Ecological Chemistry and Biochemistry of Plant Terpenoids.

Abstract

The world is in a perilous financial meltdown. This book addresses the industry that introduced us to that term. There are 439 nuclear power facilities on the planet to look after. At least two nuclear reactors have already suffered partial or full meltdowns (Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986) causing much bodily and psychological suffering, especially in the nowradiogenic communities that surround the plants. The current financial meltdown has come from the U.S. government’s embracement of neoliberalism, a movement that abandoned effective regulatory oversight over banking, housing, and Wall Street. Has the homeland security state, under neoliberalism, done any better regulating the most lethal industry in the world, nuclear? Not on your life. As Johnston and her 14 anthropology colleagues make abundantly clear, it’s not just nuclear meltdown disasters that we should fear but the cradle-to-grave circuit of nuclear production. This circuit includes: (1) uranium mining (Navaho miners have been especially hard hit with thousands of deaths), (2) uranium processing (there are 2.35 billion tons of radioactive “tailings” remaining after uranium extraction), (3) weapons development (between 2001 and 2004, tens of millions of cubic meters of liquid radioactive waste were dumped into Russia’s Techa River), (4) testing (2,057 nuclear tests have occurred the world over spreading fallout far and wide), and (5) disposal (anthropologist Edith Turner, astounded at a very high cancer rate in Alaska’s Inupiat community in the 1990s, helped illustrate that it was not “lifestyle” but a nearby radioactive dump site that accounted for the spike). Worldwide thyroid cancer, leukemia, birth abnormalities, and other conditions linked to nuclear exposures are far more extensive than previously thought. The anxiety of living next to a radiogenic site is felt by millions. Moreover, the majority of the suffering— more than 70 percent—has occurred in indigenous communities, referred to by one critic as “national sacrifice zones” (p. 301). Johnston entitles one of her own chapters “more like us than mice” (lower case as in original). The phrase is drawn from a transcript from the Atomic Energy Commission Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine that referred to indigenous peoples as such. Johnston writes, “This view— that human groups are more or less evolved, with primitive ‘natives’ being biologically inferior to Western ‘civilized people’—was a common and useful notion . . . dampen[ing] any moral qualms about the planned use of the Marshallese population in human radiation experiments” (p. 26). The Marshall Islanders have suffered greatly. As we learn in the chapter by Holly Barker, they live in Micronesia, acquired as a trust by the United States as a kind of war booty after the United States defeated the Japanese in World War II. On the atolls of Enewetak and Bikini in the Marshall Islands the United States detonated 67 thermonuclear weapons from 1946 to 1958. It was the equivalent of 1.5 Hiroshimastyle bombs dropped every single day for 12 years (p. 214) The 6.3 billion curies