Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown

This is the startling story of the major plutonium manufacturing complexes in the United States in Soviet Union from World War II, through the Cold War, to the early years of the twenty-first century. This is a great work of historical research. In addition to the historian’s traditional archival work, Brown conducted numerous interviews in both Russia and the United States. She includes some behind-the-scenes views of what she was thinking as she talked to those who worked or lived near the plants or as she crossed landscapes that she knew were poisonous. It is no wonder that Plutopiawon the American Society for Environmental History’s George Perkins Marsh Award for best book in 2014.

 

Despite the ideological polarization of the Cold War, Brown discovered many similarities between the American and Soviet plutopias. They both:

 

·      Were constructed with almost no regard for safety. 

·      Created towns totally controlled by the central government without the hallmarks of local government common to other cities in the respective nations. 

·      Presented a “promise’ of prosperity and consumer affluence in exchange for doing dangerous work.

·      Used the cloak of secrecy and national security to hide and mislead workers and civilians in the area about the dangers of plutonium production to their health.

·      Subjected their employees to health experiments without their knowledge or consent, such as ingesting plutonium and measuring results.

·      Hid harmful releases of materials from the public. As Brown points out, the cumulative effect of these repeated occurrences greatly dwarfs the much more famous Chernobyl accident of 1986.

·      Left a toxic legacy in the atmosphere, land, and water that will continue to plague communities for generations. 

·      Falsified health records and bullied local civilian authorities to do so as well.

·      Attacked dissenters and those who demanded to know more about the medical  risks they faced.

·      Exposed the least powerful people to the greatest risks (convict and foreign laborers and soldiers in the USSR and African-Americans and Native Americans in the USA).

 

There were some interesting differences, however, in the initial construction of the plutonium complexes. As part of the Manhattan Project, there was no shortage of money in building the American plutopia. General Leslie Groves relentlessly drove plant officials to manufacture plutonium. He was determined to build the bomb before the end of the war. He did not want to face Congress to explain why billions of dollars did not produce results. Ironically, it was his questions about weaponizing plutonium as a chemical weapon, that led to the first studies on its impact to health. On the Soviet side, Joseph Stalin placed Lavrentiy Beria in charge of building a plutonium complex. Unsurprisingly for the man who commanded the Soviet security system, Beria’s hand-picked manager relied on forced labor from the gulags.  Criminals, political undesirables, German prisoners-of-war, all fed on substandard food and kept in decrepit quarters, weren’t the most motivated workers. Eventually, Moscow found the man to squeeze out the inefficacies and finish the plant. Thereafter, the plutopias began to more resemble one another. 

 

There were many parts of this story to make one angry at a system that had such little regard for the rights or the health of their employees and countryman, but the absolute hardest part for this reader were the medical horror stories relayed by workers, especially those that occurred to children. It is truly frightening stuff.  

Mill Town by Kerri Arsenault

I really liked this book. It is a memoir about the toll an enormous paper mill reaped on the environment, the workforce, and inhabitants of Kerri Arsenault's home town of Mexico, Maine. As an environmental history, Mill Town provides an excellent source on the the harmful effects of large factories, chemicals, and toxic waste have on the interconnected human and natural world. It is one more reminder that these are not two separate spheres with nature as some sort of other world. As Rachel Carson demonstrated in Silent Spring sixty years ago, people and birds share the same fate. Mill Town discusses environmental policies, corporate denial, collusion between politics and industry, and waste disposal. Arsenault offers a deeply personal account of the agonizing death of her father, a lifetime mill worker. Mill Town chronicles how Arsenault pieced together the story of Mexico's cancer epidemic through interactions with family members, neighbors, townsfolk, and the historical records. It is part socio-economic history of the mill, the town, the rise of industry in the early twentieth century and its precipitous decline in the 1980s, intermingled with the story of the rise and fall of the working class and the effects of automation. Towards the end she examines how  her generational  cohort, those who graduated high school in the 1980s, split into two different groups: one who left Mexico, as she did, and another who remained in the town and even took one of the declining numbers of jobs at the mill. As a reader, I got the sense that the latter harbors considerable resentment towards the former for abandoning their town and leaving their own parents behind to be cared for by others. 

On another level this is a very compassionate story of "fly-over" country, the one that was totally left behind in the post-Cold War economic boom of the 1990s but still felt the vicious sting of the great recession, opioids (something mentioned but not explored), broken families, and declining home values, among other traumas. Only a page or two are devoted to the 2016 election, but it is clear that the author, while personally opposing Donald Trump, understands why many in her former home town cast their ballots for him. If one is unfamiliar with the America Arsenault describes than this empathetic exploration of it would be a good starting point. 

