Toxic archipelago a history of industrial disease in Japan Brett L. Walker ; foreword by Willima Cronon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walker, Brett L., 1967- Author.

Series:

Weyerhauser environmental books.

Weyerhauser environmental books

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Occupational diseases--Japan--History.

Occupational diseases.

Human ecology--Japan--History.

Human ecology.

Japan--Environmental conditions.

Japan.

Physical Description:

1 online resource illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Seattle London University of Washington Press 2010

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Foreword: The pain of apoisoned world

Preface

Prologue

Introduction: Knowing Nature

1 The Agency of Insects

2 The Agency of Chemicals

3 Copper Mining and Ecological Collapse

4 Engineering Pain in the Jinzū River Basin

5 Mercury’s Offspring

6 Hell at the HŌjŌ Colliery

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 251-269) and index.

Other Format:

Print version: Walker, Brett L., 1967- Toxic archipelago.

ISBN:

9780295803012

OCLC:

744362071