Watch the episode here
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There is no forever solution to nuclear waste, and humanity is doomed to always live with its drastic consequences. With underserved areas always getting the small end of the stick, Dr. Sarah Fox helps to elevate their voices by putting community storytelling in the spotlight. In this conversation with Corinna Bellizzi, she shares how she underscored the disproportionate impact of environmental contamination on marginalized regions by highlighting the stories and activism of ordinary people. Dr. Sarah also explains why the lives of everyday individuals must not be treated as less important than in-depth scientific researches, which both aim to build healthier and more sustainable communities.
About Dr. Sarah Fox
Seattle-based author and historian Sarah Fox is drawn to the stories we tell about places, bodies, and the relationships between them. Fox is the author of Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West (University of Nebraska Press, 2014). She is currently completing the manuscript for her second book project, At Home in the Plume: Unruly Waste and Reckoning in the Pacific Northwest. Fox holds a PhD in History from University of British Columbia.
Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-alisabeth-fox-024a9391/
Guest Website: https://www.downwindhistory.com
Guest Social: https://www.facebook.com/downwindapeopleshistory
Additional Resources Mentioned:
Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West
Show Notes:
- 00:02:51 – Author And Historian Sarah Fox
- 00:12:07 – Highlighting The Voices Of Ordinary People
- 00:15:56 – Trust The Experts Vs Questioning The Science
- 00:25:50 – How Underserved Communities Are Harmed By Fallout
- 00:34:49 – Hesitancy Around Preserving Nuclear Documents
- 00:42:23 – How To Tell Stories That Matter
- 00:51:17 – Answering Lightning Round Questions
- 00:57:14 – Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
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Leveraging The Power Of Community Storytelling With Dr. Sarah Fox
It is the start of summer, and we’re prepping to take some time off. This may be our last episode of June, as we recharge, refresh, and spend time with family in the outdoors, as I encourage all of you to do as well. There’s a tremendous back catalog of episodes, so you can feel free to peruse the 240-plus episodes that are already out in the world. Perhaps you’ll do some catching-up as well.
I’ve got a very special episode for you. I’m honored to be joined by Dr. Sarah Fox. She’s a historian, writer, and author of Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West. Based in Seattle, Sarah’s work explores the deep connections between places, bodies, and the stories we tell about both. Her forthcoming book, At Home in the Plume, continues this path of inquiry and exploration, inviting us to reckon with the unruly legacy of toxic waste and community activism in the Pacific Northwest.
A quick note before we begin, Care More Be Better is a climate-positive podcast. For every new subscriber on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, as well as on our newsletter, we are planting a tree through a partnership that we commenced with ForestPlanet.org. This is for at least 2025, and we have the initial goal of planting at least 20,000 trees. So far, we’ve planted 14,246 trees as of May 28th. That means every follow helps reforest this beautiful planet Earth. If you haven’t yet, hit that subscribe button and join us in growing something truly beautiful and that truly matters. With that, Dr. Sarah Fox, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Corinna. Thanks for having me.
It’s so great to have you here. It was wonderful to see you speak when you were being interviewed for Prescott College, an institution that I call my home for my PhD research. I’m so thrilled to get to know you today and through your future scholarship at Prescott College. We’re very excited to have you.
Thank you.
Author And Historian Sarah Fox
I wanted to first start with this bigger question of what drew you to this intersection of environmental history, community storytelling, and these nuclear legacies.
I’ve always been passionate about spending time outdoors. That was a big part of my childhood growing up, and a value that my parents were always centered on. As I started to get older, growing up in the Western United States, I was constantly exposed to conflicts over land use. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, there were lots of debates about the spotted owl, for example, and whether we could have jobs and also have wild animals or old-growth forests.
As a kid or as a young person, it was interesting to me how you could have groups of people that seemed so ideologically opposed but who shared a place, who shared a home, and who had maybe ideas about what our relationship with that place should be. That grew into an academic passion and a passion as a writer for these stories that we tell about the places we live, and how those narratives do or don’t show us a lot of the things that are happening there.
I came to believe that we share something in common that runs a lot deeper than a ZIP code. We share our reliance on water, air, and soil, despite the different political views we might have. Those questions were on my mind when I started doing my Master’s degree research many years ago. I was living in Utah at the time. I’d gotten a scholarship to study Western American history. I wanted to get at these questions of our relationship to place, the way we tell stories about that, and the way those stories do or don’t bring us together.
People share something in common that runs a lot deeper than just a zip code. We share the water, air, and soil despite our different political views.
