Toxic Archipelago

A History of Industrial Disease in Japan

By: Brett L. Walker, William Cronon (Foreword by)

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Paperback | 1 July 2011

At a Glance

Paperback
306 Pages

Age
22+

Grade
17+

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 1.75

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Every person on the planet is entangled in a web of ecological relationships that link farms and factories with human consumers. Our lives depend on these relationships -- and are imperiled by them as well. Nowhere is this truer than on the Japanese archipelago.

During the nineteenth century, Japan saw the rise of Homo sapiens industrialis, a new breed of human transformed by an engineered, industrialized, and poisonous environment. Toxins moved freely from mines, factory sites, and rice paddies into human bodies.

Toxic Archipelago explores how toxic pollution works its way into porous human bodies and brings unimaginable pain to some of them. Brett Walker examines startling case studies of industrial toxins that know no boundaries: deaths from insecticide contaminations; poisonings from copper, zinc, and lead mining; congenital deformities from methylmercury factory effluents; and lung diseases from sulfur dioxide and asbestos.

This powerful, probing book demonstrates how the Japanese archipelago has become industrialized over the last two hundred years -- and how people and the environment have suffered as a consequence.

Industry Reviews

"Historian Walker effectively links, perhaps for the first time anywhere, the historical processes of the economic, social, and land-use policies involved in modernizing and globalizing Japan with the pain and suffering of its environment and people. Never has a book so clearly illustrated the aphorisms 'all politics are local,' 'the personal is the political,' and 'we are what we eat.' This discussion of the evolution of environmentalism in Japan will reflect new light on the understanding of environmental history. Essential." -Choice

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Foreword: The Pain of a Poisoned World	p. ix
Preface	p. xiii
Prologue	p. xvii
Introduction: Knowing Nature	p. 3
The Agency of Insects	p. 22
The Agency of Chemicals	p. 45
Copper Mining and Ecological Collapse	p. 71
Engineering Pain in the Jinzu River Basin	p. 108
Mercury's Offspring	p. 137
Hell at the Hojo Colliery	p. 176
Conclusion	p. 211
Notes	p. 225
Works Cited	p. 251
Index	p. 271
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Toxic Archipelago

A History of Industrial Disease in Japan

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

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