Linda C. Morice
The University of Georgia Press, 2022
Echoes from the United States’ decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 still reverberate. One need look no further than the film Oppenheimer, which won the 2023 Oscar for Best Picture and reignited a discussion about nuclear weapons. But these are not the echoes in the subtitle of Linda Morice’s riveting book, Nuked. The echoes she has been hearing and feeling are those that reverberate in and around St. Louis, Missouri, which was home to Mallinckrodt Chemical Works. Mallinckrodt processed the uranium for the atomic bombs and for weapons manufactured during the Cold War, and Nuked recounts how the radioactive waste from that processing seeped into the water and sediment near the storage sites, and in turn caused high rates of cancer and death for those that lived nearby.
Some of the nearby residents who suffered were members of Morice’s family, who moved to the town of Florissant, Missouri in 1957. Florissant, located 14 miles northwest of downtown St. Louis, is bisected by Coldwater Creek. In 1946, the federal government began moving waste from the Mallinckrodt plant to a site at the St. Louis airport, just south of Florissant. Water and groundwater at this St. Louis Airport Storage Site (SLAPS) flowed into Coldwater Creek, and as Morice notes, the radioactive wastes also “followed ecological principles,” and drained into the creek. The impact of this runoff was exacerbated by poor waste management practices at SLAPS. And the post-WWII housing boom made matters worse; Morice notes that with residents “unaware of radionuclides in their midst, new construction practices spread the contamination throughout the Coldwater Creek watershed.”
The long-term impact of that contamination is a critical component of Nuked. Morice describes how cancer caused the death of her parents and brother and has afflicted her husband. She also looks at the impact on communities, noting for example that one “door-step” epidemiological survey documented 700 hundred cases of cancer and immune system disease within a four-square mile area of Florissant. But Morice also highlights the work performed by citizen-led groups that urged government officials to test for contamination and pursued legal avenues. These groups received “vindication” in 2019 when the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry acknowledged that the contamination might have increased the risk of cancer and “voiced support of ongoing efforts to identify and properly remediate radiological waste.” Although few plaintiffs have prevailed in the courtroom, Morice mentions one case that led to $12.5 million in compensation and restitution for residents near one of the landfills that received some of the overflow from SLAPS.
The discussion of these organizations and advocates situates Nuked within a growing literature on the impacts of nuclear weapons and testing. As Morice points out, much of this work traces back to Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, which tells the story about the adverse effects of nuclear testing in Nevada during the 1950s and 1960s and the impacts of a rising Great Salt Lake on migratory birds. I read Refuge two decades ago and Nuked inspired me to reopen its pages. Toward the end, Williams references Irene Allen v. United States of America, a case seeking compensation for the cancers caused by that testing. The District Court for the District of Utah awarded damages to some of the plaintiffs, but the Tenth Circuit reversed on sovereign immunity grounds. Williams juxtaposes the outcome of that case with her resolve to question the “authority that ultimately killed rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons.”
Toward the end of Nuked, Morice juxtaposes legal battles and stories of people pushing back in other locations directly affected by nuclear weapon development, including Paducah, Kentucky; Rocky Flats, Colorado; and Hanford, Washington. She identifies numerous similarities. For example, “officials at each facility ignored important environmental principles in choosing its location.” Yet there are differences too. Whereas residents in Paducah, Rocky Flats, and Hanford were generally aware of the activity at the plants, SLAPS “was not a recognizable presence to most people in the Coldwater Creek watershed. . . . The threat hid in plain sight for decades.”
Nuked will help ensure that St. Louis’s nuclear legacy is now visible for all to see. There are several other upsides to this book. First, Morice provides a clear picture of the geography, which helps the reader understand how the contamination spread. Second, she effectively traces the journey of the uranium, from the Congo to New York, from New York to St. Louis, and from downtown St. Louis to Florissant and other neighborhoods in the form of waste. Third, the text is followed by valuable appendixes, a timeline, a glossary, and bibliography, all of which should prove useful to future scholars. On the flip side, the benefits of the graphics (two maps and one image) were diminished by being in grayscale. And in the chapter entitled “Bureaucratic Blues,” the answer to questions such as “what did they know, and when did they know it?” could have been incorporated chronologically rather than coming at the end.