I started hearing about Downwinders. Coming from Washington State, I thought of Downwinders as people who live near the Hanford nuclear facility. I didn’t know that we had tested nuclear weapons in Nevada for a very long time, and that there was a large group of people who identified as Downwinders of that activity. I was so perplexed that I had never heard of this history before. It seems so big and so shocking that I got pulled into researching, and that research would eventually become my first book, Downwind.
I happened to be aware of some of the nuclear storage sites in Nevada. For instance, outside of Nevada and outside of Las Vegas in the Palumbo area, off of the mountainside, nestled into what would otherwise be this pristine and beautiful land, buried in the mountain, this toxic waste. You have effect from that as well because sometimes a barrel will leak. There aren’t forever solutions. There is no forever solution for nuclear waste. That reality becomes more and more clear as we see the effects downstream and downwind with time.
I was watching a video recently of people finding liquid mercury on the banks of a river. This is something that has become somewhat commonplace. We know that these waters can look clean and pristine, yet they’re not safe to drink. Backpacking and getting outdoors, you’ve got your filtration stuff with you. You also know that the cleanest water you’ll drink while you’re out there is the stuff you brought with you. That reality is something that we are still getting used to and contending with.
I also grew up in Southern Oregon. I remember all the campaigns to save the spotted owl that were probably in the ‘80s. I was growing up in what was Lumber Town USA in Medford, Oregon, or in the Rogue Valley in Ashland. Many of the people who relied on forestry-type work for their livelihood were like, “What? It’s an owl. Can’t it go live somewhere else?” They didn’t think about it as a solvable problem. “Either I have a job or this owl goes. I need a job. I need to put food on the table, so I can’t care about this owl.” I think that trade-off is something that we’re going to continue to contend with as we face climate change. Big problems. You’re writing about bigger problems.
I appreciate that comparison that you draw because it’s never that simple. It’s never jobs or spotted owls. They’re both part of a system that we’re encouraged to see in very overly simplified and binary terms by structures of power that are invested in us, not paying attention to them. That has been part of my work. It is to try and sift underneath those stories, those oversimplifications, to see how we might all be tangled up in this together.
Instead of clear-cutting an entire forest, there are other methods to select wood that you can take out and preserve the health of the forest at the same time. There are always other solutions, but it is a very binary perspective that drives us. People, generally speaking, can’t be bothered to look too deeply at something that they see as “It’s too complicated. I can’t.”
They were encouraged to see it that way. “That’s beyond our expertise,” which is another passion of mine, thinking a little bit more critically about what constitutes expertise and who gets to claim it.
I would love for you to talk about your background as a historian and a Pacific Northwesterner, and how this might have shaped the narrative arc of Downwind.
My mother is a historian. I grew up in the corner while she was doing oral history interviews. She’s a historian of the Pacific Northwest. I was raised steeped in this practice of thinking more deeply about who has relationships with a place, how we tell stories about those relationships, and how those relationships matter. I grew up listening to those stories. I became passionate about the pursuit of history as a way to think more about the context that shapes our stories and our storytelling.
My training is as a historian, but I was trained in doing archival research and oral history work, and looking for documentary evidence about the past and about changes in the past. I’ve always been an interdisciplinary scholar. I always believed that you can’t learn a story through one entry point alone, for example, just through archival documents or scientific studies. We need a lot of different forms of information to get a full picture of a complicated question, like what is leading to spotted owl extinction, or what were the effects of nuclear weapons development on the people who lived near the places where they were being constructed and developed?
There’s no single disciplinary approach to eco-social problems or eco-social questions. We need to be listening for other forms of expertise. I’ve always read widely in scientific literature. I’m not a scientist, but I love hanging out with scientists and with people who have backgrounds in environmental studies. I’m also very passionate about studying social movements.
I’m curious about the ways that we decide that something isn’t right, that something is out of balance, and the way we tell stories about that problem, and the way we come together and develop strategies to try and shift it. Those combined interests, in a lot of ways, are nurtured by growing up in the Northwest. There’s a lot of passion for the outdoors, and there’s a lot of passion for social justice. That shaped my trajectory as a researcher, an academic, and a writer.
Highlighting The Voices Of Ordinary People
In Downwind and your newer works, you spotlight activists and everyday people as central figures. Why is centering community voice so important in this world of environmental history?
For a very long time, what I learned when I started studying nuclear weapons development and nuclear history is that the voices of ordinary people are systematically excluded. For ordinary folks like me, I do have a degree in history but no background in physics or science, it is assumed that we cannot understand the details of something like nuclear weapons production. It’s a topic that’s best left to the experts.
