Left in the Dust: How Race and Politics Created a Human and Environmental Tragedy in L.A. - Hardcover

Piper, Karen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1403969310 ISBN 13: 9781403969316

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2006

Synopsis

An intensely personal story crossed with a political potboiler, Left in the Dust is a unique and passionate account of the city of Los Angeles's creation, cover-up and inadequate attempts to repair a major environmental catastrophe. Owens River, which once fed Owens Lake, was diverted away from the lake to supply the faucets and sprinklers of Los Angeles. The dry lakebed now contains a dust saturated with toxic heavy metals, which are blown from the lake and inhaled by unsuspecting citizens throughout the Midwest, causing major health issues. Karen Piper, one of the victims who grew up breathing that dust, reveals the shocking truth behind this tragedy and examines how waste and pollution are often neglected to encourage urban growth, while poor, non-white, and rural areas are forgotten or sacrificed.

About this title

About the Author

Karen Piper is Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Missouri-Columbia and author of Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity. She lives in Columbia, Missouri.

From Publishers Weekly

The story of how L.A. diverted the Owens River more than 90 years ago—draining a lake and leaving behind a toxic dust bowl—is one that English professor Piper (Cartographic Fictions) takes personally. She grew up breathing wind-borne arsenic-laced dust lifted from Owens Lake; her lungs are permanently scarred and her sinuses damaged. It's thus disappointing that this history of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's corrupt grab for Owens Valley water, and the coverup of the consequent environmental disaster, doesn't pack more of a punch. In a scenario familiar to anyone who saw Polanski's film Chinatown, Piper lays out facts cogently enough: the capitalist villainy that enriched the young city's white elite nearly a century ago, when work started on the L.A. Aqueduct; the devastating impact of the water's diversion on both Paiute tribes and local farmers; and how the project led to "white flight" from neighborhoods around the Los Angeles River, which was dwindling to a polluted trickle in a trench. Unfortunately, the damning accumulation of accusations, though well documented, is lost in a prose style as opaque as the horrific dust storms the author describes. B&w photos. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1403969310
• ISBN 13: 9781403969316
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240