Nuked provides a greater understanding of natural resource use. It also sheds light on the people who have been and continue to be exposed to the waste that is a byproduct of that use, and in this way, the book fills a gap left by films like Oppenheimer.
Richard W. Judd
University of Massachusetts Press, 2023
For the last several years, my brother and I have embarked on a weekend hiking trip in the summer. The trip is a chance for us to bond and to reconnect with nature, two things we often did as children growing up in the Adirondack Mountains. This summer, he and I headed to northern Maine to climb Mount Katahdin. At the summit, we saw a plaque placed by the state’s Forest Commission to “record the gift and conveyance to the state” by Percival Baxter of nine square miles of land, “within which area are located this the highest peak of the mountain 5267 ft.” as well as numerous other peaks. The plaque also states:
This gift was made upon the express condition that the said tract so donated and conveyed “shall forever be used for public park and recreational purposes, shall forever be left in the natural wild state, shall forever be kept as a sanctuary for the wild beasts and birds, that no roads or ways for motor vehicles shall hereafter ever be constructed therein or thereon.”
This donation by Baxter is discussed in Richard Judd’s Democratic Spaces, which I read soon after our ascent, and the donation serves as an excellent example of the type of land preservation that Judd explores in his intriguing book.
The thrust of Democratic Spaces is that there exists a lacuna in the history of land preservation in the United States. That history has focused on national parks and wilderness areas, and Judd “steps outside this paradigm” to look at the tradition of open spaces preserved by “philanthropic foundations, planning professionals, state agencies, and most important, community-based organizations.” Among those community-based organizations, he devotes particular attention to land trusts. These land trusts have steered clear of setting aside “sublime natural features,” and instead protected “neglected riverbanks, tangle swamps, rockbound glens, windy mountaintops, bits of woodland and meadow, and other landscapes left behind in the rush to develop cities and suburbs.” One preservationist described these spaces as “essential voids,” which is an apt characterization because while they appear to be empty, they are critical to long-term sustainability and engagement with the land.
In Judd’s account, New England was the hotbed for efforts to protect these “essential voids.” The pillar of the movement was the Trustees of Public Reservations (TPR), which was established in Massachusetts in 1891. Initially the TPR focused its work on acquiring parcels of land through donations. But over time, the TPR realized the challenges involved with maintaining them. In the mid-twentieth century, the emerging field of ecology presented a new challenge to maintenance of the reserved land. Debates arose about how much the TPR should intervene with nature as the scientific community gained a greater understanding of the complexity of ecosystems. According to Judd, the TPR “generally agreed on leaving the reservation ‘as Nature would have it,’ but the devil, as always, was in the details.” Judd deftly examines some examples of this debate, including one about whether and to what extent to remove live trees: some believed that trees should never be cut, while others believed that trees should be handled as crops. One can hear echoes of the longstanding divide between preservation and conservation in this arborous dichotomy.
Judd describes two more key points along the land trust trajectory that may be of interest to practitioners in land use law and natural resources law. The first is the land trusts’ turn toward conservation easements, which “mushroomed in the 1980s due to rising real-estate prices and a shift in preservation strategies away from individual parcels to broader aggregates.” Judd observes that easements “required considerable legal expertise.” But he also notes that courts “cleared away legal misgivings by declaring [easements] binding on subsequent owners” and that Congress created a nationwide framework for easement contracts when it passed the Uniform Conservation Easement Act in 1981. Though I was hoping to find in Democratic Spaces a more detailed explanation of the mechanics of conservation easements, I recognize that the book is not a legal treatise; instead, it is a social and political history of land stewardship.
The second shift is toward what Judd calls “integrated stewardship.” This term captures the idea of land trusts allying with each other and relying on state and federal funding. He brings this concept into focus in a chapter that explores the movement to preserve wide swaths of the Northern Forest, which stretches from the Adirondacks in New York to the St. Croix River in Maine. Much of this work has been performed in the wake of land liquidation by pulp and paper companies, and Judd’s examples of the collaboration between land trusts and government entities illustrate his ability to balance broad ideas with in-depth details.