What I learned, as I started digging deeper into the history, is that shutting ordinary people out of these conversations was also a strategy to protect nuclear weapons development because there was a recognition very early on that this was dangerous, that this was going to lead to long-term contamination, and this was going to make people sick. It was going to cause birth defects. It was going to cause cancer. It was going to cause changes in people’s genetic material that would echo forward for many generations.
In full cognizance of that reality, decision-makers at the Federal level made the decision to focus on this narrative that we should leave this to the experts, and that ordinary people didn’t have the capability to understand things like nuclear risk. Over the years, this formulation has been applied repeatedly. We see it intensively after the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in 1979, where the public became alarmed about the possibility of risk from radiation exposure. Alarm and anxiety about risk are framed as the big problem. It was sometimes called radio phobia, where people had an unreasonable fear of radiation. We should strive to listen to calm and clear information from the experts so that people won’t become panicked and causing anxiety and stress.
In actuality, what I learned was that people’s anxieties were oftentimes very well-founded. There were changes in the environment that were taking place. There were changes in people’s health. Young children were disproportionately at risk from these episodes of radiation exposure, both sudden, like in the Three Mile Island accident, or slow, steady exposure over the long term from things like nuclear weapons production or nuclear waste storage. There was documented evidence that people were getting sick.
I started to believe that centering community stories was an important corrective to these long history of marginalizing and sidelining community experiences, where people were trying to get more information about what was happening in their area, their water, and their bodies so that they could seek appropriate medical care and make informed decisions about their food supply. It’s the opposite of paranoia. It’s people trying to make informed decisions. I came to believe, through doing the research for that book, that these stories were a vital form of counter-evidence that needed to be put in conversation with the more official record that was created by entities like the United States government and the Atomic Energy Commission.
Trust The Experts Vs Questioning The Science
You mentioned a couple of things that I want to circle back to. One of those is this “leave it to the experts” perspective. I feel like this applies in contrast to a major trend in politics today, which is that we’re not supposed to trust any of the experts. Scientists are somehow creating alarm where none is deserved, that these IPCC reports or the international society that is essentially telling us where climate change is becoming more problematic, and how to reverse some of those issues. so that we don’t face the mass extinctions that we are facing over the course of the next few decades.
We’re already in it. We see mass die-offs of species of insects and mollusks in our oceans. Fish, birds, wildlife, and all sorts of animals are essentially going extinct at this point in time. We can be referred to as alarmists or the blue-haired liberal, which is maybe why I put a little blue in my hair, poking fun at them. The realities are that people have been encouraged not to trust the science in front of them, to believe that vaccines are bad, and now we see polio cropping up in different environments around the United States. We can get to a spot where suddenly, we don’t have community protection anymore because so many people are unvaccinated. I think we get to a threshold of about 10% of the population that is unvaccinated, then we can see community outbreaks that are hard to control.
At any rate, that’s not to say I want a draconian state that forces everybody into these situations, but it is also an important point to note that we’re being encouraged, as a populist, not to believe the science, to question everything, to listen to whichever politician that we’re supposed to from our side of the aisle, so to speak. What do you think about this movement? Can these two realities exist at the same time, where you say, “Trust the experts here, but don’t trust the experts here?”
Expertise, at various times in history, has been weaponized in much the same way as what we might call expertise backlash is also being weaponized. Again, it’s a problem of a binary approach. What I have come to believe is necessary in any moment in any problem is a form of triangulation, where we don’t look at the “experts” as a monolith. We look at them as individual entities who bring something to our understanding of a problem.
A woman from a rural community, who is pointing to clusters of birth defects, and who has concerns that they might be related to a pesticide that is used in her community, her perspective is equally worthy of being aired as the perspective of a scientist who maybe spent decades studying that chemical and has published papers on that chemical. When we’re going to make decisions about that chemical, both of those people should have the right to be in the room and ask each other questions.
I’ve found so much evidence, over the years studying nuclearism, of deeply ethical scientists who brought forward concerns about human health impacts and long-term environmental impacts, and were silenced not by science as some sort of abstract entity, but by political regimes who were interested in moving in a different direction, by corporate interest who were concerned about the economic impact of regulations, who mobilized their own experts.
You mentioned climate change, some of the early campaigns against climate change science were waged by some gentlemen with a consulting agency, whose first big client was Big Tobacco in the 1950s. There’s a wonderful book called Merchants of Doubt by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. She looks at the history of this consulting firm, which got its start helping Big Tobacco in the 1950s to defeat arguments against the regulation of cigarettes by bringing out their own experts who could cast doubt on questions of causality.
