Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country

This is absolutely a landmark environmental justice book. To those unfamiliar with environmental injustice, what this book contains will be downright shocking. To those that are, there is still much to learn from this book about how deeply, and insidiously to regular citizens, racial injustice is connected to land use and baked into the federal agencies that manage our land. I am in a graduate program for land management and will be recommending this to my professors for use in future classes, as I think it's critical that my peers be aware of these issues as we continue our careers. The ways we assign value to land are often unconscious and deeply tied to culture, and it's important to be aware of those influences if we want to engage stakeholders effectively and manage land equitably.I found the author’s writing style somewhat tangential, and in places there seemed to be an excess of details that were not necessarily relevant to the overall point (a writing habit of which I myself am not innocent). Nonetheless, those are a minor gripes, and not ones that impacted my overall enjoyment of this book. To those interested in further reading on the subject, I recommend "Understories" by Jake Kosek, which is about National Forest management, also in the southwestern US.

This is one of the most important critical reviews ever written of racial-environmental injustice, compounded by the arrival in the West of self-obsessed, supremely self-righteous white Christians. Voyles pioneers understanding of what we're witnessing right now, the declaration of "wastelands" where national monuments, wilderness areas, and other forms of protected federal lands have existed, generally for decades. In the case of the Bears Ears National Monument, however, Trump, Zinke and the Utah Congressional Delegation have exercised their contempt for cultural ways other than Mormon, jerking out from under the Navajo-Ute-Zuni-Hopi coalition that persuaded President Obama to do the honorable thing, instead slashing landscapes known to be extremely rich in archeological, paleontological, and spiritual sites --- and, incidentally, scenic and recreational, values appealing to the dominant white culture --- into vastly less meaningful fragments, giving access to mining, grazing, drilling, 4-wheel drive access, and those who exist by pillaging ancient pottery, rock art, architecture and fragments of ancient ancestors of the people who still inhabit the place thousands of years later. Bears Ears National Monument, however it transpires, will stand forever as a monument to the insights of Traci Brynne Voyles, who manages to see simultaneously into family, landscape, spirit and industry, reflecting the greatest flaws in the political-religious culture of this sad time, the Trump Presidential years.

I enjoyed this book, though I have to think through her theoretical framework more to see if I really think it is effective in what she wants it to do? Otherwise I think it's a creative way of thinking through these issues, and does good work in linking larger narratives of the height of nuclear activity. The chapter on gender was really great, especially in the ways it linked the perceived femininity of the past and the future as imagined by Diné women, but I think that really was the linchpin of the book and should have been pulled throughout the book rather than being relegated to a single chapter

this book rules. i loved it and think everyone should read it.

This is important work documenting the environmental injustice and violence of uranium mining. Unfortunately, in numerous instances, facts are distorted, used out of context, or misrepresented to justify the author's assertions. This book is still worth reading, but with a grain of salt.

OK book