science Studies: A New Generation by Maralee Mayberry on page 326, and Back Matter
- Mad About Wildlife: Looking At Social Conflict Over Wildlife (Human-Animal Studies) by Ann Herda-Rapp; Theresa L. Goedeke in Front Matter, and page 220
- Conservation Fallout: Nuclear Protest At Diablo Canyon by John Wills in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- The Life of the Law: Anthropological Projects by Laura Nader in Back Matter
See all 23 books citing this book
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