The Dirty Dozen: Toxic Chemicals and the Earth's Future

Forty years after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, this important study examines the history, industrial uses, and harmful effects of the twelve most commonly used organochloride chemicals. All have been fully or partially banned by the Stockholm Protocol, an international treaty signed by about 120 countries in December 2000. Among the twelve are the dioxins (the active ingredient in Agent Orange) and polychlorinated byphenyls (PCBs), which are toxic in minute quantities. Johansen pays special attention to the Inuit of the Arctic, where these chemicals have been bio-accumulating to dangerous levels, moving up the food chain to a degree of toxicity that some Inuit mothers are no longer able to safely breast-feed their infants.
The polar stratospheric ozone has been devastated by emissions of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), and new scientific findings connect global warming near the Earth's surface to significant cooling in the stratosphere. This synergy aggravates ozone depletion because the chemical reactions that destroy the ozone become more energetic as temperatures drop. Synthetic toxins have taken their toll on minority ethnic groups in the United States, and persistent organic pollutants have inflicted physiological damage on humans and other animals. Finally, Johansen explores the estrogenic effects of such chemicals. Sperm counts have declined as much as 50% in 50 years.

Johansen, Bruce E.

Reference

Praeger

From the earliest traces of first arrivals to the present, the Native peoples of North America represent a diverse and colorful array of cultures. From Central America to Canada, from recent archaeological discoveries to accounts of current controversies, this comprehensive study uses both traditional story telling and a powerful narrative to bring history to life. Johansen provides a critical narrative of European-American westward expansion through use of Native American voices, including compelling personal sketches of key figures such as: Tecumseh, alliance builder in the Ohio Valley; Chief Joseph the Younger, leader of the Nez Perce long march; and Susette LaFlesche, an Omaha Indian who reported on the Wounded Knee massacre for the Omaha-Herald.This account provides an uncommonly rich description of the material and intellectual ways in which Native American cultures have influenced the life and institutions of people across the globe, from medicine such as aspirin to foods like corn and squash to democratic ideas. It utilizes portrayals of select incidents, such as the Wounded Knee massacre and the impact of small pox, to reveal deep layers of meaning about the frontier experience in American history. A wide array of contemporary controversies, such as gambling interests, sports mascots, and sovereignty issues, are also included.

The Native Peoples of North America [2 volumes]: A History [2 volumes] (Native America: Yesterday and Today)

History

Americas

Evidence of rising temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and damage to flora and fauna on land and in the oceans has been accumulating for several decades. Scientific bodies around the world have traced this trend to increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, most of it attributable to the consumption of fossil fuels. Despite the evidence, political debate still rages over the existence of global warming. Global Warming in the 21st Century provides a detailed review of the accumulating evidence of global warming, from the Arctic and Antarctic to the tropics, focusing special attention on a number of processes that will accelerate warming as the century passes. Extensive warming also could endanger sea life through the devastation of phytoplankton populations at the base of the oceanic food chain.
Bruce Johansen presents scientific theories on the subject that conflict with popular assumptions and explains that global warming is a slow-motion crisis in which the effects of greenhouse gas emissions are not evident in the atmosphere until roughly a half-century after they occur. Extensive reports from scientific literature explain how ozone depletion in the stratosphere and warming near the surface of the Earth are related. This three-volume work also proposes detailed solutions to global warming, including a worldwide overhaul in energy systems that will go beyond the initial diplomatic efforts of the Kyoto Protocol.
 The set ends with one of the most extensive bibliographies in the field and includes more than 80 color and black and white illustrations.

Global Warming in the 21st Century [3 volumes]: 3 volumes

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Most Americans know very little about Native America. For many, most of their knowledge comes from an amalgam of three sources―a barely remembered required history class in elementary school, Hollywood movies, and debates in the news media over casinos or sports mascots. This two-volume set deals with these issues as well as with more important topics of concern to the future of Native Americans, including their health, their environment, their cultural heritage, their rights, and their economic sustainability.
This two-volume set is one of few guides to Native American revival in our time. It includes detailed descriptions of efforts throughout North America regarding recovery of languages, trust funds, economic base, legal infrastructure, and agricultural systems. The set also includes personal profiles of individuals who have sparked renewal, from Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a leader among the Inuit whose people deal with toxic chemicals and global warming, to Ernest Benedict and Ray Fadden, who brought pride to Mohawk children long before the idea was popular. Also included are descriptions of struggles over Indian mascots, establishment of multicultural urban centers, and ravages of uranium mining among the Navajo. The set ends with a detailed development of contemporary themes in Native humor as a coping mechanism. Delving occasionally into historical context, this set includes valuable background information on present-day controversies that are often neglected by the news media. For example, the current struggles to recover Native American trust funds and languages both emerged from a cradle-to-grave control system developed by the U.S. and Canadian governments.
These efforts are part of a much broader Native American effort to recover from pervasive poverty and reassert Native American economic independence. Is gambling an answer to poverty, the new buffalo, as some Native Americans have called it? The largest Native American casino to date has been the Pequots' Foxwoods, near Ledyard, Connecticut. In other places, such as the New York Oneidas' lands in Upstate New York, gambling has provided an enriched upper class the means to hire police to force anti-gambling traditionalists from their homes. Among the Mohawks at Akwesasne, people have died over the issue. This two-volume set brings together all of these struggles with the attention to detail they have always deserved and rarely received.

