Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West

In his ardent memoir, Ward, who has fought for the health of the Great Basin Desert, tells the story of his awakening as an environmentalist. He had been living a quiet family life in Grantsville, Utah, in the late 1970s when he began to suspect that the various industries in the region, including a magnesium refinery that expelled the rancid smell of chlorine and an army depot that demolished old weapons, were polluting the region. His community, he realized, risked becoming a new generation of downwinders (named after those who became ill after living downwind of nuclear testing). ""We knew that the more you look for something, the more you see it, until it looms large in your perspective,"" he writes. ""But when you realize that there is cancer in every third house you pass, the evidence becomes compelling."" Once he recognized the relationship between environmental and human health (which he refers to as ""the gospel of eco-human-health""), he had no choice but to act. Ward's ode to the intricate desert and the planet's interconnectedness, following writers like Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams, sets up a fast-paced account of Utah's betrayal by the military, the turn-the-other-cheek attitude of state regulators, the blind eye of corporate hardball and the steadfast labor of whistleblowers and citizens forced to step up and take action. Though Ward attempts to put himself on a middle ground, his sometimes bitter attacks on the people and systems he's worked with can come off as a bit wild-eyed. Nonetheless, this call to clipboards for local activism is both hopeful and damning: a gift to the next generation and a warning that, in the end, there is no upwind. (Jan.)