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"Sarah Alisabeth Fox"
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Downwind
Downwindis an unflinching tale of the atomic West that reveals the intentional disregard for human and animal life through nuclear testing by the federal government and uranium extraction by mining corporations during and after the Cold War.
Sarah Alisabeth Fox highlights the personal cost of nuclear testing and uranium extraction in the American West through extensive interviews with \"downwinders,\" the Native American and non-Native residents of the Great Basin region affected by nuclear environmental contamination and nuclear-testing fallout. These downwinders tell tales of communities ravaged by cancer epidemics, farmers and ranchers economically ruined by massive crop and animal deaths, and Native miners working in dangerous conditions without proper safety equipment so that the government could surreptitiously study the effects of radiation on humans.
In chilling detailDownwindbrings to light the stories and concerns of these groups whose voices have been silenced and marginalized for decades in the name of \"patriotism\" and \"national security.\"
With the renewed boom in mining in the American West, Fox's look at this hidden history, unearthed from years of field interviews, archival research, and epidemiological studies, is a must-read for every American concerned about the fate of our western lands and communities.
eBook
LIVING UNDER THE CLOUD
By the time five-year-old Claudia returned to her swing set, a strangely colored cloud was all that remained of her flying saucer. Years later, she learned the apparition she had seen in the sky was not a UFO but the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Her childhood home in southern Utah was about a hundred miles east of the Nevada Test Site (known today as the Nevada National Security Site), one of the most heavily utilized nuclear weapons testing areas in the world. From 1951 to 1992, regular nuclear explosions rattled the region, scattering untold quantities of radioactive isotopes
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CRITICAL MASS
In the domain of nuclear physicscritical massis defined as the smallest amount of an elemental material that can set off and sustain a chain reaction, given the right conditions. Multiple factors play into the achievement of critical mass, ranging from the temperature or shape of the material to the degree it has been enriched or altered. For some elements, only a small amount is needed to achieve a nuclear chain reaction. Other elements must be present in larger quantities, or must be profoundly affected by temperature or pressure, before they will sustain a nuclear chain reaction. Once critical
Book Chapter
HOME ON THE RANGE
In the months and years that followed the bombing of Japan, accounts proliferated of the incredible potential of nuclear technology to both create and destroy. National and local newspapers and magazines reprinted verbatim the press releases, opinions, and fictionalized future war scenarios of politicians, scientists, and military leaders, stocking the American lexicon with a set of images and terms heretofore reserved for science fiction. Apocalypse, in the shape of a mushroom cloud, was understood to be on the doorstep, alongside incomparable power and possibility.
William Laurence, theNew York Times’ first ever science reporter, educated millions of Americans on the
Book Chapter
LOCALLY GROWN
In many corners of twenty-first century America, eating locally grown food has become something of a political statement. Those who choose to do so can take advantage of a proliferation of farmers’ markets and local produce sections in grocery stores. An abundance of literature exists to guide the aspiring local eater, from how-to guides to philosophical treatises on the culinary and ecological rewards of rediscovering the local foodshed. There are even T-shirts and bumper stickers for the new dietary demographic, sometimes called locavores. The trend has gained so much popularity that theNew American Oxford Dictionaryselected the term “locavore”
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WRITING DOWN NAMES
Being downwind means you receive what the wind carries from other places, whether it is the scent of a neighborhood barbecue or the odor of a landfill. Folk wisdom reminds us that if an animal is downwind from a hunter, it is likely to smell danger—human scent—on the breeze. Downstream has a similar connotation. Wise campers refrain from muddying the water upstream from their campsite, thereby preventing contamination from entering their water supply.
The directional reference in “downwind” is also evocative. American society tends to connote power and value in spatial terms. Successful people are referred to as
Book Chapter
UNEARTHING YELLOW MONSTERS
The place where a story begins relies entirely on the perspective of the storyteller. America’s nuclear arms race is a story of many such perspectives. Some historians begin their narrative of the atomic bomb with a group of brilliant physicists puzzling over calculations in secretive laboratories. There are Utahans who will tell you that, for them, the story of the bomb begins on a day in 1953 with a brilliant flash in the morning dark, followed by a mushroom cloud rising in the western sky and slowly drifting toward their homes. For many North American indigenous peoples, the story of
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