Last weekend I attended the 24th annual commemoration ceremonies of the successful anti-nuclear waste dump campaign in the Mojave Desert’s Ward Valley. This was my fourth time in attendance, and it was beautiful as always. When UC Press asked me to write a blog post linked to my forthcoming book this week, I jumped at the chance to write about Ward Valley:

Today, there is no nuclear waste dump in Ward Valley. This beautiful stretch of California’s Mojave Desert, about 25 miles west of the Colorado River, is instead home to plants, animals, and much of the culture and spirituality of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe and other tribes of the Southern Colorado River, including the Chemehuevi, the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT), the Cocopah and the Quechan. Yet at one point, this land had another likely future — as the location for a shallow, unlined trench to store nuclear waste…

To read the rest, head over to the UC Press blog.