Even though the science was there, as they say, to prove that smoking caused cancer, they were able to defer regulation by creating doubt through the mobilization of their own experts, people who had scientific backgrounds that weren’t necessarily related to cigarette smoking or lung cancer. The guys running this agency were former nuclear scientists who had perfected this strategy of generating doubt in expert terms while working on nuclear weapons production. These same fellows would later go on to help create doubt around climate change science by bringing out other experts to muddy the waters.
What I always do with my students, when I teach undergraduate classes, is I say, “Who are the experts? What is the basis of their expertise? How can we look a little bit more carefully at who we’re being instructed to trust? Are there divergent perspectives in the science that it would benefit us to bring to the table?”
Ordinary people are no more of a monolith than the experts. We have a lot of different forms of expertise that come from our daily lives and our various work. Just the same way that we see ordinary folks are not a monolith, the experts are not a monolith either. The current moment of political discourse flattens the ocean of all experts being somehow the same, and they’re not.
Research studies that are in third-party, peer-reviewed journals are supposed to reveal any conflicts of interest. However, you have people who work in industry that then suddenly get gobbled up and employed by a lobbying firm of some sort. They have an interest, they have all this background, they have the history, they know the people, and they were enticed away by big salaries, dollars in kickbacks, and all sorts of things that essentially will correct what is seemingly uncomfortable with time.
I have also seen people who do TED Talks on something like GMOs and glyphosate, basically claiming that it’s a non-issue, that a little of it is used, that it’s not a problem, and that the yields are what’s important. Why is this TED Talk even out there? There’s a simple disclaimer underneath that TED Talk saying that a number of experts have come up in opposition to the content shared in this presentation. I’m like, “Yes, and how?”
The more research we see on the effects and perils of glyphosate, otherwise known as Roundup, put out by Monsanto, and now a part of the Bayer Corporation because Bayer bought out Monsanto, largely to put that brand to death because so many would call them Monsatan. They got branded poorly. Now, you bury something in another corporation that is also heavy in chemicals. Suddenly, you can lobby to keep this thing around a little bit longer to delay the inevitable one-day regulation that will put it to bed, because there are profits to be made today at the cost of the health of people, generally speaking.
The TED Talk anecdote goes to show how effective doubt is at preserving practices that are quite likely to cause harm, and we have a lot of evidence that they will likely cause harm. If there is some doubt about causality, which is frequently the case when you’re talking about environmental contamination, exposure over long periods, accumulating in our bodies, it becomes difficult to say you’re cancer was caused by your exposure to X. Manufacturing that doubt or manufacturing the notion of there being some sort of scientific uncertainty or controversy is profitable for companies and entities that are interested in perpetuating these processes that introduce these dangerous forms of chemicals into our environments and into our space.
Manufacturing doubt, uncertainty, and controversy is profitable to companies interested in perpetuating and introducing dangerous chemicals in the environment.
How Underserved Communities Are Harmed By Fallout
Let’s talk about what it means to be downwind from one of these situations, whether it be a nuclear, a pesticide runoff, or something to that effect, but environmental contamination. Often, the sites where people experience the most downwind or are going to be negatively impacted by this are the impoverished communities, and largely people of color. Are there situations where you’ve seen that the impact has been demonstrated in very wealthy populations, and so suddenly, changes occurred? Just so that we can see the flip side of that. I’m not aware of any, but I would love to know if you have come across that.
You see those stories less often, but they are out there. For example, the Rocky Flats nuclear facility, which is located between Denver and Boulder, Colorado, is quite near two pretty significant population centers. I wouldn’t say that they are necessarily super wealthy communities, but you have a larger concentration of White property owners who are the demographic that usually move the needle most dramatically in American political culture when they’re upset about something that’s happening and it could affect their property values.
When revelations started coming out about plutonium leaving the Rocky Flats site, which it did quite often during their production of components for nuclear weapons, it caused a lot of alarm, and you had a swift organizational response from a lot of White property owners, and it got a lot of publicity. Rocky Flats was shut down. There was a Federal investigation, and the site was “cleaned up,” which I have to put air quotes around that. You can’t clean up plutonium. It doesn’t ever go away. You can only try to contain it.
The Department of Energy bragged a lot about how it was this incredibly fast cleanup, and now it’s a wildlife preserve, and you can ride your bicycle there. I was watching that unfold. It was unfolded in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but thinking about how that has unfolded in comparison to the cleanup or non-cleanup of contaminated uranium sites, which were also created to produce US nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
The Navajo Nation has over 500 of these uranium sites that have not been remediated. Infants who were tested in Indian Health Services hospitals on the Navajo Nation have consistently been found to have uranium in their bodies. Even though it hasn’t been mined there or milled since 2005. Infants that are being born today still have uranium showing up in their bodies. There’s very little or no urgency on the Federal government to deal with the remediation of these sites. Whereas the Rocky Flats, you’re right in between Denver and Boulder. You had a lot of White folks with a lot of political capital who wanted to see this result quickly.