Recent Reads: Speece, Defending Giants

 In my twenty years of teaching at community colleges I was continuously fascinated by the experiences that my students shared in class. One student in my environmental history class a couple  years ago had been a lumberjack in the northwest. He described to the class what that entailed, confrontations with protesters, and even what an unpleasant experience it was to strike a tree spike with a chainsaw. I couldn’t help thinking about this as I read Darren Speece’s superb Defending Giants: The Redwoods  Wars and the Transformation of American Environmental Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017). 

 

The Redwoods Wars transpired in the northwest coast of California from the early 1980s to the end of the twentieth century. From Speece’s description of the events in that twenty-year period, it certainly sounds like so many battles fought over a long, grueling war as local activists battled both external environmental groups and a multinational corporation. Their objective was to ensure sustainability. They were radical for employing direct action to confront loggers and for seeking to regulate timber harvesting on private land. The battleground went beyond the forests, reaching into the courthouses, trailblazing a new front for both environmentalists and business resistance to regulations. Their great success was in bringing this local matter to national and even international prominence. 

 

For much of the first three quarters of the twentieth century a corporatist approach protected the Redwoods from over harvesting. Save-the-Redwoods League and Sierra Club supported the California Board of Forestry who worked with Pacific Lumber to set harvest goals. For their part, Pacific Lumber was a paternalistic corporation who feared depleting a valuable resource. This arrangement had its drawbacks, of course, and the cooperation is a bit of a simplification, but this status quo lasted until the 1980s. What changed?

 

Well, lots of things changed, as Speece tells us. First off, Redwoods country became a prime destination for back-to-the-land hippie refugees fleeing urbanization. They arrived with an anti-government and anti-corporate mindset and many years of grass roots organization and protest experience. Second, an external firm, fueled by junk bonds and loaded with debt took over Pacific Lumber. This business had no interest in the local economy or sustainability. The Redwoods to them were one more resource to be leveraged to maximum financial payoff to stabilize their finances. Third, the emergence of a more militant environmentalism as exemplified by Earth First!. Finally, on the other end of the spectrum was the radicalization of the anti-environmentalist movement often referred to as the Sage Brush Rebellion.   

 

Local activists battled the international lumber giant for two decades. This is the meat of the book and Speece covers much ground in detail, examining the personalities, intent, tactics, strategy, sources, and outcomes of each of the scores of battles waged during the Redwoods Wars. Direct confrontation created more distrust, and violence. Each success by either side further enflamed mutual hostility. A car bomb seriously injured activist Judi Bari. The FBI even arrested her on the assumption that she was a terrorist who was on her way to bomb someone else. Pacific Lumber violated laws and regulations in their quest to cut trees, an opening that activists sought to exploit with lawsuits. On their other flank, local activists resented and resisted efforts by national environmental organizations to take control of their protest movement. The dedication and strength of the local activists is one of the main points of Speece’s interpretation of the Redwoods Wars.

 

The Redwoods Wars ended with “The Deal,” a bundle of compromises brokered by the Clinton administration in an effort to shore up the president’s support among environmentalists in the lead up to the 1996 election. Pacific Lumber agreed to sell land to California and promised to file the necessary plans with the proper agencies. A deal on paper was one thing, lining up all the parties and implementing it took another few years. There definitely was a hang-over effect. Unsurprisingly, considering the emotional investment, both sides struggled with second-guessing and regrets.

Crusading Spirits: David Brower and William Hornaday

Prior to The Man Who Built the Sierra Club: A Life of David Brower by Robert Wyss published by Columbia University Press in 2016, my most thorough introduction to environmentalist David Brower came from John McPhee’s classic Encounters with the Arch Druid (1971). While it has been a long time since I read McPhee’s account of dialogue between arch-nemesis’ Brower and Bureau of Reclamation Director Floyd Dominy during a rafting trip, Brower came across to me in that work as amiable and casual. That is definitely not that the characterization given by Wyss who, in contrast, depicts Brower as manic, domineering, and demanding. While he may have been charming to meet, he was also a stern taskmaster and troublesome subordinate who followed his own moral compass to the great consternation of his employers who found him difficult to keep focused. As I read through Brower’s life, I kept noting some striking similarities to William Temple Hornaday. Hornaday is not mentioned at all in the index, and I would not be surprised if Brower had never even heard of him in anything more than a passing reference. 

Hornaday focused almost all his conservation efforts exclusively on wildlife while Brower devoted himself primarily to protecting natural landscapes. Like Brower, Hornaday caused his employers at the Bronx Zoo constant headaches. Both Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn were exasperated with Hornaday’s endless fights with everyone over everything. Anything from a seemingly simple exchange of specimens with the American Museum to complex negotiations with the city of New York turned into a brawl. Hornaday’s employers did not appreciate either the stinging barbs that Hornaday, in his zeal for the cause for wildlife protection, directed at his fellow conservations (including someone like George Bird Grinnell who was a close personal friend to Grant) or the fact that battled his adversaries as if it was a no-holds barred street fight. Hornaday publicly shamed and humiliated his adversaries and refused to play by the Queensbury rules when it came to his dealings with the gentleman sportsman. Like Brower’s employers at the Sierra Club, Hornaday’s at the New York Zoological Society eventually decided he was too hot to handle. After a prolonged battle with Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Biological Survey, and John B. Burnham, among others, Hornaday was to some extent forced to retire. 

