Two recent books by geographers do just that. Project Plowshare, established in 1957, depended on conducting 'earth-moving' experiments in places outside the Nevada test site. Due to opposition from local residents and AEC-funded scientists, this never happened. Steingraber traverses the ecologies of several constrasting landscapes of the East Coast and the Midwest. In doing so, she reveals the very prevalence of reckless toxic endangerment, which turns people's bodies and homes into sites of environmental distress, often resulting in disfigurement, disability, or death.
All flesh is grass,' says the Book of Isaiah.
So too for Steingraber. A decade ago, the late Brian Harley, a founder and director of the University of Wisconsin's History of Cartography Project, challenged geographers and cartographers to recognize that power relations were embedded in the maps they produced and used. Since then, a virtual industry has sprung up around 'power talk' and the effort to denaturalize spatial representations. In recent years, the social contexts within which maps do their work have become much clearer to us. Her analyses of specific incidents, like the United Farm Workers anti-pesticides campaign and a grazing conflict in New Mexico, reveal important struggles over space, place, nature, and identity.