Signs of Danger
Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat
Questions the literal burying of the nuclear threat and how it relates to expectations for our future
Focusing on the government’s nuclear waste burial program in Carlsbad, New Mexico, Signs of Danger begins the urgent work of finding a new way of thinking about ecological threat in our time. The reflections at the center of this book—on memory, trauma, disaster, representation, and the virtual—offer invaluable insights into the interface of where culture ends and nature begins.
At a time when heads of state worry about nuclear weapons getting into the wrong hands, Signs of Danger draws our attention to the dangers not only of nuclear weapons but also of peaceful nuclear power in the right hands. How to mark the disposal sites and be sure they will remain untouched three thousand generations hence?
Alphonso Lingis, author of Trust
A rising ocean. A falling building. A toxic river. Species extinguished. A nuclear landscape. In a world so configured, the state of contemporary ecological thought and practice is woefully—and perilously—inadequate. Focusing on the government’s nuclear waste burial program in Carlsbad, New Mexico, Signs of Danger begins the urgent work of finding a new way of thinking about ecological threat in our time.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad began receiving shipments in 1999. With a proposed closing date of 2030, this repository for nuclear waste must be secured with a sign, the purpose of which will be to keep people away for three hundred generations. In the official documents uncovered by Peter van Wyck, we encounter a government bureaucracy approaching the issue of nuclear waste as a technical problem only to find itself confronting a host of intractable philosophical issues concerning language, culture, and history. Signs of Danger plumbs these depths as it shows us how the problem raised in the desert of New Mexico is actually the problem of a culture grappling with ecological threats and with questions of the limits of meaning and representation in the deep future.
The reflections at the center of this book—on memory, trauma, disaster, representation, and the virtual—are aimed at defining the uniquely modern status of environmental and nuclear threats. They offer invaluable insights into the interface of where culture ends and nature begins, and how such a juncture is closely linked with questions of risk, concepts of history, and the cultural experience of time.
Winner of the 2005 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize of the Canadian Communication Association
Awards
Winner of the 2005 Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize of the Canadian Communication Association
At a time when heads of state worry about nuclear weapons getting into the wrong hands, Signs of Danger draws our attention to the dangers not only of nuclear weapons but also of peaceful nuclear power in the right hands. How to mark the disposal sites and be sure they will remain untouched three thousand generations hence?
Alphonso Lingis, author of Trust
Peter van Wyck brings together the sciences and the humanities to theorize environmental issues in this interesting and entertaining book.
Verena Conley, Harvard University
4/05/2011: At the time I wrote Signs of Danger, the two great nuclear indices were Three Mile Island (1979), and Chernobyl (1986). Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the third index, but here at least, in North America, these events stand as repressed adventures particular to war-time endeavors. In a word, they were not accidents.
Related Publications
Geography and Social Movements
Comparing Antinuclear Activism in the Boston Area
A comparative analysis of the implications of space, place, and scale in political mobilization.
Toxic Burn
The Grassroots Struggle against the WTI Incinerator
The economics of trash and the politics behind hazardous waste disposal.
Knowing Nukes
The Politics and Culture of the Atom
Countering critics who charge that postmodern positions on language, authority, and power cannot inform effective political responses, this compelling analysis employs these same methods to examine antinuclear politics. Star Wars (the movie and the antimissile system), the Freeze movement, Reaganism, and “lifestyle” politics all receive new treatments.
Ecopopulism
Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice
This book reconstructs the growth of a powerful movement around the question of toxic waste, following the issue as it moves from the world of "official" policymaking in Washington, onto the nation's television screens and into popular consciousness, and then into America's neighborhoods, spurring the formation of thousands of local, community-based groups. Szasz shows how, in less than a decade, a rich infrastructure of more permanent social organizations emerged from this movement, expanding its focus to include issues like municipal waste, military toxics, and pesticides. In its success, Szasz suggests, this movement may even prove to be the vehicle for reinvigorating progressive politics in the United States.