There are certainly examples where we see more urgency on the part of responsible parties. We’re talking about nuclear sites. The Department of Energy is generally going to be the responsible party. There’s more urgency there. As you say, the vast majority of these exposures are being absorbed by low-income communities, rural communities, and primarily Indigenous communities.
When we think about nuclear weapons production, the United States would not have gotten nuclear weapons technology without the advantages that colonialism has provided. The ability to access large areas of land, minerals, and labor. The ability to then use these large areas of land, water, and air as a dumping site for the dangerous materials that are produced in the course of developing nuclear weapons technology. The story of US nuclear weapons is often told as one of American ingenuity and the inevitable success of democratic projects, but it’s a story about colonialism. That’s also the case with other nuclear powers worldwide.
The story of US nuclear weapons is often told as one of American ingenuity and the inevitable success of democratic projects. In reality, it is a story about colonialism.
The juxtaposition you laid out there, showing that there was action taken when it impacted the White landowners and no action taken when it impacted the Navajo Nation, is a commentary in and of itself. I was thinking about the John Wayne, Santa Ana Airport, as an example, which is simply a noise pollution issue, but you have a lot of wealth amassed in this particular area. It’s relatively close to things like Disneyland, big hotels, and a lot of people vacationing there. If you have ever flown into Santa Ana Airport, and you know what it’s like to leave it, they do this very interesting takeoff strategy to reduce noise pollution for people in the wealthy neighborhoods around there.
It’s like you’re doing a brake stand in the plane before you start, and then take off as quickly as possible. Once you’re at something like 10,000 or 15,000 feet elevation, you coast for a while until you’re over the ocean, and then you kick the engines back on. It is an interesting way in which politics and wealth have come into play for something as simple as noise pollution because you have so much commerce happening right there, and so many wealthy people, and the Hill is in Orange County. This is not a new problem. We’ll continue to see things like this. We also see things like waste sites in impoverished areas. Often, the crevices of the mountains of Pahrump are where this nuclear waste site is. Guess what, some of the lowest priced properties are in and around that area as well.
You can see it too. If you look at a map of the follow-up pattern of continental US nuclear testing, which took place right outside of Las Vegas at the Nevada Test Site, they started testing bombs atmospherically there in the open air in 1951. They did that until 1963, when we had the Limited Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union. After which, they tested nuclear weapons underground. If you look at the fallout trajectory, it’s like somebody put a giant fan in Las Vegas, and all of the fallout is blowing due East. That was not accidental. That was Federal policy.
The United States government, through the Atomic Energy Commission, was in charge of these tests, which were responsible for both developing nuclear weapons technology and also protecting public health, which is a pretty massive conflict of interest. They knew that people would get sick. They knew that they were releasing large amounts of radiation. If that radiation went over Las Vegas or went over the large cities in California, it would create public outcry among populations that had political power, White landowners, business owners, and wealthy neighborhoods.
They deliberately tested these weapons only when the wind was blowing East, which means that Utah, Southern Nevada, Northern Arizona, Idaho, and Montana took the brunt of the fallout, which then continued to cross the rest of the country. In the end, radiation doesn’t weigh very much, and it can be carried quite a long way on the wind. The signature of these nuclear tests would show up again on the Pacific Coast after it had circumnavigated the entire globe.
Those communities that were ultimately on the coast were exposed to radiation, but it was in much lesser amounts than the rural and Indigenous populations that were being deliberately exposed. As you mentioned about the airport, there are strategies to mitigate pollution, but they’re selectively applied to protect certain populations at the expense of others.
Hesitancy Around Preserving Nuclear Documents
I think about your storytelling, in particular, the activist path that you’ve essentially laid out by centering the stories of individuals who are affected by this, diving into their ethnographies and family histories, and the pieces of the tree that they have retained in their hands. One of the things that you’ve spoken on is the fact that they may be skeptical of putting the documents that they have on file in the hands of historical institutions, libraries, and things along those lines. Can you speak about that?
