(In)visible Harms & Toxic Truths
Join authors Mariah Blake, Sunaura Taylor, and Sharon Udasin for a powerful conversation on the human and ecological costs of industrial pollution. From corporate cover-ups and wounded landscapes to disabled ecologies and communities fighting for justice, this panel exposes urgent environmental harms and the movements rising to confront them.
| Where: | National Park Experience Stage (Seats 146, Wheelchair accessible) |
| When: | Sun, Mar 15, 2:30 pm - 3:25 pm |
| Signing area: | Sales & Signing Area - National Parks (following presentation)
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| Genre: | Nature / Environment |
| Moderator: | Patty Machelor |
| Sponsor: | Session made possible courtesy of Western National Parks |
Panelists
Mariah BlakeMariah Blake is an investigative journalist whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The New Republic, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. She was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University....
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Sunaura TaylorSunaura Taylor is an artist, writer, activist, academic and mother. She is author of “Disabled Ecologies” and “Beasts of Burden." which received the 2018 American Book Award. Taylor works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies, and art practice....
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Sharon UdasinSharon Udasin is an environment reporter, based in Boulder, Colorado, who has been delving into water contamination and conservation issues for fifteen years. Her newest book is "Poisoning the Well." She was a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and has reported for The Hill, The Jerusalem Post, and The New York Jewish Week....
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Books:
Poisoning the Well
How Forever Chemicals Contaminated America
Sharon Udasin
Current Issues / Politics / Social Science
Island Press
April 2025
ISBN 9781642833324
264 pages
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Disabled Ecologies
Lessons from a Wounded Desert
Sunaura Taylor
Nature / Environment
Univ of California Press
August 2025
ISBN 9780520424692
368 pages
Buy nowA powerful analysis and call to action that reveals disability as one of the defining features of environmental devastation and resistance.
Deep below the ground in Tucson, Arizona, lies an aquifer forever altered by the detritus of a postwar Superfund site. Disabled Ecologies tells the story of this contamination and its ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Sunaura Taylor takes us with her to follow the site’s disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered.
What Taylor finds is a story of entanglements that reach far beyond the Sonoran Desert. These stories tell of debilitating and sometimes life-ending injuries, but they also map out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement, Disabled Ecologies is a powerful call to reflect on the kinds of care, treatment, and assistance this age of disability requires. More/less
They Poisoned the World
Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals
Mariah Blake
Science / Medicine / Technology
Random House
May 2025
ISBN 9781524760090
320 pages
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