Breast-feeding in a Small Mining Town

The inscription of properties on the World Heritage List often places restrictions on existing livelihoods. In these contexts, tourism is widely held to be a panacea for the economic and social wellbeing of local communities. Ecotourism, in particular, is regarded as addressing both environmental and social needs of communities. However, existing research demonstrates that tourism seldom delivers benefits to Indigenous peoples or local communities in developing countries. This paper suggests that such limitations are equally problematic for local communities in developed nations such as Australia. Through ethnographic research including participant observation and interviews, this paper describes the impacts of tourism on the local community of Strahan, a small logging, fishing, and mining town that transformed into a tourism village following the World Heritage listing of Southwest Tasmania. We suggest that contrary to the widely held view that tourism created employment and economic growth in the town, locals experience diminished quality of life, limited opportunities, and reduced amenity and services. This suggests that ecotourism overlooks its responsibilities for local communities in developed countries, with profound consequences for social sustainability.

Socio-economic wellbeing in Australian mining towns: A comparative analysis

ii DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDMENTS iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER I 6 THE SOUTHWEST: THE LAND AND ITS DISTINCTIVE PEOPLE CHAPTER II 28 MARY COLTER: HER ARCHITECTURAL DEVELOPMENT AND EXPERIENCE CHAPTER III 45 THE GRAND CANYON: COLTER'S INDIGENOUS STYLES CHAPTER IV 68 PUEBLO AND SPANISH MISSION-REVIVAL HOTELS CHAPTER V 88 CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY 98 APPENDIX 101

Each year, certain special religious images are ceremonially brought from Mexico and Central America to visit Catholic devotional communities in Southern California. These devotional statues of Catholic saints are “imágenes peregrinas,” pilgrim or traveling images. They are official replicas of esteemed images from regionally and nationally significant shrines and sanctuaries. More than inert objects, they are material manifestations of the sacred that are understood to bestow blessings on an otherwise barren American spiritual landscape. These sacred objects-entities possess a power and potency that their devotees often feel they lack in an increasingly tenuous political and economic climate. Since 2006, a traveling image of the Santo Niño de Atocha from Plateros, Mexico (a small silver mining town in the Mexican state of Zacatecas) has made an annual pilgrimage to the predominantly Latino southern California city of Santa Paula. Traveling images like the Santo Niño create and sustain linkages between sending communities and migrants living in the United States.

Schoolteacher Lilly Moffat is dismayed by conditions in a Welsh mining town. She sets up a school to teach fundamental education to the villagers. Her housekeeper and daughter oppose the project, as does the local Squire who will not rent her space. Using part of her own home, she goes ahead with Miss Moffat's School. One of her students Morgan Evans turns from bully to brilliant student.

Taken at face value, northern California’s El Dorado County has a lot going for it—the dramatic Sierra Nevada foothills scenery, lots of room for spacious new houses, and its short distance from Sacramento. That’s why the population has nearly sextupled since 1960, according to U.S. Census figures. But the construction that is transforming this once rural area has also dug up a health risk—thin needles of amphibole asbestos, a particularly hazardous form of the mineral. Naturally occurring amphibole asbestos is not a problem when left underground. But development can unearth the mineral, increasing the risk of exposure. In November 2003 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found that over 25% of 153 soil samples collected from the local high school contained more than 1% asbestos by weight, a level that, if disturbed, could pose a threat to public health. As a result, the agency determined that additional investigations are required. This fall, officials from the EPA Superfund program plan to simulate the activities of school kids playing sports and use personal monitors to measure exposures associated with these activities at several locations including the high school, according to Superfund senior science advisor Richard Troast. The monitoring comes in the wake of another town’s recently publicized experience: occupational and environmental exposure to amphibole asbestos in the small mining town of Libby, Montana, resulting in deaths and other widespread health effects. There are lessons from Libby that apply to El Dorado, according to many asbestos experts. People with no occupational exposure, such as women who handled their miner husbands’ work clothes, can have asbestos-related problems. Further, ambient air monitoring may not reflect actual asbestos exposure—individuals can dramatically heighten their exposure by kicking up fibers on the ground. So an accurate estimate of exposure requires personal air monitoring during specific activities. In the April 2004 issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, a group of British researchers led by J. Corbett McDonald reported their study of 406 Libby miners, in which they calculated that occupational exposure resulted in a 14% increase in mortality from all asbestos-related causes. They also estimated that environmental exposure for 50 years would lead to a 3.2% mortality increase and called attention to the potential health risk in northern California. Extrapolation is fraught with uncertainty, but for El Dorado’s population of 160,000, such a mortality increase could translate into thousands of deaths. A 2002 EPA peer consultation unanimously agreed that for mesothelioma, a rare cancer of the lining of the lung, the carcinogenic potency of amphibole fibers is a minimum of two orders of magnitude greater than for chrysotile asbestos fibers (most likely because amphibole fibers persist longer in the body). Forms of amphibole asbestos also can cause noncancer diseases in proportion to exposure, according to researchers led by Lucy Peipins of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. They conducted a clinical study in which about 6,700 Libby residents had chest X rays. In the November 2003 issue of EHP, the researchers reported 29 exposure pathways related to work, recreation, and household activities. The prevalence of pleural abnormalities increased with the number of exposure pathways, ranging from 6.7% for those who reported no apparent exposures to 34.6% for those who reported 12 pathways. Some data already indicate that exposures in El Dorado are high enough to be harmful. When concerned citizens requested analysis of four deceased pets, the animals’ lung fiber burdens revealed concentrations of amphibole fibers higher than those found in goats from Corsica, where episodic environmental exposure to amphibole asbestos is clearly associated with human mesothelioma, says pathologist Jerrold Abraham of Upstate Medical University. Working collaboratively, pathologist Bruce Case of McGill University confirmed these findings in an independent analysis. A summary of the study findings is available online at http://www.asbestos.net/. What happens next in El Dorado will depend on the exposure monitoring data, says Troast. Some experts are braced for the worst. Says Case, “The situation in El Dorado has the potential to be the most important source of environmental asbestos-related mesothelioma ever in the United States.”