That’s something that I’ve encountered a number of times. A person who has been an activist, whether a uranium activist or a nuclear testing activist, has amassed a large archive, what I would call a Grassroots Archive of their own materials and their own research. I’ve been asked a number of times to help get those archives preserved. When it comes to donating them to an archive, most of which are run by institutions, like the State of Washington or a university, a lot of folks have been hesitant. That hesitancy comes not just from a knee-jerk reaction to authority, but from a long history of institutions colluding with the entities responsible for harm in these communities.
Nuclear weapons development was a big project, and the Federal Government was the one paying for it. In small rural communities or even in big cities, lots of different layers of government became involved in these projects. Having a military base in your community is a big economic boost. What often happened is that the Atomic Energy Commission, rather than asserting its own authority, would bring in local members of government or entities from local institutions to do the work locally for them. This is a colonial strategy of governments, getting local elites to carry the message for them.
As part of that project, the Atomic Energy Commission dumps tons and tons of research money into universities, for example. The University of Washington’s oceanography lab benefited hugely from Federal funds and the Atomic Energy Commission. They were testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific Ocean during the 1950s, introducing these radioisotopes, which allowed scientists for the first time to track global ocean currents.
A lot of what we know about global climate change comes from the Cold War introduction of radioisotopes into global air currents and ocean currents, which allowed scientists for the very first time to get a picture of these global systems. In the hopes of better understanding them, but also better understanding the effects of nuclear weapons testing, the Atomic Energy Commission was dumping a lot of money into universities.
There’s one story that I share in Downwind about a group of sheep herders in the 1950s, who had thousands of sheep die very suddenly, and who had lots of birth defects and problems in young lambs that were being born. They went to their local agricultural extension agents from the state ag colleges and said, “What is this?”
The Atomic Energy Commission was dumping money into those state agricultural colleges and pushing for scientists and experts to say malnutrition was what was responsible for these sheep dying. Privately, they concluded that it was radiation exposure. In the effort to keep local people compliant, they ended up funding this giant study on range nutrition, which the Atomic Energy Commission did through the state college. A lot of farmers then began to feel like the state college had been paid off by the government. There are patterns like this in every place.
It wasn’t a direct quid pro quo, but I’m sure there were buried threats and other things.
It did. I’ve looked at what they called cooperative research contracts. These contracts with the state colleges said, “We will fund this much money into your genetics research program or your oceanography program. In exchange, because this matters is relevant to matters of national security, you will not submit for publication to a peer-reviewed journal. You will submit to us.”
The AEC retains the power to embargo any scientific papers that it deems threatening to the continuance of nuclear weapons development. There were a lot of studies by a lot of earnest experts who were concerned about public health and environmental safety that never saw the light of day because they were sidelined by the Federal government to protect what they saw as a bigger project.
It’s my understanding that that’s also how often funded research is laid forward. I don’t know if that sort of interest has to be declared and conflicts of interest or not.
Ethically, it should be, but I don’t know that it is.
I don’t know that it is either. I’m thinking particularly about drug research, for example.
A lot of it is done by the companies that are getting ready to sell the drug.
They may or may not publish the negative research, or they may have agreements with the researchers to say, “This is a very interesting area that you’ve revealed about these side effects. We wanted to dig deeper to understand it before we publish. Therefore, let’s look at your study design.”
There are lots of ways to keep that information from coming out. One of the big ones that we see in nuclear and also in drug research is to design the study in such a way that you don’t find the problem. If you had a pretty good sense that there are particular health problems that are going to ensue from a particular form of exposure, you would look for something else.
There are a lot of ways to keep information from coming out. In nuclear and drug research, it is to design the study in such a way that you cannot find the problem.
For example, at the Hanford site in Eastern Washington, where we produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, there was a big study that began in the 1990s. It was funded by the Department of Energy because information had come out about the extent of radiation releases there. What they did was they only looked at one health problem. They only looked at thyroid cancer. They didn’t look at birth defects. They didn’t look at reproductive cancers. They didn’t look at autoimmune diseases, and these dozens of other problems that local people were pointing to.
When the study came out, based on the way they had framed it, they were able to say that they didn’t find evidence of an association. Designing studies in such a way that they don’t look at particular problems is another way that we can preserve the fallacy that these things are safe.
How To Tell Stories That Matter
I’ve had many conversations with chemists who can say, “Give me data, and I’ll tell you what you want to hear.” Everything can be in how you’re looking at it, and I agree. It’s interesting. Deep dives can be done on this particular area, but in the interest of moving the story along and coming back to this perspective of storytelling and justice, and how many of us may feel disempowered, in particular, if we’re in a community that is not wealthy or that is more diverse. How do you think we can preserve agency and have these stories told?