The Praeger Handbook on Contemporary Issues in Native America [2 volumes]: 2 volumes (Native America: Yesterday and Today)

The Praeger Handbook on Contemporary Issues in Native America: Linguistic, Ethnic, and Economic Revival, Volume 1 (Native America: Yesterday and Today)

Praeger Publishers

The Praeger Handbook on Contemporary Issues in Native America: Legal, Cultural, and Environmental Revival, Volume 2 (Native America: Yesterday and Today)

This book is about people whose beliefs and affiliations have opposed powerful interests in the present-day United States. This eclectic group of people and controversial issues, from climate-change scientists who have been censored by the Bush administration to Muslims accused of terrorism, have one thing in common. All of them straddle the limits of what Noam Chomsky has called permissible debate as defined by dominant political and economic institutions and individuals. The central thesis is that restriction of free inquiry is harmful to our culture because it inhibits the search for knowledge. Johansen presents case studies in the borderlands of free speech in a Jeffersonian cast―an intellectual framework assuming that open debate―even of unpopular ideas―is essential to accurate perception of reality.
This book is about people whose ideological circumstances have found them opposing established beliefs in our times―scholars advocating the Palestinian cause in a very hostile intellectual environment, for example, as well as climate scientists defending themselves against the de-funding of their laboratories by defenders of fossil-fuel interests; opponents of creation science under assault for teaching what once was regarded as household-variety biology (a.k.a. Darwinism); Marxists in a political system dominated by neoconservatives. The central thesis that unites this diverse array of controversies is that shutting down free inquiry―most notably for points of view deemed unpopular―dumbs us all down by restraining the search for knowledge, which demands open inquiry.
We have been told when going to war, as in Iraq, that freedom isn't free, the unstated assumption being that our armed forces are fighting and dying to safeguard our civil rights at home and abroad. During recent years, however, freedom to inquire and debate without retribution has been under assault in the United States. This assault has been carried out under a distinctly Orwellian cast, under Newspeak titles such as the Patriot Act, parts of which might as well be described more honestly as the Restriction of Freedom of Inquiry Act. The information gathered here will interest (and probably anger) anyone who is concerned with protecting robust, free inquiry in a nation that takes seriously its freedom to speak out, and to define truth through open debate.

Silenced!: Academic Freedom, Scientific Inquiry, and the First Amendment under Siege in America

Politics & Government

This wide-ranging and reliable encyclopedia offers the most up-to-date information on prominent and lesser-known Native American military leaders, chiefs, shamans, explorers, scientists, athletes, inventors, artists, writers, and political activists, as well as on a select number of significant non-Indians (from Benjamin Franklin to Marlon Brando). Sample entries include Big Foot, Black Elk, Cochise, Cornplanter, Crazy Horse, Vine Deloria, Jr., Michael A. Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Geronimo, Louis Hall, Chief Joseph, Lame Deer, Russell Means, Osceola, Ely Parker, Leonard Peltier, Plenty Coups, Pocahontas, Red Cloud, Will Rogers, Wendy Rose, John Ross, Sacajawea, Sequoyah, Sitting Bull, Tecumseh, Jim Thorpe, Victorio, Wooden Leg, and over 550 others. Together, they comprise a startling and unforgettable mosaic of nearly four centuries of Native American history.

The Encyclopedia Of Native American Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Grinde Jr., Donald A.

Reference & Collections

Da Capo Press

For more than a decade scholars have debated the question of whether American Indian confederacies, primarily the Iroquois, helped influence the formation of U.S. basic law. The idea has sparked lively debate in the public arena as well, with Canadian diplomat Durling Voyce-Jones contending it shows a paradigm shift in our thinking, Patrick Buchanan calling it idiocy, and George Will saying it's fiction. For the first time, this bibliography brings together some 450 citations on the debate. The work describes the debate in the words of one of its major participants, Bruce E. Johansen, author of three other books on the subject.
The bibliography also takes the reader back to suggestions of the idea long before the contemporary debate. Lakota author Charles Eastman brought up the subject in 1919, Mohawk teacher Ray Fadden developed it in the 1940s, and John F. Kennedy touched on it in 1960. Bringing the debate to its full flower in the present day, the bibliography illustrates both fervent support and equally emphatic denial in the academy and the public press. The book is both a scholarly tool and a lively exploration of issues bearing on the study of history and multiculturalism.

Native American Political Systems and the Evolution of Democracy: An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in American History)

Greenwood

Integrating American Indian law and Native American political and legal traditions, this encyclopedia includes detailed descriptions of nearly two dozen Native American Nations' legal and political systems such as the Iroquois, Cherokee, Choctaw, Navajo, Cheyenne, Creek, Chickasaw, Comanche, Sioux, Pueblo, Mandan, Wyandot, Powhatan, Mikmaq, and Yakima. Although not an Indian law casebook, this work does contain outlines of many major Indian law cases, congressional acts, and treaties. It also contains profiles of individuals important to the evolution of Indian law. This work will be of interest to scholars in several fields, including law, Native American studies, American history, political science, anthropology, and sociology.

The Encyclopedia of Native American Legal Tradition (Dilemmas in American Politics)

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

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