Explaining Disease and Marking Race in California's Central Valley, 1850-1990

Presentation and book signing with Linda Nash.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ANNUAL BOOK LECTURE 2008

Monday, March 3, 2008  |  4:00 - 6:00 pm

MU II, Memorial Union Building
University of California, Davis

On March 3 Linda Nash will speak at UC Davis on "Explaining Disease and Marking Race in California's Central Valley, 1850-1990." Taking us from nineteenth-century fears of miasmas and faith in wilderness cures to the recent era of chemical pollution and cancer clusters, Nash charts how Americans have connected their diseases to race and place as well as dirt and germs. Nash, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington, has been the recipient of a fellowship from the National Library of Medicine, and she serves on the editorial boards of Isis and Environmental Justice. Her recent book, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge, has been awarded the John Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association, the Pacific Coast Branch Award of the American Historical Association and the Serra-Keller Prize of the Western Association of Women Historians.

Among the most far-reaching effects of the modern environmental movement was the widespread acknowledgment that human beings were inescapably part of a larger ecosystem. With her new book, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge, Linda Nash gives us a wholly original and much longer history of "ecological" ideas as that history unfolded in California's Central Valley.

This event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the UC Davis John Muir Institute of the Environment; Environmental Justice Project; Department of History; Davis Humanities Institute; Consortium for Women’s Research; and the Center for History, Society and Culture.