That’s such a vital question. Something that I’ve always come back to is that the only thing that can outlast radiation in the environment is storytelling. There are indigenous knowledge traditions where particular stories have been passed down for literally dozens and dozens of generations. It’s the only human product we have that’s capable of outlasting radiation in terms of longevity.
The first part of my answer to that question is that storytelling is asking our elders for these stories. It’s looking for evidence of people’s records of these things. These grassroots archives might be sitting in people’s garages, and then finding ways to make these materials and these stories accessible to wider audiences.
My favorite example of that that I always like to highlight is the Navajo Nation. The vast majority of the United States’ domestic uranium reserves are on the lands of the Navajo Nation in Northern Arizona and Northern Mexico. There’s a huge number of folks on the Navajo Nation who are living below the Federal poverty line, substantially below. They are living without running water, without electricity, and without a lot of the conveniences that most of us are accustomed to.
Selling uranium is a very profitable project, but the Navajo Nation banned the uranium industry in 2005. They did so on the basis of stories that were common in so many families about the health effects of uranium exposure, whether it was to minors, whether it was to minors’ families, or whether it was to folks whose only water source in their ancestral lands was permanently contaminated by the industry.
To have an entire nation, because the Navajo Nation is a sovereign nation within the bounds of the United States, banning this industry entirely at a moment when nuclear power is very attractive to a lot of people who think it offers a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, at a time when the United States government has been actively dumping millions and millions of dollars into renovating our nuclear weapons arsenal, which is something that started under Obama, to resist and to shut out entirely the uranium industry is a powerful act.
It’s evidence of the power of story. It’s evidence of the power of taking heed of the lessons of the past that storytellers have for us. It’s evidence to me of something that I’ve seen in so many different communities that have been impacted by radiation exposure. They are, as we were discussing, predominantly low-income communities without a lot of political power. What ends up happening is that women usually start talking to each other about health problems and birth defects. Women do a lot of caregiving labor in our society. When they notice a pattern of people getting sick or people being harmed, they first share it with each other over the kitchen table.
What I’ve been studying for many years is how these kitchen table conversations can become the backbone of social movements, wherein ordinary people who may not have access to academic research tools or training can start to grasp the basics of what has gone on in their community, what has potentially impacted their air or their water, or the safety of their food. Together, they can become a powerful force, wherein they can reach out to people who do have that formal training, experts who are committed to ethical research and ethical knowledge sharing, and build coalitions that can end up changing policy.
That to me is ultimately more powerful than these institutions and these bad actors who have sought to hide this information from the public. The power of these kitchen table conversations, the power of ethical collaboration to produce scientific knowledge with transparency and accountability to impact communities, is really significant. It’s something that we all have access to. All we have to do is start asking, and people are willing to share that knowledge.
The power of kitchen table conversations and ethical collaborations to produce scientific knowledge with transparency and accountability will greatly benefit underserved communities.
You and I both saw an example of that responsible research as presented by Dr. Lynn Peterson at Prescott College a few steps back. She has focused her research specifically on the impacts of methylmercury on fish populations, and the downstream effect of that on women and babies, specifically, with regard to brain damage, birth defects, and things along those lines, from getting overexposure to methylmercury.
That particular issue is something that is able to be mitigated if we are serious about ensuring that every coal-fired power plant has these filtration systems on it, so that the methylmercury doesn’t end up escaping into the atmosphere. Once it does, it gets into our clouds, small water cycle, and the streams. It affects the fish populations. We eat the fish. It’s also in our air and drinking water. Those are problems that exist regardless.
This particular form of methylated mercury, not the mercury that is found in the coal, but once it’s burned, it’s methylated. It is highly absorbable and highly toxic. It’s one of the reasons that women are advised not to eat certain fish more than a couple of times a month during pregnancy and lactation. She’s making it a birth issue and bringing this research forward to politics in the hope of gaining these regulations. Loosening of restrictions on environmental protections around us is going to mean that coal-fired plants that are less responsible are likely to forego this mitigation strategy, which can prevent these issues.
Her research is so inspiring. As you mentioned, it’s the evidence of the power of ethical, transparent science when it’s leveraged in tandem with things. I listened to Dr. Peterson talk about her research, and it’s so motivated by a love of place, by family connections to the boundary waters, to fishing with her father.
Those places of connections and those stories are what animate so much of her good science, and what makes her science compelling to ordinary people who may think they don’t care about the regulation of coal-fired power plants. They might care about a place where they went fishing with their dad. It’s that convergence of people’s stories of place, their relationship to eating from those places, and the good science that people like her are doing to think about the connections between those phenomena. That’s how we move forward together.
