CANARIES ON THE RIM

An eco-activist’s angry wake-up call about the harm being done to the environment by polluters, both military and industrial, and the need for citizens to seize power over the technological bullies in their neighborhood. Ward, who moved to Grantsville, Utah, believing it to be a fine small town to raise a family, soon discovered some unpleasant truths about his new home. Grantsville is located on the rim of the Great Basin, a vast desert of some 165,000 square miles that is the site of various military installations, including the Tooele Army Depot. There, Ward learned, old munitions were exploded in open pits. Also nearby, the Magcorp magnesium refinery, characterized by Ward as “the dirtiest industrial operation in America,— was releasing huge amounts of chlorine gas into the air. Ward traces a pattern of abusive military activity marked by denial and coverup, and charges that a tradition of trading environmental quality for jobs and revenue has turned wilderness areas into “environmental sacrifice zones.” Now dedicated to the struggle for a clean environment, he describes the many battles in the long fight to keep the army from incinerating nerve agents and to force Magcorp to clean up its refinery, and he concludes that local citizen activists are the key to success. Surveying the continuing battle over paying to store nuclear waste in the Skull Valley Reservation, he shows the division between Indians who view it as a bonanza and those who view it as a disaster while making his own stand on the question clear. He and his Grantsville neighbors, he asserts, are like the canaries used by old-time coal miners to warn of lethal gases. This time, however, once toxins are in the air, water, and food chain, everyone, not just those immediately downwind or downstream, is at risk. Except for an excess of confusing acronyms and abbreviations, a highly readable addition to the growing body of writing on the toxicity of our environment.