Abandoned In The Wasteland

Broadcasters, parents, public officials, and teachers have all abandoned our children to a wasteland of vacuous, often violent television programing. In this eloquent book, Newton Minow and Craig LaMay persuasively demonstrate that this is a false application of the First Amendment. Broadcasters are required by law to serve the public interest, and the Supreme Court and Congress have said that service to children is a broadcaster's obligation under law, they remind us; the First Amendment can be used on behalf of children, to help make television a force that will nurture and not harm them.

Arguing that the First Amendment can be used on behalf of children to make sure television nurtures rather than harms them, a pathbreaking book offers workable ideas for an effective children's policy to limit commercial interests dominating programming today.

Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike. Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the presence of uranium mining on Diné (Navajo) land constitutes a clear case of environmental racism. Looking at discursive constructions of landscapes, she explores how environmental racism develops over time. For Voyles, the “wasteland,” where toxic materials are excavated, exploited, and dumped, is both a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. Because environmental inequality is inherent in the way industrialism operates, the wasteland is the “other” through which modern industrialism is established. In examining the history of wastelanding in Navajo country, Voyles provides “an environmental justice history” of uranium mining, revealing how just as “civilization” has been defined on and through “savagery,” environmental privilege is produced by portraying other landscapes as marginal, worthless, and pollutable.

The Plant Contract argues that visual and performance art can help change our perception of the vegetal world, and can return us to nature and thought. Via an investigation into the wasteland, robotany, feminist plants, and nature rights, this phytology-love story investigates how contemporary art is mediating the effects of plant-blindness, caused by human disassociation from the natural world. It is also a gesture of respect for the genius of vegetal life, where new science proves plants can learn, communicate, remember, make decisions, and associate. Art is a litmus test for how climate change affects human perception. This book responds to that test by expressing plant-philosophy to a wider public, through an interrogation of plant-art.

A Fascinating Investigation of Industry’s Modern Ruins and the "Deindustrial Sublime."

The history of human waste. How I learned to love the excrement; The early history of human excreta; Treasure nigh soil as if it were gold!; The water closet dilemma and the sewage farm paradigm; Germs, fertilizer, and the poop police -- The present: a sludge revolution in progress. The great sewage time bomb and the redistribution of nutrients on the planet; Loowatt, a loo that turns waste into watts; The crap that cooks your dinner and container-based sanitation; HomeBiogas : your personal digester in a box; Made in New York; Lystek, the home of sewage smoothies; How DC water makes biosolids BLOOM; From biosolids to biofuels -- The future of medicine and other things; Poop : the best (and cheapest medicine; Looking where the sun doesn't shine; From the kindness of one's gut : an insider look into stool banks -- Afterword : breathing poetry into poop.

In five centuries, the Empire of the Mxica, descendants of the ancient Aztecs, spread out to conquer the Earth. Now, a young human discovers a long-buried secret that could alter the galactic balance of power forever.

In an eloquent history of landscape and land use, Vittoria Di Palma takes on the “anti-picturesque”—how landscapes that elicit fear and disgust have shaped our conceptions of beauty and the sublime.

Fans of the Divergent and Hunger Games series will love Wasteland, the first installment of the Wasteland trilogy, by five-time Emmy Award–nominated writer Susan Kim and Edgar Award–winning Laurence Klavan. With heart-pounding thrills, this harrowing survival story is alive with action and intrigue. Welcome to the Wasteland, a post-apocalyptic U.S. where no one lives past the age of 19. But an early death isn’t the only doom waiting around the corner: Everyone is forced to live under the looming threat of rampant disease and brutal attacks by the variants—hermaphroditic outcasts that live on the outskirts of Prin. Esther doesn’t care that her best friend, a variant, is considered “the enemy.” She doesn’t care that Levi, who controls the Source, is the real enemy and might send his Taser boys after her if she makes one wrong move. Then she meets Caleb, and just possibly, she might have a chance at salvation.

"For thirty years, David T. Hanson has made photographs that are widely celebrated for their powerful depictions of the American landscape and how it has been transformed and despoiled by our industrial and military culture.... Wilderness to Wasteland presents four series of previously unpublished and unexhibited photographs from Hanson's early work"--Book jacket.