- Title Pages
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
-
1 * From Fragmentation to Forest Resurgence - Rethinking Social Lives and Forest Transitions
-
2 * False Forest History, Complicit Social Analysis -
3 * Stories of Nature’s Hybridity in Europe -
4 * Adam Smith in the Forest -
5 * Jungles, Forests, and the Theatre of Wars -
6 * Mutant Ecologies -
7 * Pan-Tropical Perspectives on Forest Resurgence -
8 * The Social Lives of Forest Transitions and Successions -
9 * Paradigms Lost -
10 * Effects of Human Activities on Successional Pathways - Human-Forest Relationships and the Erasure of History
-
11 * Constructing Nature -
12 * Culturing the Rainforest -
13 * Residual Effects of Agroforestry Activities at Dos Hombres, a Classic Period Maya Site in Belize -
14 * Forest as Faunal Enclave: Endangerment, Ecology, and Exclusion in India -
15 * Amazonia - Market Dynamics and Regional Change
-
16 * The Fate of the Branded Forest -
17 * Gendered Knowledge and the African Shea-Nut Tree -
18 * Ancient Forest Tea -
19 * The Production of Forests -
20 * From Swidden to Rubber - Institutions
-
21 * A Forest for My Kingdom? “Forest Rent” and the Politics of History in Asante (Ghana) -
22 * The Invisible Map -
23 * Re-Greening the Sahel - Urban Ecologies
-
24 * Amazonia 1492 -
25 * Urban Residence, Rural Employment, and the Future of Amazonian Forests -
26 * From Fallow Timber to Urban Housing -
27 * Forest Resources, City Services -
28 * Chicago Wilderness - References
- Contributors
- Index
* Mutant Ecologies
* Mutant Ecologies
Radioactive Life in Post–Cold War New Mexico
- Chapter:
- (p.70) 6 * Mutant Ecologies
- Source:
- The Social Lives of Forests
- Author(s):
Joseph Masco
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
The Manhattan Project not only unlocked the power of the atom, it also inaugurated a subtle but total transformation of the biosphere, ushering nature into a new kind of nuclear regime in 1945. The technoscientific militarization of nature in nuclear discourses enabled a dual deployment of social evolution and biological extinction as the focal points of a new kind of modernity, producing not only new understandings of self, nature, and society, but also a profound mutation in each of these terms. In the post-Cold War period, the U.S. nuclear complex has implicitly recognized transformations of the biosphere by the nuclear testing regime through a new type of territorial re-inscription, such as the formation of a 1000-acre wildlife preserve within a 43-square mile territory of Los Alamos National Laboratory. This chapter describes the “re-wilding” of Los Alamos’ monitored hyper-toxic nuclear waste sites, which have been reinvented as pristine wild landscapes. It draws attention an unusual facet of Cold War environmental politics, focusing not on imagined nuclear immolation, but the creation of an ersatz “Ur” nature, a suite of new institutions, and the inscription of toxic landscapes as pristine sanctuaries.
Keywords: Cold War, Los Alamos, environmental history, re-wilding, conservation on toxic lands, ideologies of landscape, naturalizing environmental hazard
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- Title Pages
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
-
1 * From Fragmentation to Forest Resurgence - Rethinking Social Lives and Forest Transitions
-
2 * False Forest History, Complicit Social Analysis -
3 * Stories of Nature’s Hybridity in Europe -
4 * Adam Smith in the Forest -
5 * Jungles, Forests, and the Theatre of Wars -
6 * Mutant Ecologies -
7 * Pan-Tropical Perspectives on Forest Resurgence -
8 * The Social Lives of Forest Transitions and Successions -
9 * Paradigms Lost -
10 * Effects of Human Activities on Successional Pathways - Human-Forest Relationships and the Erasure of History
-
11 * Constructing Nature -
12 * Culturing the Rainforest -
13 * Residual Effects of Agroforestry Activities at Dos Hombres, a Classic Period Maya Site in Belize -
14 * Forest as Faunal Enclave: Endangerment, Ecology, and Exclusion in India -
15 * Amazonia - Market Dynamics and Regional Change
-
16 * The Fate of the Branded Forest -
17 * Gendered Knowledge and the African Shea-Nut Tree -
18 * Ancient Forest Tea -
19 * The Production of Forests -
20 * From Swidden to Rubber - Institutions
-
21 * A Forest for My Kingdom? “Forest Rent” and the Politics of History in Asante (Ghana) -
22 * The Invisible Map -
23 * Re-Greening the Sahel - Urban Ecologies
-
24 * Amazonia 1492 -
25 * Urban Residence, Rural Employment, and the Future of Amazonian Forests -
26 * From Fallow Timber to Urban Housing -
27 * Forest Resources, City Services -
28 * Chicago Wilderness - References
- Contributors
- Index