The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West Book

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. It not only makes visible the millions of acres that were removed from public access for weapons testing and development--and, more recently, for waste storage--but also reveals the cultural significance of this contaminated land. Valerie Kuletz documents in frightening detail the tragic consequences of these policies on the southwestern land and its native peoples. Consequently, a double exposure emerges of one landscape superimposed upon another: a landscape of national sacrifice over what many Americans understand as a geography of the sacred. After demonstrating how the consequences of nuclear power from the production of weapons and energy have been concentrated in the US inter-desert region, Kuletz then focuses on Yucca Mountain, the proposed permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste. Located in Nevada at the boundary between the Mojave and the lower Great Basin deserts on traditional Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute land, Yucca Mountain illuminates the ways different cultures understand and interact with nature. Kuletz investigates how culture influences both native and scientific representations of nature as well as strategies for managing the relationship between nature and human society. The author draws on interviews with the Native Americans affected by nuclear activity while using mapping strategies, textual analysis and an ethnoecological approach to document the zones of national sacrificial land. Having grown up near a testing center in the Mojave desert, she demonstrates that this is not just a local problem, or even a national one, but a global crisis that affects everyone's backyard.Read More