1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910811347703321

Autore

Nash Linda Lorraine

Titolo

Inescapable ecologies : a history of environment, disease, and knowledge / / Linda Nash

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2006

ISBN

9786611752521

0-520-93999-9

1-281-75252-5

1-60129-529-4

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (348 p.)

Disciplina

614.4/2794

Soggetti

Medical geography - California - History

Environmental health - California - History

Public health - California - History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Body And Environment In An Era Of Colonization -- 2. Placing Health And Disease -- 3. Producing A Sanitary Landscape -- 4. Modern Landscapes And Ecological Bodies -- 5. Contesting The Space Of Disease -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With this book, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas of the body as that history unfolded in California's Central Valley. Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. In this account, the rise of germ theory and the pushing aside of an earlier environmental approach to illness constituted not a clear triumph of modern biomedicine but rather a brief period of modern amnesia. As Nash shows us, place-based accounts of illness re-emerged in the postwar



decades, galvanizing environmental protest against smog and toxic chemicals. Carefully researched and richly conceptual, Inescapable Ecologies brings critically important insights to the histories of environment, culture, and public health, while offering a provocative commentary on the human relationship to the larger world.