| Description |
We are due for a seismic reckoning in the American West and in the environmental humanities. Though plate tectonics has revolutionalized the earth sciences, this pardigm has yet to shift environmental humanities' epistemologies and ontologies, despite a recent geologic turn. The lens of seismicity offers a novel strategy for interdisciplinary environmental investigations. I narrate a seismic underground where colonialism and nuclearism collide with hazardous tectonic energies in the Seismic West, a region defined by the Cascadia Subduction Zone, the San Andreas Fault, the Basin and Range, and the Yellowstone Hotspot. Relationships between seismic landscapes and knowledges in the American West reveal a tectonic aspect of the Anthropocene. Chapter II articulates how an Anthropocene defined by colonial histories has diminished traditional geological knowledge, the indigenous seismic epistemologies best equipped to reckon with the slow violence of tectonic agency. Chapter III traces how seismological knowledge of the American West arises in the Atomic Age. Chapter IV considers the Idaho National Laboratory a critical intersection between the West's nuclear development and tectonic agency, highlighting the Anthropocene's compounded geologic hazards of nuclear reactors, radioactive waste, and seismicity. Examining the American West through the lens of seismicity updates our understanding of the region to account for recent realizations regarding the West's earthquake risks and articulates the tectonic contexts and stakes of the geological environmental crisis of the Anthropocene. |