She dedicated her entire life to this research. It’s pretty incredible, and I look forward to seeing that work in action because I do think that she is going to push policy change. That will be meaningful. It shows the power of a single individual, too, with concerted effort on what you can do. Those moments and those stories bring hope. That’s what’s so imperative in these times.
Answering Lightning Round Questions
As we prepared to wrap, I want to initiate this lightning round. Just a few questions for you to think through quickly and share with our audience, then we can get into closing thoughts. Do you have a book that shaped your thinking on justice and ecology?
If I had to pick one title, Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence was transformative for me. He’s a literary scholar. Slow Violence is an examination of the way we have told stories in literature and elsewhere about environmental harm that is experienced by low-income and Indigenous people worldwide. He frames slow violence as the opposite of a sudden, harmful event like a nuclear power plant meltdown or a bomb falling. It’s that exposure that we experience over the long term that causes changes in our bodies. That was transformative for me when I encountered it because it gave me a paradigm to think about eco-social harm that plays out over much longer time scales.
I love it. I think that would be an interesting book to read and fodder for deep thinking about particular issues you face in your life. What is a place that you return to when you need to reconnect with your purpose?
My vegetable garden in my front yard. A big part of the reason for that is that I was raised in a blue-collar family. My mom grew food as a way to supplement our grocery budget. I grew up raising my own vegetables. When we moved to Seattle many years ago, I started a vegetable garden. I was pregnant with my son at the time, and my midwife said, “You’d better get your soil tested.” I said, “Why is that?” She said, “You live in the ESCO plume.” I was like, “The what?”
I had to do some learning, and it turns out there was a copper smelter about 30 miles from where I live in South Seattle that operated for a century, and released this giant plume of heavy metals into the air, which settled into the soil all around the Northwest, an area that prides itself on being cleaner and fresher, for example, than some of the industrial areas on the East Coast. It rattled me. It shook me. I had my soil tested. Luckily, it was below dangerous levels of lead and arsenic, but it changed my relationship with growing food. It made going out to my garden a political act, as much as a personal one. When I need to reconnect and ground and stiff through what it is I’m doing, that’s usually where I go.
Is that where you get the title for your new book, At Home in the Plume?
Yes.
Lastly, if you had one historical figure that you could interview, whether they be living or dead, who might they be?
There are so many ways I could answer it, but off the top of my head is Irma Thomas. She was an activist in Southern Utah who was one of the very first people to draw attention to health problems related to nuclear testing. She died a few years before I started doing the research for my first book. She has always been a person who looms really large. I’m thinking about these kitchen table conversations, and the power of ordinary people to spark quiet revolutions in their neighborhoods. She was someone who was shunned by a lot of her neighbors and family, and not taken seriously. She didn’t let that slow her down. She is someone I always wished I could have talked to in person. I guess Irma would be high on my list.
I love that. Sarah, thank you so much for your work, for your voice, and for helping us understand that place-based stories can be a tool for both healing and for resistance. Where can our audience follow your work, support the release of At Home in the Plume when it’s ready, and what closing thoughts might you have?
For the moment, the website for my first book is where most of that stuff will live. I’m in the process of building a new website since I have a new book coming. I’ll signpost DownwindHistory.com as a landing spot for folks. There will be information posted in there soon about these new projects and the new website.
When the new book is ready and the new website, you’ll have to come on and talk about it. I like that pre-press copy to read, so I’m well prepared.
Thank you so much, Corinna.
Thank you so much. We will be sure to include links so people can engage with your work and follow you as a new core faculty member at Prescott College. Congratulations on that.
Thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be a part of Prescott, and looking forward to more conversations in the future.
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Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
I so enjoyed this time with Dr. Sarah Fox. I hope you have, too. I want to thank you for being a part of this journey. As of this recording, we’ve planted 14,246 trees through our partnership with ForestPlanet.org, one for every new subscriber on each platform. If you haven’t already, be sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Visit CareMoreBeBetter.com to sign up for our newsletter. It’s free, and every single sign-up helps reforest our planet one tree at a time. Thank you now and always for being a part of this pod and this community. Together, we can do so much more. We can care more, we can be better. We can build stronger and more connected communities that make a big difference every single day. Thank you.
Important Links
- Downwind
- Dr. Sarah Fox on LinkedIn
- Downwind: A People’s History of the Nuclear West
- Downwind on Facebook
- Downwind on Tumblr
- Downwind on Instagram
- ForestPlanet
- Care More Be Better on Apple Podcasts
- Care More Be Better on Spotify
- Care More Be Better on YouTube
Suggested Reading
- Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Climate Change
- Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
