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. 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. Toxic Archipelago explores how toxic pollution works its way into porous human bodies and brings unimaginable pain to some of them. Toxins moved freely from mines, factory sites, and rice paddies into human bodies. Nowhere is this truer than on the Japanese archipelago.ĭuring the nineteenth century, Japan saw the rise of Homo sapiens industrialis, a new breed of human transformed by an engineered, industrialized, and poisonous environment. He is the author of The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800, The Lost Wolves of Japan, and Toxic Archipelago: A History. 'On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake devastated northeastern Japan and caused one of Earth’s most dangerous nuclear catastrophes. Our lives depend on these relationships - and are imperiled by them as well. Walker, Regents Professor of History at Montana State University, Bozeman, will be giving a talk next Monday about disasters in modern Japan. Every person on the planet is entangled in a web of ecological relationships that link farms and factories with human consumers.
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