Shows the risks of high-tech pollution through a study of an IBM plant's effects on a New York town In 1924, IBM built its first plant in Endicott, New York. Now, Endicott is a contested toxic waste site. With its landscape thoroughly contaminated by carcinogens, Endicott is the subject of one of the nation’s largest corporate-state mitigation efforts. Yet despite the efforts of IBM and the U.S. government, Endicott residents remain skeptical that the mitigation systems employed were designed with their best interests at heart. In Toxic Town, Peter C. Little tracks and critically diagnoses the experiences of Endicott residents as they learn to live with high-tech pollution, community transformation, scientific expertise, corporate-state power, and risk mitigation technologies. By weaving together the insights of anthropology, political ecology, disaster studies, and science and technology studies, the book explores questions of theoretical and practical import for understanding the politics of risk and the ironies of technological disaster response in a time when IBM’s stated mission is to build a “Smarter Planet.” Little critically reflects on IBM’s new corporate tagline, arguing for a political ecology of corporate social and environmental responsibility and accountability that places the social and environmental politics of risk mitigation front and center. Ultimately, Little argues that we will need much more than hollow corporate taglines, claims of corporate responsibility, and attempts to mitigate high-tech disasters to truly build a smarter planet.

This groundbreaking text provides students with an overview and assessment of green criminology as well as a call to action. Green Criminology draws attention to the ways in which the political-economic organization of capitalism causes ecological destruction and disorganization. Focusing on real-world issues of green crime and environmental justice, chapters examine ecological withdrawals, ecological additions, toxic towns, wildlife poaching and trafficking, environmental laws, and nongovernmental environmental organizations. The book also presents an unintimidating introduction to research from the physical sciences on issues such as climate change, pollution levels, and the ecological footprint of humans, providing a truly interdisciplinary foundation for green criminological analysis. To help students succeed in the course—and to encourage them to see themselves as future green criminology researchers—the end-of-chapter study guides include: • Questions and Activities for Students that review topics students should be able to conceptualize and address. • Lessons for Researchers that suggest additional areas of research in the study of green crime.

He works by day for Smokey, which really is a rip But after work,he parties, be it whiskey, beer, or trip When he's drunk,he staggers, you've never seen the sight But look at Mokey crooked, and you've got yourself a fight We've never seen him sober, we've never seen him straight But when he's feeling lucky, a fifth bottle is his date He's never had a license, he's nutsey when he drives The cops say “Red-haired wacko, he's gonna take some lives”

Julie Whitesel Weston left her hometown of Kellogg, Idaho, but eventually it pulled her back. Only when she returned to this mining community in the Idaho Panhandle did she begin to see the paradoxes of the place where she grew up. Her book combines oral history, journalistic investigation, and personal reminiscence to take a fond but hard look at life in Kellogg during “the good times.” Kellogg in the late 1940s and fifties was a typical American small town complete with high school football and basketball teams, marching band, and anti-Communist clubs; yet its bars, gambling dens, and brothels were entrenched holdovers from a rowdier frontier past. The Bunker Hill Mining Company, the largest employer, paid miners good wages for difficult, dangerous work, while the quest for lead, silver, and zinc denuded the mountainsides and laced the soil and water with contaminants. Weston researched the late-nineteenth-century founding of Kellogg and her family’s five generations in Idaho. She interviewed friends she grew up with, their parents, and her own parents’ friends—miners mostly, but also businesspeople, housewives, and professionals. Much of this memoir of place set during the Cold War and post-McCarthyism is told through their voices. But Weston also considers how certain people made a difference in her life, especially her band director, her ski coach, and an attorney she worked for during a major strike. She also explores her charged relationship with her father, a hardworking doctor revered in the community for his dedication but feared at home for his drinking and rages. The Good Times Are All Gone Now begins the day the smokestacks came down, and it reaches far back into collective and personal memory to understand a way of life now gone. The company town Weston knew is a different place, where “Uncle Bunker” is a Superfund site, and where the townspeople, as in previous hard times, have endured to reinvent Kellogg—not once, but twice.

