19th century
20th century
A01=Linda Nash
Author_Linda Nash
biomedicine
california
cancer clusters
Category=PDX
Category=RGCD
Category=RNC
causes of disease
central valley
disease history
ecologists
ecology
ecosystem
environment and culture
environmental history
environmental impact
environmental movement
environmental protest
environmentalists
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
germ theory
human impact
illness
natural science
natural world
nonfiction
pollution
public health
regional ecology
textbooks
toxic chemicals
wilderness
Product details
- ISBN 9780520248878
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Jan 2007
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California's Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.
Linda Nash is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Washington.
