Description:
Honorable Mention, 2025 Richard Frisbie Award for Adult Nonfiction, sponsored by the Society of Midland Authors
Honorable Mention, 2025 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, sponsored by the Organization of American Historians
Housewives, hard hats, and an Ohio town's restoration of the radioactive wasteland in its backyard
In 1984, a uranium leak at Ohio's outdated Fernald Feed Materials Production Center highlighted the decades of harm inflicted on Cold War communities by negligent radioactive waste disposal. Casey A. Huegel tells the story of the unlikely partnership of grassroots activists, regulators, union workers, and politicians that responded to the event with a new kind of environmental movement.
The community group Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health (FRESH) drew on the expertise of national organizations while maintaining its autonomy and focus on Fernald. Leveraging local patriotism and employment concerns, FRESH recruited blue-collar allies into an innovative program that fought for both local jobs and a healthier environment. Fernald's transformation into a nature reserve with an on-site radioactive storage facility reflected the political compromises that left waste sites improved yet imperfect. At the same time, FRESH's outsized influence transformed how the government scaled down the Cold War weapons complex, enforced health and safety standards, and reckoned with the immense environmental legacy of the nuclear arms race.
A compelling history of environmental mobilization, Cleaning Up the Bomb Factory details the diverse goals and mixed successes of a groundbreaking activist movement.
Brief description: Paul Sutter is series editor for the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. He is professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder. He has published five books, including Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (Georgia, 2015) and Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Washington, 2005).
Review Quotes:
"The book reads like an adventure novel . . . demonstrat[ing] that a scholar can both observe the highest scholarly standards of citation and documentation and captivate the reader's attention. Huegel integrates data from scholarly sources, government documents, archives, and interviews. The work is a case study, yet the findings regarding strategies and alliance-building are broadly relevant. The conclusions are nuanced. The book is a classic."
-- "Choice"