Meanwhile, the promotion of nuclear power as a clean energy source took center stage as the climate change threat came into view. The hypothesis that emissions of greenhouse gases could alter the climate first took shape in the nineteenth century, and atmospheric scientists had debated what they called the “greenhouse effect” throughout the 1960s and 1970s. But the year 1988 marked a turning point in public awareness. In June, amid a catastrophic drought and heat wave throughout the Great Plains and the Midwest, James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, appeared before Congress and warned of a real and discerning warming trend. The same month, the World Conference on the Changing Atmosphere gathered in Toronto, Canada, where for the first time they discussed carbon emission reductions. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading international body for the assessment of climate change, was established that December. In a play on its annual “person of the year” issue, Time magazine’s cover for January 2, 1989, was titled “Planet of the Year: Endangered Earth.” The following September, the first book-length treatment of climate change, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, was serialized in the New Yorker, and by the end of 1989, one poll found that nearly 80 percent of Americans had heard of the greenhouse effect.141 As the Cold War wound down, the threat of megadeath in a nuclear war did not disappear, but it was slowly eclipsed by the threat of incremental species extinction on a feverishly overheating Earth.
Heightened attention to the dangers of rising carbon emissions created what one booster described as a window of opportunity for the nuclear industry.142 While its public relations teams continued to stress both the ubiquity and the safety of radiation, they now emphasized what nuclear power plants did not emit into the atmosphere: carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide. One NEI strategic report was typical in its portrait of nuclear energy as “the largest source of emission free electricity, avoiding annually discharges of 150 million metric tons of carbon, 4.8 million metric tons of sulfur dioxide, and 2.5 million metric tons of nitrogen oxide.”143 By the early 1990s, advertisements appeared in nationally syndicated newspapers and magazines championing the industry as a nonpolluter, often accompanied by captions like “Every Day Is Earth Day with Nuclear Energy.” Nuclear critics cited the move as a damning example of corporate green washing, a tactic that came to the fore in the mid-1980s.144 Of course this branding of nuclear power as clean and natural was not new; it harked back to the earliest utopian ambitions for civilian atomic power. But what critics got right was that this strategy dodged long-standing and unresolved questions about radiological contamination. In 1991, as the nuclear industry was tactically repositioning itself as a green technology, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that there were over 45,300 sites of radiation contamination in all fifty states, ranging “from severely contaminated nuclear weapons production sites to small sealed sources used for research, manufacturing, and medicine, to oil and gas wells, to nuclear weapons accidents.” With the lone exception of the handling of uranium mill tailings, there were no federal standards in place for cleaning up the contamination, which the EPA warned was impossible to fully quantify, observing that a “truly accurate inventory of radiological contamination in the United States does not exist.”145 Appearing before Congress in 1990, Nuclear Monitor founder Michael Mariotte imagined that history would one day regard “the use of commercial nuclear power as the irrational equivalent of a declaration of war by governments upon their own people—a slow nuclear war that is beginning to show casualties comparable to those of shooting wars.”146 Yet industry spokesmen heralded nuclear power as a nonpolluter that, by virtue of its existence, had kept oil in the ground and carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrous oxide out of the air.
By the end of the 1980s, the culture of dissociation had been sutured back together again. The Three Mile accident quietly receded into memory and would later be recalled only as a juncture in the history of commercial nuclear power. But it had been much more. At Three Mile Island, the atomic age came apart and reassembled itself into the ecological one. The cord running between these two ages was the unborn, a figure that first appeared at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The accident illuminated how this figure was shaping the political transformation of the late 1970s. As the country hovered between left and right, conservatives consolidated their power by knitting ecological images into a biotic nationalism. This nationalism accorded a crucial role to women as guardians of reproduction at the precise moment that civic nationalism was championing women’s liberal rights and freedoms in the age of feminism. This body-centered nationalism first found expression at Three Mile Island, where residents perceived themselves as patriots-turned-activists. And it appeared again within disarmament activism, as freeze organizers strategically positioned themselves as activists-turned-patriots. The new politics of the ecological age was deeply indebted to the protest cultures of the 1960s, yet time and again that debt was disavowed. Within a mutated political landscape, the social and cultural revolutions of the late 1960s would remain—not unlike radiation—everywhere and nowhere at all.
