The Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West

This text maps the nuclear landscapes of the US inter-desert southwest, a land sacrificed to the Cold-War arms race and nuclear energy policy. Valerie Kuletz documents in detail the 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. 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.