Tainted Earth

Smelting is an industrial process involving the extraction of metal from ore. During this process, impurities in ore—including arsenic, lead, and cadmium—may be released from smoke stacks, contaminating air, water, and soil with toxic-heavy metals. The problem of public health harm from smelter emissions received little official attention for much for the twentieth century. Though people living near smelters periodically complained that their health was impaired by both sulfur dioxide and heavy metals, for much of the century there was strong deference to industry claims that smelter operations were a nuisance and not a serious threat to health. It was only when the majority of children living near the El Paso, Texas, smelter were discovered to be lead-exposed in the early 1970s that systematic, independent investigation of exposure to heavy metals in smelting communities began. Following El Paso, an even more serious led poisoning epidemic was discovered around the Bunker Hill smelter in northern Idaho. In Tacoma, Washington, a copper smelter exposed children to arsenic—a carcinogenic threat. Thoroughly grounded in extensive archival research, Tainted Earth traces the rise of public health concerns about nonferrous smelting in the western United States, focusing on three major facilities: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Bunker Hill, Idaho. Marianne Sullivan documents the response from community residents, public health scientists, the industry, and the government to pollution from smelters as well as the long road to protecting public health and the environment. Placing the environmental and public health aspects of smelting in historical context, the book connects local incidents to national stories on the regulation of airborne toxic metals. The nonferrous smelting industry has left a toxic legacy in the United States and around the world. Unless these toxic metals are cleaned up, they will persist in the environment and may sicken people—children in particular—for generations to come. The twentieth-century struggle to control smelter pollution shares many similarities with public health battles with such industries as tobacco and asbestos where industry supported science created doubt about harm, and reluctant government regulators did not take decisive action to protect the public’s health.

"“We’re going to own you.” “We’re going to break you.” “When we’re through with you, you won’t remember life before you were ours.” That’s what they whisper as I pass their cells. Ha. Guess what bastardos? I’m Rosalie Oscura, champion underground cage-fighter and freaking Alpha Werewolf from the infamous Oscura Clan. My family wrote the book on criminal organisations and I’ll be ruling this place by the time the next moon rises. Papà always said my hot head would land me in here one day. The supernatural prison they call Darkmore Penitentiary. Where they send the cruellest, most dangerous Fae in Solaria. Like me apparently. So maybe I deserve to be in prison, but do you want to know a secret? I planned to get sent to Darkmore Penitentiary. I’ve come to break out the most notorious criminal in Solaria. The trouble is, I need the help of the four Alpha males to get out of here. And they happen to hate each other almost as much as they hate me. But I always did love a challenge. How hard could it be to make them accept me as their leader?" -- Back cover.

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.

"A marvelous debut...has everything a big, thick novel should have, and I hated to put it down." - John Grisham "A page-turner." - New York Times Book Review For readers of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, this is a dramatic and deeply moving novel about an act of violence in a small Appalachian town and the repercussions that will forever change a young man's view of human cruelty and compassion. After seeing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, fourteen-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this town of Medgar, Kentucky, a peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The town is beset by a massive mountaintop removal operation that is blowing up the hills and back filling the hollows. Kevin's grandfather and others in town attempt to rally the citizens against the "company" and its powerful owner to stop the plunder of their mountain heritage. But when Buzzy witnesses a brutal hate crime, a sequence is set in play that will test Buzzy and Kevin to their absolute limits in an epic struggle for survival in the Kentucky mountains. *Includes Reading Group Guide*

While searching for a kidnapped hiker in Umatilla National Park, Ukiah Oregon, an enigmatic tracker possessing remarkable heightened senses who had been raised by wolves, stumbles upon the legend of a young boy who mysteriously vanished in 1933, a story that may hold the key to his own hidden past. By the author of Alien Taste. Original.

Based on case studies, the book creates a multidisciplinary conversation on the gendered vulnerabilities resulting from extractive industries and toxic pollution, and also charts the resilience and courage of women as they resist polluting industries, fight for clean water and seek to protect the land. While ecumenical in scope, the book takes its departure from the concept of integral ecology introduced in Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si'. The first three sections of the book focus on the social and ecological challenges facing minoritized women and their communities that are related to mining, pollutants and biodiversity loss, and toxicity. The final section of the book focuses on the possibilities and obstacles to global solidarity. All chapters offer a cross disciplinary response to a particular local situation, tracing the ways ecological destruction, resulting from extraction and toxic contamination, affects the lives of women and their communities. The book pays careful attention to the political, economic, and legal structures facilitating these life-threatening challenges. Each section concludes with a response from a 'practitioner' in the field, representing an ecclesial organization or NGO focused on eco-justice advocacy in the global South, or minority communities in the global North.