Like Brower who went on to found Friends of the Earth, Hornaday would not be silenced by the New York Zoological Society. Long before his retirement, he formed the Wildlife Protection Fund, an endowment of $100,000 raised from wealthy contributors, that allowed him the freedom to campaign for his own causes in his own way outside of the auspices and control of the New York Zoological Society. Like Brower’s Friends of the Earth, Hornaday’s organization allowed him to take a much more radical, passionate stance.

Like Brower, Hornaday was a pioneer in the use of media and advertising. When he was with the Sierra Clun Brower produced stunning photography-books and ran full-page ads in major newspapers supporting his causes. Fifty years prior to Brower’s use of these techniques, Hornaday had done similar things. He was the first person to write a book devoted exclusively to wildlife protection, Our Vanishing Wildlife (1913). He also pioneered in the use of photographs in his publications, which was then an expensive and new technology. When Hornaday’s publishers balked at the expense, his wealthy friend and patron Andrew Carnegie financed the projects. Hornaday also used the new medium of film in the cause, such as when he and T. Gilbert Pearson of the Audubon Society showed a clip of egrets being killed and skinned in their lobbying campaign to persuade Congress in 1913 to support a ban on plumage imports as part of Woodrow Wilson’s tariff revision. They were ultimately successful in accomplishing this historic and long-sought objective of wildlife protectionists.

Both men were uncompromising and came to that position after learning some lessons the hard way. For Brower it was acceding to the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam to protect Dinosaur National Monument. For Hornaday, it was working with sportsmen and even gun manufacturers. In both instances, Brower and Hornaday felt  betrayed and became unyielding in their pursuit of what they considered the pure and just cause. 

Both men were workaholics. Brower to the extent, according to Wyss, that he damaged his marriage and even relationship to his children. While Hornaday’s marriage and relation with his daughter remained solid as bedrock, he worked long days as director of the Bronx Zoo followed by long nights and weekends writing. He wrote, as he mentioned in several letters over the years, until he could no longer keep his eyes open.

Both men were builders. Brower took a small California mountaineering club and turned it into an influential national environmental organization. Hornaday built the largest zoo in the world from scratch and made it the international standard in animal conservation and education.

The last similarity that I wish to bring up is that both Brower and Hornaday relentlessly battled federal governmental agencies. For Brower, it was the Bureau of Reclamation. For Hornaday, it was the Bureau of Biological Survey, forerunner to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Both were scathing in denouncing these agencies, their motives, their use of science, and their unhealthy connections to business interests. 

  

I am not sure what all this means. Perhaps, the most that can be teased out of this is that agents of change can be prickly, principled, and unyielding characters unwilling to accept things as they are when they see things as they should be. 

Hetchy Hetchy classroom discussion

We had a very interesting discussion about the Hetch Hetchy dam controversy in my HIS 207 American Environmental History class last night at FRCC. Each student had a two page excerpt of a primary source document surrounding the public debate, including comments by the Marsdon Manson, James R. Garfield, John Raker, William Colby, John Muir, and several magazine editorials that favored or opposed the dam. Three main points of consensus emerged among the students by the end of the class.

 
1. They responded well to the dam proponents who generally supported their arguments with facts, especially dollar estimates of costs and benefits. While they liked John Muir’s salty attack on the dam proponents, they generally dismissed his writing as emotional and lacking the same objectivity of the proponents. The unique natural beauty argument did not hold sway.

2. As was clear from our National Park Service Hetch Hetchy timeline there was a direct connection between the dam and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Two months before the earthquake, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to abandon the pursuit of Hetch Hetchy. The devastating earthquake and its fires gave the project new life. Students found this both interesting, because they were unaware of the connection before, and compelling, because it provided a sound claim in their view that the city needed an accessible water supply quickly. They were a little more than chagrinned to see at the end of the time line that it took 20 years to get the water flowing to San Francisco!


3.They definitely sensed some elitism in the arguments of dam opponents. Protecting a valley that relatively few would see did not compare favorably to the benefit gained by the entire city, in their opinion.

I was a little surprised how much the class seemed to tilt in favor of the advocates of the dam.

Granted, this was hardly a deep dive into the event. Nor did I supply any photographs that might have won them over. In most books that I have read, and with most other historians with whom I have discussed the Hetch-Hetchy controversy, it is self-evident that Muir was on the right side, so I was a little taken aback. The lesson for me is to not count out the ghost of Gifford Pinchot!