IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB903994495

Locating the Boundaries of the Nuclear North: Arctic Biology, Contaminated Caribou, and the Problem of the Threshold (2021)

Luedee, Jonathan (Author)

Journal of the History of Biology
Volume: 54
Issue: 1
Pages: 67-93
Publication date: 2021
Language: English

URI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-021-09631-y

DOI: 10.1007/s10739-021-09631-y

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

This essay is a historical–geographical account of how scientists and public health officials conceptualized and assessed northern radioactive exposures in the late 1950s and 1960s. The detection of radionuclides in caribou bodies in northern Canada both demonstrated the global reach of nuclear fallout and revealed the unevenness of toxic relations and radioactive exposures. Following the documentation of the lichen–caribou–human pathway of exposure, Canadian public health officials became increasingly concerned about the possibility of heightened radioactive exposures among Indigenous northerners. Between 1963 and 1969, scientists and officials with Canada’s Radiation Protection Division (RPD) coordinated an interdepartmental monitoring program through which they sought to determine whether the consumption of contaminated caribou meat had caused radioactive exposure levels in northern communities to exceed the officially recognized “safe limits.” In 1969, the northern monitoring program was suspended after officials determined that radionuclide body burdens had not exceeded the threshold for radioactive exposures. While the RPD emphasized its development of a technoscientific approach to measuring radioactive body burdens, the legitimacy of the monitoring program was linked directly to interdepartmental relations within Canada’s colonial northern administration. I situate the northern monitoring program within broader shifts in public health approaches to radiation protection and use Gabrielle Hecht’s concept of nuclearity to demonstrate how RPD officials employed the logic of the threshold in their assessment of radioactive exposures.

...More

Included in

Article Jacob Hamblin; Linda M. Richards (2021) Connecting to the Living History of Radiation Exposure. Journal of the History of Biology (pp. 1-6). unapi

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB903994495

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Jennifer Fraser; (2021)
Seizing the Means of Reproduction? Canada, Cancer Screening, and the Colonial History of the Cytopipette (/p/isis/citation/CBB836159819/)

Article Sumiko Hatakeyama; (2021)
Let Chromosomes Speak: The Cytogenetics Project at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) (/p/isis/citation/CBB161117781/)

Book Robert A. Jacobs; (2022)
Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha (/p/isis/citation/CBB596228330/)

Article M. X. Mitchell; (2021)
The Cosmology of Evidence: Suffering, Science, and Biological Witness After Three Mile Island (/p/isis/citation/CBB799186607/)

Article Sörlin, Sverker; (2014)
Circumpolar Science: Scandinavian Approaches to the Arctic and the North Atlantic, ca. 1920 to 1960 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001420410/)

Thesis Hay, Amy M.; (2005)
Recipe for Disaster: Chemical Wastes, Community Activists, and Public Healthat Love Canal, 1945--2000 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001561582/)

Article Rolf Sinclair; (2018)
Astronomical Phenomena North of the Arctic Circle… and How People Respond to Them (/p/isis/citation/CBB384026515/)

Book Dathan, Patricia Wendy; (2012)
The Reindeer Botanist: Alf Erling Porsild, 1901--1977 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001321143/)

Book Brenda Parlee; Ken J. Caine; (2018)
When the caribou do not come : indigenous knowledge and adaptive management in the western Arctic (/p/isis/citation/CBB391645362/)

Book John R. Bockstoce; (2018)
White Fox and Icy Seas in the Western Arctic: The Fur Trade, Transportation, and Change in the Early Twentieth Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB031576298/)

Thesis Emelin Elizabeth Miller; (2019)
Empire of Ice: Arctic Natural History and British Visions of the North, 1500-1800 (/p/isis/citation/CBB984131524/)

Article Joan H. Fujimura; Ramya M. Rajagopalan; (2020)
Race, Ethnicity, Ancestry, and Genomics in Hawai‘i: Discourses and Practices (/p/isis/citation/CBB252611287/)

Book Travis Hay; Teri Redsky Fiddler; (2021)
Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism (/p/isis/citation/CBB792171410/)

Article Gregory P. Marchildon; (2021)
Social Democratic Solidarity and the Welfare State: Health Care and Single-Tier Universality in Sweden and Canada (/p/isis/citation/CBB529786926/)

Article Jill Campbell-Miller; (2021)
The Proving Ground: Colombo Plan Fellowships and the Changing Landscape of Health Education in Canada, 1951–69 (/p/isis/citation/CBB181155364/)

Article Derek Cameron; (2021)
“Imagine the Perfect Vaccine”: Homeopathic Vaccine Alternatives and Vaccine Discourse in English Canada (/p/isis/citation/CBB605278051/)

Article Masco, Joseph; (2004)
Mutant ecologies: Radioactive life in post-cold war New Mexico (/p/isis/citation/CBB001180560/)

Article Hamblin, Jacob Darwin; (2008)
Gods and Devils in the Details: Marine Pollution, Radioactive Waste, and an Environmental Regime circa 1972 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001231513/)

Article Bickerstaff, K.; Lorenzoni, I.; Pidgeon, N. F.; Poortinga, W.; Simmons, P.; (2008)
Reframing Nuclear Power in the UK Energy Debate: Nuclear Power, Climate Change Mitigation and Radioactive Waste (/p/isis/citation/CBB000831216/)

Book Walker, J. Samuel; (2009)
The Road to Yucca Mountain: The Development of Radioactive Waste Policy in the United States (/p/isis/citation/CBB001033010/)