Conclusion
During the long 1970s, the economic structure, political culture, and social organization of the United States underwent profound transformation. The nation shifted from a state-centered industrial society to a finance-centered globalized economy, one increasingly dependent on services, information, and what economists call rent. Trade restrictions were lifted, capital began moving with greater ease across national borders, and banks emerged as controllers of world liquidity. As the political economy “fled toward the global,” the state replaced managed Keynesianism with monetarism, embraced a neoliberal faith in the market, and shed much of its earlier regulatory functions, thus reducing its role to that of crisis manager.1 The country evolved from a hierarchical, white, and male-dominated system of status to a multicultural, multiracial, antinomian democracy. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the successive crises that shook US society in the 1970s—the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, economic recession—were part of this global restructuring. But at the time, these crises were interpreted in profoundly nationalist terms, as symptomatic of a loss of American power and stature. Amid pervasive fears of national decline, an organic, biological sense of the nation reasserted itself, even as civic nationalism flourished. Radiation Nation has used the story of Three Mile Island to show how ecology gave shape to a biotic nationalism in the 1970s that both imagined the nation as a wounded body and presented sickened bodies as evidence of betrayal.
It was ecology’s preoccupation with reproduction and generational continuity that made it such a rich resource for biotic nationalism. That preoccupation began with the threat of global self-destruction introduced in 1945, a year that “changed everything,” to borrow a phrase from Naomi Klein.2 The dropping of atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, combined with routine weapons testing, introduced a new constellation of fears surrounding reproductive futurity. The atomic age ushered in a core revelation of the Anthropocene: human activity could lead to species extinction. The extinction threat, in turn, became embodied in the figure of the unborn. This figure armed contemporary environmental politics with a powerful corrective to petrocapitalist logics of resource extraction and short-term profit maximization. Harms to air, water, and land can play out across long time horizons and rebound into an indeterminate future. To be sure, there is also a spatial dimension to the maldistribution of environmental harms: they often target poor communities and people of color.3 But the figure of the unborn introduced temporal considerations. Burdens and injuries can be maldistributed not only across space but also across time, that is, across generations. The unborn embodied questions about intergenerational care and injury that are at the center of modern social thought.
This ecological attention to the unborn appears most recently in Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, published in 2014. During the years tha
t she researched petrocapitalism’s planetary impacts, Klein also struggled to conceive a child, and the two became parts of a whole for her. From the oil-infested Gulf Coast marshes to Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” from the fracked landscape of rural Colorado to the acidified waters of the Pacific Northwest, Klein encountered species who were “bashing up against their own infertility walls, finding it harder and harder to successfully reproduce and harder still to protect their young.” In Mossville, Louisiana, a predominantly African American town ringed by fourteen chemical plants and refineries, she found a “woman’s womb of chemicals.” After the BP oil spill, Klein traveled through the bayous of the Mississippi River Delta, where the zooplankton that should grow into adult shrimp, oysters, crabs, and finfish were failing to thrive. She labeled the scene an aquatic miscarriage. In Louisiana she surveyed the oil-soaked surface of Redfish Bay and imagined herself “suspended … in amniotic fluid, immersed in a massive multi-species miscarriage.” What struck Klein was how imperceptibly this destruction unfolded: “no corpses, just an absence.” Five decades after Rachel Carson described the “shadow of sterility” left behind by DDT, Klein saw petrocapitalism depriving “life-forms of their most essential survival tool: the ability to create new life and carry on their genetic lines.” The spark of life was “being extinguished, snuffed out in its earliest, most fragile days: in the egg, in the embryo, in the nest, in the den.”4
Until the 1970s, it was Cold War dissenters who made this move of connecting fertility crisis to ecological crisis; Women Strike for Peace and Silent Spring are two examples. The link did not appear within dominant discourses of US nationalism, which remained triumphalist and optimistic during the postwar years. This was because in addition to marking a rupture within the history of the Anthropocene, the year 1945 constituted a geopolitical turning point for the United States, which fully consolidated itself as a global (as opposed to continental) power. The years between 1945 and 1973 were the age of an American imperium, what Henry Luce called “the American Century,” characterized by unipolar dominance, unprecedented military, political, and economic power, and a moral authority that had emerged out of the fight against fascism. This age came to a precipitous close in the early 1970s, when amid war and recession, many policymakers and citizens alike perceived a nation in the throes of decline. Most devastating was the military defeat in Vietnam. Others saw the shuttering of factories and the relocation of manufacturing jobs overseas as evidence that the economy was faltering. Still others saw the emergence of movements for racial, sexual, and cultural liberation as a troubling sign that older institutions, especially the traditional family, were coming apart. At Three Mile Island, these fears of national decline collided with fears of radiological disaster and a collapse of trust in the state. As this happened, the atomic-cum-ecological construction of the unborn as an object of vulnerability in need of protection, earlier aligned with Cold War dissent, became incorporated into a conservative nationalism that leveled three charges: the nation had been weakened, the official story could not be believed, and patriots had been betrayed.