Democratic Spaces is a wonderful counterpoint to the literature on national parks and wilderness. It also lays the groundwork for future research into this area. For example, while Judd describes a gradual democratization of open spaces, he points out that there have been undercurrents of exclusion and elitism in the work of land trusts. I found Judd’s narrative very readable, and it allowed me to keep my mind in the woods of Maine for a bit longer after I returned home from the annual hike with my brother.
Jerry Emory
The University of Chicago Press, 2023
Like Nuked and Democratic Spaces, Jerry Emory’s engrossing George Meléndez Wright brings to light an untold story. That story is the biography of Wright, who was not only “the first Hispanic to occupy a professional position in the National Park Service (NPS)” but also “the father of scientific research and resource management” at the NPS. Wright served as a ranger naturalist in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Emory’s remarkable book adds important threads to two tapestries: the history of the early days of the NPS and the history of wildlife biology in the United States.
Emory provides a look inside the NPS during its second decade through his recounting of Wright’s work. Wright arrived in Yosemite National Park in 1927 after graduating from Berkeley, and went on to accomplish a string of achievements, from proposing and leading the NPS’s first-ever wildlife survey to co-authoring the canonical Fauna of the National Parks of the United States (Fauna No. 1), and from serving as the inaugural head of the agency’s Wildlife Division to spearheading a policy on predators in the parks. Emory relies heavily on Wright’s correspondence, publications, and other materials, but the archival cornucopia goes beyond the written word: Emory also includes photographs of Wright in various national parks and images of Wright’s field notes. These well-placed images produce a sense of being with Wright as he traversed the country’s wildest corners and studied its wildlife.
Wright’s studies spurred a shift in how wildlife is viewed in the United States and looking back from nearly a century after the peak of his career, Wright has the markings of a modern biologist grappling with some of the most intractable problems related to wildlife management. Wright pushed against the traditional mindset that treated wildlife, such as bears, as entertainment, and that saw predators, such as wolves and coyotes, as nuisances. The new paradigm Wright helped establish was a hands-off approach. And yet the borders of this new paradigm were fuzzy. Although Wright opposed the killing of predators inside national parks and national forests, supported adjusting park boundaries so that they better aligned with wildlife behavior, and urged the NPS to stop feeding bears in park dumps, Wright also floated the idea of captive breeding as a method to save the trumpeter swan, supported the culling of elk herds that exceeded a park’s carrying capacity, and advocated for the reintroduction of bison in Glacier National Park for the benefit of both the park and the nearby Blackfeet Nation.
The fuzziness around the appropriate level of human involvement is also reflected in the statute that established the NPS. The National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 states that the purpose of the parks “is to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such a manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” This language suggests that Congress intended for wildlife to be protected in perpetuity, yet there have been different interpretations of enjoyment. For example, in the early years, the NPS allowed visitors to get very close to animals. Wright opposed this level of interaction and called instead for “science-based restoration and management of the ‘pristine state.’”
Defining the “pristine state” presented its own challenges. Emory writes that a “major issue” that Wright and the other authors of Fauna No. 1 “wrestled with was the need for a specific point in time from which to pursue their objective in the national parks” and that these discussions were “fraught with a variety of historical, biological, and cultural challenges in the early 1930s, as they are today.” Wright and his co-authors decided to use the arrival of European colonizers as the baseline for the “pristine state.” They recognized that nature had been in a “state of flux” since time immemorial, but reasoned they could not know as much about the prior periods. This approach overlooked what is now known as Indigenous Knowledge. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that Wright learned from his interaction with Native Americans that the “presence of people in these inhabited landscapes far predated the creation of national parks and protected areas, and this reality had to be acknowledged and accounted for as part of any management equation going forward.”
Accounting for the reality that people and wildlife shared the same spaces was at the heart of Wright’s work. One of Wright’s quotes on this theme stood out to me:
Fifty years from now we shall still be wrestling with the problems of joint occupation of national parks by men and mammals, but it is reasonable to predict that we shall have mastered some of the simplest maladjustments. It is far better to pursue such a course though success be partial than to relax in despair and allow the destructive forces to operate unchecked.
Wright mastered some of the maladjustments; unfortunately, his life was cut short when he died in a car accident at the age of 31 while exploring what would become Big Bend National Park. Wright’s legacy lives on in many forms, including two peaks named after him in Big Bend and Denali National Parks. Emory’s excellent biography stands as another testament to Wright’s life and work.
