GEOG 10 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Nature Reserve, Political Ecology, Social Evolution
Document Summary
Mutant ecologies: radioactive life in post cold war new mexico. A political ecology of the nuclear age developed through a theorization of "mutation" interrogates the contemporary terms of radioactive nature in new mexico. As an analytic, the value of "mutation" is its emphasis on multigenerational effects, enabling an assessment of biosocial transformations as, alternatively, injury, improvement, or noise. Cold war radiation experiments, the post cold war transformation of nuclear production sites into "wildlife reserves," and the expanding role that biological beings play as "environmental sentinels" in new mexico are all sites where concerns about. "species" integrity may be articulated in relation to radioactive nature. 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. This chapter describes the re-wilding of los alamos" monitored hyper-toxic nuclear waste sites, which have been reinvented as pristine wild landscapes.