This conservative nationalism accorded a crucial role to the human body. The insight that the body could be a site of political contestation had its origins in the social upheavals of the 1960s. The black freedom movement demanded more than formal equality under the law; it called for both a fuller accounting of racism’s depredations and new forms of liberation. As they fought to expose epidemics of police brutality and mass imprisonment within black communities, activists singled out the black body as a locus of extraordinary political violence. Simultaneously, Afrocentric reclamations of black culture and identity imagined the black body as a site of emancipation and recovery.5 With the rise of women’s and gay liberation in the late 1960s, the human body—its inviolabilities, its capacities, and its pleasures—assumed an even more prominent role within the political field as activists demanded sexual freedom and autonomy. Meanwhile, the black and women’s health movements insisted that sickness itself could be deeply embedded in structures of inequality. This heightened attention to the body deepened the liberal tradition of individual rights by pushing it beyond an earlier emphasis on reason and rationality.
By the 1970s, conservatives were developing a body politics of their own. This politics went beyond efforts to regulate the bodies of others, whether through a criminal justice system that meted out violence against black and brown bodies or through laws that sought to control the bodies of women and gay people. Unlike the social movements of the 1960s, which were animated by universalist ideals, conservative activists were driven by the sense that their bodies and the bodies of the people they loved—the patriot, the veteran, the radiation victim, the loyal American—had been injured and betrayed by the government. This was patriotic body politics. In the 1970s, as the nation hovered between left and right, the symbol of the suffering body migrated across the political landscape and ultimately tipped the balance rightward.
At first, patriotic body politics centered on the martial masculine body: the POW and the MIA, the wounded soldier, the disabled and atomic veteran. But at Three Mile Island, those bodies were displaced by the bodies of women, children, and the unborn. The crisis thus captured women’s dualistic role within the political realignment of the decade. On the one hand, women’s liberation exemplified a civic nationalist vision that cited gender and sexual freedom as evidence of the nation’s redemptive capacities for democratization. The push for women’s political, economic, and social equality appeared to hold out the promise of a country that could become more meritocratic precisely through decoupling women from their role in reproduction, laying waste once and for all to the retrograde claim that biology was destiny, and incorporating women into a late-capitalist, postindustrial market society no longer organized around the male breadwinner ideal. Yet on the other hand, the core insight of the atomic-cum-ecological age—that the future of all reproduction hung in the balance—meant that women would also play an outsized role within an alternative biotic nationalism. The Three Mile Island story makes this clear. After the accident, women positioned themselves as the guardians of reproduction rather than the victims of its patriarchal imperatives. In the process, they crafted a homegrown conservative ecological politics that reflected the influence of feminists who had fought against sexist exclusion in the public sphere and had seen the body as a locus of political struggle. Yet while feminism strove to protect women from the reproduction mandate, the women at Three Mile Island fought to protect reproduction itself from a damaged reactor, a rapacious utility company, and a negligent regulatory commission. If the civic nationalism of the 1970s relied on moving women away from reproduction, biotic nationalism propelled them toward it.
This biotic nationalism was not wholly new, of course. Rather, it drew on an earlier ethnonationalist tradition that saw the nation as an organic, bounded entity that possessed a lifecycle and an inner life. Throughout US history, ethnonationalism has exploded to the surface at moments of perceived community peril: when Puritan villagers felt threatened by heathen “natives”; during and after the Civil War, when white, Anglo-Saxon Southerners fought to defend slavery; when nativists have attempted to exclude immigrants from citizenship; and throughout the Cold War, when governmental institutions and media outlets were gripped by anti-Communist paranoia. This sense of ethnic community peril resurfaced in the 1970s as de jure segregation toppled. In cities like Atlanta, Boston, Richmond, and Charlotte, white citizens swung back against court-mandated busing, taxation, and integration, portraying themselves as victims of hostile external forces, including the courts, the liberal welfare state, and newly empowered minority groups.6 The atomic threat at Three Mile Island supplied this vision of peril with something new: the symbol of an irradiated body betrayed by its own government. Biotic nationalism thus introduced an ecological dimension into this earlier ethnonationalist strain and hitched it to the fear of national decline. The result was the rise of an aggrieved nationalism in
the 1970s, predicated on the claim that the nation had sustained wounds that threatened not just its power and authority but its very identity. These were wounds that had come from within. The political triumph of Ronald Reagan in 1980 can be explained, at least in part, by his shrewd ability to redirect this blame and fear outward during the Second Cold War.
But the Reagan Revolution could never fully resolve the political contradictions of the 1970s. This was because Reagan-era conservatism was never simply a reaction to the left, so much as a relation of selective and often deft incorporation. After all, Three Mile Island residents could never have done what they did without drawing on what had come before: a political left that questioned authority during the Vietnam War, women’s and black health activists who insisted that illness was a political issue, and an ecology movement that sounded the alarm over environmental degradation. When they repurposed core insights from these movements, local activists at Three Mile Island demonstrated how concepts and insights were not only circulating widely by the late 1970s, but also shape-shifting along the way. Ecology supplied the field in which these concepts migrated, scrambling any simple political dichotomy between left and right.
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