Description
Book SynopsisPresents a history of environmental injustice, corporate malfeasance, political treachery, and a community fighting for its life. These frank and often heartrending stories evoke the grim reality of labouring under giant machines and lava-spewing furnaces while turning mountains of rock into copper ingots.
Trade ReviewCopper Stain is a powerful work of grassroots scholarship exposing the tremendous physical and social costs of ASARCO's El Paso smelter. By allowing the former workers to tell the stories of their declining health and the exploitation they have faced through their lives, Hampton and Ontiveros make a critical addition to our knowledge of environmental and workplace injustice."" - Erik Loomis, author of
Empire of Timber and
Out of Sight""From Tacoma, Washington, to San Luis Potosí, Mexico, ASARCO's smelters have been lacing people's bodies with contaminants for well over a century now. Hampton and Ontiveros's study of El Paso presents the fruit of extensive research and interviews with dozens of the central actors in this drama. It delivers the human experience of this chronic violence with the immediacy and care that it demands."" - Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, Professor of History, McGill University
""Modern economies run on copper, but
Copper Stain unearths the costs - human and environmental - in ways we rarely see. Through careful historical research and illuminating oral histories, Hampton and Ontiveros excavate the tragic consequences of ASARCO's frequently unconscionable and sometimes illegal actions in El Paso. The stories collected here remind us how environmental injustice and violence accrue in the bodies of workers, communities, and Earth itself."" - Adam M. Sowards, author of
The Environmental Justice: William O. Douglas and American Conservation
