The Tainted Desert Quotes

“Those who have attempted to inform the public about uranium mining and milling in the Four Corners area refer to the postwar period as a “hidden holocaust,” a tragic legacy of the Cold War. Still, today, few Americans are aware of this particular story of national sacrifice. Most tourists speak about the Four Corners area with admiration for its beauty and share the colonist’s fascination with its “picturesque” Indian cultures. Uranium fields aren’t on the AAA road map of Indian Country.”
― Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West

“An exploration of the nuclear waste crisis reveals the inequitable distribution of payment, weighing most heavily on the disenfranchised, and thus contributes to a more accurate assessment of what “collateral” damage has been inflicted in the pursuit of capitalist political hegemony. The so-called “price” for “freedom” is paid for by those with the least power, the least chance to benefit from U.S. control of global order and the wealth it brings.”
― Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West

“Originally chosen for its inaccessibility and inhospitable character—making secrecy easier to maintain—the interdesert region now stands as a testament to our entry into the nuclear age and to the dominance of the military-industrial complex in the late twentieth century. Encompassing most of the Southwest, the nuclear landscape covers a swath of land that includes much of New Mexico, Nevada, southeastern California, and parts of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and Texas.”
― Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West

“Paiute individuals, as well as individuals from other Indian tribes, have reported increased incidences of cancer on their reservations and “colonies.” Increased numbers of birth defects have also been noted. Most historians and government officials have ignored the presence of certain populations at risk in areas of nuclear weapons development and testing—populations whose subsistence economies depend heavily on land resources, including its flora, fauna, and water. This neglect is not accidental. When not deliberately part of official secrecy, it reveals an all-too-familiar pattern of disregard for the people that inhabit these desert areas, masking an exploitation of their land that goes back to the beginning of the so-called westward expansion. This is a landscape—a nuclear landscape—too often ripened by sacrifice, for sacrifice, shrouded in secrecy, and plundered of its wealth.”
― Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West

“Our eyes Are armed, but we are strangers to the stars, And strangers to the mystic beast and bird, And strangers to the plant and to the mine. The injured elements say, “Not in us;” And night and day, ocean and continent, Fire, plant and mineral say, “Not in us;” And haughtily return us stare for stare. For we invade them impiously for gain; We devastate them unreligiously, And coldly ask their pottage, not their love. —Ralph Waldo Emerson from the poem Blight I bless the mountain by asking the mountain to bless us. —Corbin Harney Western Shoshone Spiritual Leader”
― Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West

“The nuclear waste crisis, and the problem of nuclearism in general, thus has roots not only in Euroamerican political and economic institutions but in Euroamerican cultural knowledge regimes as well. Consequently the epistemological foundations that dominate how people understand the natural world and their relationship to it contribute to the ways in which they attempt to resolve environmental crisis. The interconnections among politics, culture, and science show up in the relationship among nuclear culture, militarism, and environmental science in the postwar era. The discourses on nature that are the product of such interconnections are part of a complex web of social and cultural practices with real material consequences, such as radiation victims, radioactive waste dumps, and sacrificial landscapes. These practices constitute part of the unacknowledged price the United States pays for global military dominance, as well as for dominance in late-capital global markets.”
― Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West

“Cybernetic models of natural processes and, specifically, the subdiscipline of radioecology have historically contributed to scientific perceptions of certain areas as experimental landscapes. Legitimating such destructive practices has helped to further marginalize the indigenous inhabitants of the region, contributing to an unacknowledged practice of environmental racism.”
― Valerie Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West