Arsenic. Mercury. Pesticides. Dioxin. Toxic gases. Your typical hazardous waste dump, right? Wrong. These materials can be found in the home. Every day, people work, live, and play amid potentially harmful toxins-things they might not even know are there. They are exposed to these toxic substances in their homes, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, foods, and consumer products. Now, two toxics experts with decades of experience in public health have created a book that separates the risks from the myths of everyday toxins. Comprehensive and easy-to-use, this guide provides scenarios and real-life examples-including important warning signs-that show how to identify problems and what to do about them. With Q&A segments, charts to help assess risk, and a special homebuyer's guide, What's Toxic, What's Not is a book no home should be without.

A veteran New York Times reporter dissects the most spectacular failure in real estate history Real estate giant Tishman Speyer and its partner, BlackRock, lost billions of dollars when their much-vaunted purchase of Stuyvesant Town–Peter Cooper Village in New York City failed to deliver the expected profits. But how did Tishman Speyer walk away from the deal unscathed, while others took the financial hit—and MetLife scored a $3 billion profit? Illuminating the world of big real estate the way Too Big to Fail did for banks, Other People’s Money is a riveting account of politics, high finance, and the hubris that ultimately led to the nationwide real estate meltdown.

A revelation of the spatial atrocities committed by specialists in development of African cities. For more than fifty centuries, cities were planned and developed by generalists. The town planners were Jacks of all trades yet masters of none. In the last fifty years however, this all changed. Town planning dismantled into various specialists – masters of a single trade. Traffic engineers, urban environmentalists, modernist architects, town planning regulators, Marxist and postmodern scholars. As these specialists focus on their specialities, governed by ideological loyalty and possessiveness, they work in isolations a practice that is pushing African cities off the cliff. In Dystopia, Archimedes Muzenda reveals the destruction that specialists are creating in cities across Africa. He reveals how the in their tyrannical nature specialists are committing spatial atrocities, turning African cities into dystopias. In doing so, Muzenda sets basis for specialists to find one another if they are to create prosperous, sustainable and just cities – cities that are liveable.

Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town

Materials and the Environment, Third Edition, discusses the history of our increasing dependence on materials and energy. The book explains where materials come from and how they are used in a variety of industries, along with their lifecycle and relationship to energy and carbon. In addition, it covers the controls and economic instruments that hinder the use of engineering materials, considers sustainability from a materials perspective, and highlights the importance of low-carbon power and material efficiency. Further sections cover the mechanical, thermal and electrical properties of engineering metals, polymers, ceramics, composites and natural materials and their relationship to environmental issues. This book is intended for instructors and students of Engineering, Materials Science and Industrial/Product Design, as well as for materials engineers and product designers who need to consider the environmental implications of materials in their designs. - Introduces methods and tools for thinking about, and designing with, materials within the context of their role in products and the environmental consequences - Contains numerous case studies showing how the methods discussed in the book can be applied to real-world situations - Includes full-color datasheets for dozens of the most widely used materials, featuring such environmentally relevant information as their annual production and reserves, embodied energy and process energies, carbon footprints, and recycling data

The first full account of the scientific and political dynamics of global PCB contamination, and its threat to human health and the environment Whether or not you've heard of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), it's likely that this toxic chemical can be found in your cells. PCBs were invented in 1920 for the electronics industry, fueled the WWII military machine, then were put to domestic uses, and finally came to be present in every corner of the earth. Because PCBs were outlawed in 1976, most people think they are no longer a threat. However, like many industrial chemicals, PCBs persist in our environment and continue to accumulate in practically every life form on earth, becoming more concentrated in the tissues of those highest on the food chain--like us. In Biocidal, investigative journalist Ted Dracos explores the science behind how PCBs affect the environment, amphibians, fish, and mammals. He also draws on extensive research to document the connection between PCBs and catastrophic human illness. From the beginning--even as workers in the first manufacturing plants quickly began to suffer skin lesions, boils, liver failure, and death--the industry denied the danger of its chemicals and manipulated science, regulatory agencies, and the government to continue to make and distribute PCBs throughout the next half-century. Dracos provides the latest scientific findings in the heated controversy that surrounds the continued health impacts of PCBs, ranging from cancer to immunosupression, endocrine disruption, fetal brain development, reproductive abnormalities, and even autism. Yet Biocidal is optimistic, leaving readers with a complete and surprisingly uncomplicated blueprint of what can be done--and is being done--to counter the risks and damages of PCBs and other industrial chemicals.