![]() The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. His research, writing, and teaching are inspired by the beautiful Montana landscape that he and his ever-supportive pack call home. ![]() He has been fishing since he was a small boy and relishes summer caddis fishing on the Gallatin River, where he enmeshes himself in a watery world of currents, bugs, and fish. He argues that because our bodies are embedded in environments, as those environments are engineered and polluted our bodies become relics of our industrial age, basically historical artifacts.īrett skis regularly in Montana and sails in the San Juan Islands with friends and family. His third book, Toxic Archipelago (Washington, 2010), winner of the George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history from the American Society for Environmental History, investigates pollution episodes in Japan’s modern history and how they evidence the way in which our bodies are integrated into environments, particularly industrialized ones. The book pushes the boundaries of nonhuman agency in historical analysis. For this project, he spent as much time researching with wolf biologists in Yellowstone National Park as he did in archives in Japan, trying, through ethological and ecological sciences, to give wolves a voice. Four years later he published The Lost Wolves of Japan (Washington, 2005), which focuses on the two subspecies of wolf in Japan that hunters pursued to extinction at the end of the nineteenth century. He explores how environmental change and epidemic diseases engendered dependency among native Ainu groups, enabling the Japanese subjugation of Hokkaido and beyond. His analysis demonstrates that the conquest of Hokkaido fueled early modern Japanese economies and bodies much as European expansion to the New World brought silver and sugar to European ones. His first book, The Conquest of Ainu Lands (California, 2001), investigates the conquest of Japan’s northernmost island in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His nonacademic writing has appeared in Sail magazine. ![]() Currently, he is writing Cambridge’s Concise History of Japan. He has written three books in addition to two coedited volumes, the most recent of which is Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power (Hawaii, 2013). He teaches courses on environmental history, Japanese history, and world history. from the University of Oregon and was assistant professor of history at Yale University prior to returning home to Big Sky Country. Walker is Regents Professor of History at Montana State University, Bozeman. Join us on Monday, April 3 at 3:30 in 4130 Posvar Hall to learn more.Brett L. Professor Walker will examine asbestos in the construction and, more importantly, destruction of Japan’s built environment, with a focus on the impact of the 3/11 disaster and the later clean up." Indeed, asbestos was a critical fiber in the construction of Japan’s modern built environment because of the culturally engrained fear of fire. Although the United States EPA began phasing out asbestos in the 1970s, Japan continued to use chrysotile asbestos until 2004. ![]() Japan’s history of asbestos use contrasts with many other industrialized nations. Now, every time a backhoe or shovel digs into this rubble, asbestos fibers are released into the environment to threaten human health. Indeed, when the tides of the devastating tsunami ebbed, the unnatural disaster of cleaning up Japan’s pulverized and aerosolized built environment remained. It also left an estimated 25 million tons of rubble, much of it contaminated with asbestos and other carcinogenic toxins. The strong quake unleashed a tsunami that swept away entire communities. "On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake devastated northeastern Japan and caused one of Earth’s most dangerous nuclear catastrophes. Walker, Regents Professor of History at Montana State University, Bozeman, will be giving a talk next Monday about disasters in modern Japan. ![]()
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