Despite declining stocks worldwide and increasing health risks, artisanal whaling remains a cultural practice tied to nature’s rhythms. The Wake of the Whale presents the art, history, and challenge of whaling in the Caribbean and North Atlantic, based on a decade of award-winning fieldwork.
Sightings of pilot whales in the frigid Nordic waters have drawn residents of the Faroe Islands to their boats and beaches for nearly a thousand years. Down in the tropics, around the islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, artisanal whaling is a younger trade, shaped by the legacies of slavery and colonialism but no less important to the local population. Each culture, Russell Fielding shows, has developed a distinct approach to whaling that preserves key traditions while adapting to threats of scarcity, the requirements of regulation, and a growing awareness of the humane treatment of animals.
Yet these strategies struggle to account for the risks of regularly eating meat contaminated with methylmercury and other environmental pollutants introduced from abroad. Fielding considers how these and other factors may change whaling cultures forever, perhaps even bringing an end to this way of life.
A rare mix of scientific and social insight, The Wake of the Whale raises compelling questions about the place of cultural traditions in the contemporary world and the sacrifices we must make for sustainability.
Publication of this book was supported, in part, by a grant from Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.
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.
We all drink water and water-based fluids, yet most of us take water for granted. We assume that when we turn on the tap to fill our glass, bathtub, or washing machine, clean water will flow. But is it really safe? And if it is not, what can we do about it? The doctors who have written The Water We Drink provide readers with practical information on the health issues relating to water quality and suggest ways we can improve the quality and safety of our drinking water.
Most of us do not realize that any small amount of contaminants found in drinking water may, over time, increase our susceptibility to many of the chronic illnesses that are becoming increasingly prevalent in our society as the population ages, illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. Contaminants have also been linked to increased rates of infertility.
TheWater We Drink begins with a review of the history of water, disease, and drinking water as it relates to disease and sanitation. The manner in which drinking water is currently regulated is described, along with information on water sources and treatment. The authors then examine health issues relating to drinking water, including infectious diseases, cancer risks, estrogens and fertility, and the effects of mineral and heavy metal content. They look at the benefits and risks of bottled waters and of water purification systems currently available to consumers.
The book also provides clear, understandable lists of contaminants levels in drinking water both regulated and unregulated by law, cancer causing contaminants of drinking water and their sources, and the mineral and sodium contents of commonly used bottled waters. A helpful glossary of terms, as well as a bibliography of additional agencies, books, and web sites to consult for more information on drinking water and health, are also provided.
This biography illuminates the life and achievements of the remarkable woman scientist who revolutionized the concept of radiation risk.
In the 1950s Alice Stewart began research that led to her discovery that fetal X rays double a child's risk of developing cancer. Two decades later---when she was in her seventies---she again astounded the scientific world with a study showing that the U.S. nuclear weapons industry is about twenty times more dangerous than safety regulations permit. This finding put her at the center of the international controversy over radiation risk. In 1990, the New York Times called Stewart "perhaps the Energy Department's most influential and feared scientific critic."
The Woman Who Knew Too Much traces Stewart's life and career from her early childhood in Sheffield to her medical education at Cambridge to her research positions at Oxford University and the University of Birmingham.
Gayle Greene is Professor of Women's Studies and Literature, Scripps College.
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