Description
Book SynopsisAn ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity.
Trade ReviewReckoning with Harm paints a vivid and distressing picture of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the entwining of oil and life has left an enduring impact on both the environment and the people who call this place home . . . The lessons within this book are immeasurable. * Latina Republic *
Reckoning with Harm is an exceptional study of the production of socioecological suffering arising from predatory oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon...[Fiske] skillfully weaves scholarship across disciplines, presenting a novel exploration of how such forms are being attended to, verified, and contested...[
Reckoning with Harm] poses crucial questions about responsibility and the long shadows of resource extraction while offering nuanced analysis of the complexities. A must-read for students and scholars of Latin American history and environmental injustice in contexts of resource extraction. * CHOICE *
In sum, Amelia Fiske’s historic and ethnographic study includes oil harms to local indigenous forest residents but clearly introduces and details many colonists’ poorly-known lives…many with critical local and long-term health suffering, amidst defensive corporate explanations. As with the broad human rights demands now linked to forested Amazonian Indigenous groups, many poor and recent colonists deserve similar international support. * ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America *
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- A Note on Transcriptions
- Oil: A Visual Glossary
- Introduction. Encountering Harm
- Chapter 1. Building a Life on the Aguarico
- Chapter 2. Evidence
- Chapter 3. Bounding Harm
- Chapter 4. Toxic Exposures
- Chapter 5. Touring Toxic Places
- Conclusion. Relations of the Aguarico-4 Well
- Epilogue: Una Masa Dura
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
