The Tainted Desert

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.

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.

What does it mean to live in a post-atomic world? Photography and contemporary art offer a provocative lens through which to comprehend the by-products of the atomic age, from weapons proliferation, nuclear disaster, and aerial surveillance to toxic waste disposal and climate change. Confronting cultural fallout from the dawn of the nuclear age, Through Post-Atomic Eyes addresses the myriad iterations of nuclear threat and their visual legacy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether in the iconic black-and-white photograph of a mushroom cloud rising over Nagasaki in 1945 or in the steady stream of real-time video documenting the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, atomic culture - and our understanding of it - is inextricably constructed by the visual. This book takes the image as its starting point to address the visual inheritance of atomic anxieties; the intersection of photography, nuclear industries, and military technocultures; and the complex temporality of nuclear technologies. Contemporary artists contribute lens-based works that explore the consequences of the nuclear, and its afterlives, in the Anthropocene. Revealing, through both art and prose, startling new connections between the ongoing threat of nuclear catastrophe and current global crises, Through Post-Atomic Eyes is a richly illustrated examination of how photography shapes and is shaped by nuclear culture.

Nora Abbott needs to make enough snow to save her ski resort from the drought that is ravishing Northern Arizona, and her recent court victory should mean good times are ahead. But when the death of Nora’s husband brings her overbearing mother into town, energy tycoon Barrett McCreary uses the opportunity to launch what might just be a hostile takeover of her cash-strapped resort. To make matters worse, the local Hopi tribe still claims that making snow on the mountain will upset the balance of the earth, and someone is taking matters into their own hands in an explosive way. The ruggedly handsome Cole Huntsman keeps turning up to help Nora, but he seems to be dealing from both sides of the deck. And with a business empire’s profits—not to mention lives—at stake, double-dealing is a deadly strategy. Praise: “Baker’s series debut brings Native American culture and big business together into a clash that can be heard across the mountains."—Library Journal “A thoroughly satisfying mystery! Shannon Baker captures the grandeur and fragility of the Western landscape while keeping the pages turning.”—Margaret Coel, New York Times bestselling author of Buffalo Bill’s Dead Now "Tainted Mountain is a story as mysterious and beautiful as the Arizona landscape in which it's set. Shannon Baker offers readers a taut, cautionary tale that is a deft mix of both important contemporary issues and the timeless spiritual traditions of the Hopi. For those of us who hunger for the kind of novel Tony Hillerman used to write so well, this promising new series may just fill the bill. Pick up Tainted Mountain and prepare to be entranced."—William Kent Krueger, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Cork O'Connor Series "Pitting greed against the future of a people, Baker's thoughtful thriller, Tainted Mountain, not only presents a compelling clash of myth and violence that will keep you guessing, it also reads like such a love letter to the natural world, you won't want it to end."—Kris Neri, author of Revenge on Route 66

This study explores the ways in which the desert, as topographical space and cultural presence, shaped and reshaped concepts and images of America. Once a territory outside the geopolitical and cultural borders of the United States, the deserts of the West and Southwest have since emerged as canonical American landscapes. Drawing on the critical concepts of American studies and on questions and problems raised in recent debates on ecocriticism, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert investigates the spatial rhetoric of America as it developed in view of arid landscapes since the mid-nineteenth century. Gersdorf argues that the integration of the desert into America catered to the entire spectrum of ideological and political responses to the history and culture of the US, maintaining that the Americanization of this landscape was and continues to be staged within the idiomatic parameters and in reaction to the discursive authority of four spatial metaphors: garden, wilderness, Orient, and heterotopia.

This book accurately depicts Native American approaches to land and spirituality through an interdisciplinary examination of Indian philosophy, history, and literature. Indian approaches to land and spirituality are neither simple nor monolithic, making them hard to grasp for outsiders. A fuller, more accurate understanding of these concepts enables comprehension of the unique ways land and spirit have interlinked Native American communities across centuries of civilization, and reveals insights about our current pressing environmental concerns and American history. In Land and Spirit in Native America, author Joy Porter argues that American colonization has been a determining factor in how we perceive Indian spirituality and Indian relationships to nature. Having an appreciation for these traditional values regarding ritual, memory, time, kinship, and the essential reciprocity between all things allows us to rethink aspects of history and culture. This understanding also makes Indian film, philosophy, literature, and art accessible.

Storied Deserts makes a crucial and critical intervention in the field of environmental humanities by showcasing an emerging body of research on desert places from around the world. Deserts, despite dominant stereotypes of wasteland and barrenness, are culturally and ecologically abundant places. This edited volume sets out to reimagine the world’s desert places and the very concept of "the desert" itself, taking a boldly interdisciplinary and multicultural approach. Authors engage in literary ecocriticism and ecopoetics, film and visual studies, critical theory, personal and transdisciplinary reflection, creative practices, and historical scholarship. Through their diverse range of perspectives, contributors show how arid lands have been and can be understood as sites of narrative production, places where signs and imaginaries are born from the materialities of space and entanglement. In this way, this volume highlights how the storied matter of the Earth’s deserts informs lived realities, environmental histories, cinematic and literary imaginaries, political conflicts, and even intellectual categories such as "the human" and "the elemental". Ultimately, this book shows that reimagining desert places can help us to grapple with the epochal challenges of the Anthropocene. It is an important and engaging collection for scholars and students across disciplines that helps establish the value of desert humanities.

Probing the paradoxes of "the long twentieth century"--Unprecedented human opportunity and deprivation to the rise of the United States as a hegemon

'Wicked Problems' are those problems facing the planet and its inhabitants, present and future, which are hard (if not impossible) to resolve and for which bold, creative, and messy solutions are typically required. The adjective 'wicked' describes the mischievous and even evil quality of these problems, where proposed solutions often turn out to be worse than the symptoms. This wide-ranging and innovative book encourages readers to think about archaeology in an entirely new way, as fresh, relevant, and future-oriented. It examines some of the novel ways that archaeology (alongside cultural heritage practice) can contribute to resolving some of the world's most wicked problems, or global challenges as they are sometimes known. With chapters covering climate change, environmental pollution, health and wellbeing, social injustice, and conflict, the book uses many and diverse examples to explain how, through studying the past and present through an archaeological lens, in ways that are creative, ambitious, and both inter- and transdisciplinary, significant 'small wins' can be achieved. Through these small wins, archaeologists can help to mitigate some of those most pressing of wicked problems, contributing therefore to a safer, healthier, and more stable world.

This timely set invites readers to celebrate the most beautiful and environmentally important places in the United States. Each of the United States boasts numerous special places that are significant for their biodiversity, ecology, habitats for rare and endangered species, or other qualities that make them unique and worthy of preservation. These sites range from nature preserves to state and national parks, wildlife areas, ecosystems that provide a home to diverse flora and fauna, and even scenic vistas. The five volumes of America's Natural Places examine over 200 of the most spectacular and important of these places, with each entry describing the importance of the area, the flora and fauna that it supports, threats to the survival of the region, and what is being done to protect it. Organized by state within regional volumes, this encyclopedia both informs the reader about the wide variety of natural areas across the country and identifies places nearby that demonstrate that preserving such treasurers is of immediate importance to every U.S. citizen.