Inevitably Toxic

Brinda Sarathy (Editor) Brinda Sarathy is a professor of Environmental Analysis and director of the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability at Pitzer College. She is the author of Pineros: Latino Labour and the Changing Face of Forestry in the Pacific Northwest.Janet Brodie (Editor) Janet Farrell Brodie is a professor of U.S. history at Claremont Graduate University. Her recent scholarship focuses on secrecy in the nuclear era with articles in the Journal of Diplomatic History and The Journal of Social History.Vivien Hamilton (Editor) Vivien Hamilton is an associate professor of history of science and director of the Hixon-Riggs Program for Responsive Science and Engineering at Harvey Mudd College. Her work examines the history of medical technologies, focusing on questions of authority, expertise and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

• IntroductionToxicity, Uncertainty, and Expertise Vivien Hamilton and Brinda SarathyPart One: Radiation1. X-ray Protection in American Hospitals Vivien Hamilton2. Contested Knowledge: The Trinity Test Radiation Studies Janet Farrell Brodie3. Crossroads in San Francisco: The Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory and its Afterlives Lindsey Dillon4. Born Opaque: Investigating the Nuclear Accident at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory William PalmerPart Two: Industrial Toxins5. Making Way for Industrial Waste: Water Pollution Control in Southern California, 1947-1955 Brinda Sarathy6. Processing the Past into Your Future: Uncovering the Hidden Consequences of Industrial Development in the West Texas Petrochemical Industry Sarah Stanford-McIntyre7. Vast, Incredible Damage: Herbicides and the US Forest Service James G. Lewis and Char Miller8. Los Angeles's Neighborhood Oil Drilling and Environmental Justice Bhavna ShamasunderPart Three: Community Contestation, Expanding Expertise9. Atomic Bomb Survivors, Medical Experts, and the Endlessness of Radiation Illness Naoko Wake10. On Sovereignty, Deficits, and Dump Fires: Risk Governance in an Arctic “Dumpcano Alexander R.D. ZaharaEpilogueContainment: Discussing Nuclear Waste with Peter GalisonInterview by Vivien Hamilton and Brinda Sarathy

Science can be used to both explicate and obscure the violence of toxic exposures. The scholars in this book offer us careful historical accounts that show how science has been both not enough and sometimes profoundly complicit in toxic histories, themselves undergirded by militarism, racism, and industrialism. Crucially, the essays in this book demonstrate how ubiquitous toxicity is an achievement, not an inevitability—it can and should be otherwise.