Chapter 5 Skutterudites: Prospective novel thermoelectrics

Entrepreneurship under siege in regional communities: Evidence from Moranbah in Queensland, Australia

Introduction A miner9s life has always been fraught with danger. Besides various traumatic accidents, to which the miner is exposed, his health and life are endangered by the poisonous atmosphere of his environment. In the mines of the Erz Mountains, on both the Bohemian and Saxon sides, it has been known for some centuries that the miners die in the prime of life with symptoms of damaged lungs and rapidly progressing cachexia. These conditions, especially well known at the Schneeberg mines in Saxony, have been mentioned or described by many writers, viz. Agricola in 1500, Matthesius in 1559, Pansa in 1814, Scheffler (1) in 1770, and others. The real nature of the affection was not discovered, however, until 1879, when Harting and Hesse (2), by clinical and anatomical research, proved it to be a malignant tumor of the lungs. Latterly, the matter has been studied by Cohnheim, 1882 (3); Ancke, 1884 (4); Arnstein, 1913 (5); M. Uhlig, 1920 (6); and Risel, 1921 (7). Finally, in 1926, by the thorough research of Rostoski, Saupe, and Schmorl (8), the carcinomatous nature of the tumors was definitely established. On the Bohemian side of the Erz Mountains, in Czechoslovakia, about 30 kilometers southeast of Schneeberg, lies Jachymov (Joachimstal), a small mining town of about 8,000 inhabitants. It has been world famous as a source of radium from the beginning of the present century, but the history of its mines is much older.

John G. P. Cleland: discoverer of pain pathways in labor

BOOK REVIEWS Dorothea Lange. GIRLS OF LINCOLN BENCH SCHOOL STUDY THEIR READING LESSON. NEAR ONTARIO, MALHEUR COUNTY, OREGON. October 1939. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection [call number LC-USFH-021216'E]. BO O K R E VIE W S 3 1 5 Up in the Rocky Mountains: Writing the Swedish Immigrant Experience. By Jennifer Eastman Attebery. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 304 pages, $60.00/$20.00. Reviewed by Diane Quantic Professor Emerita, Wichita State University, Kansas When my Swedish grandmother died in 1965, we found a letter among her things. After a chain of fortuitous events, this letter led my father to his moth­ er’s family in Sweden. My grandfather, also from Sweden, died when my father was fourteen and Grandmother was a worker, not a writer. She lost contact with her relatives in the fifty years she was a widow. Reading Jennifer Eastman Attebery’s book Up in the Rocky Mountains was like reading my grandparent’s story of emigration over and over. My grandmother’s brother, like several of Attebery’s subjects, came to the United States and worked in the mining town of Victor, Colorado, before returning to Sweden to marry. When I was in Sweden, I bought a book (in Swedish) that translates What Did Grandfather Do in America? Evidently, emigration is a common story in Swedish families. Attebery introduces us to a number of Swedish correspondents in the Rocky Mountain West. Her correspondents are hard-working people who write without flourish to their families and friends. They describe with pride their jobs in the mines, the Swedish society around them, and the difficulty of being separated from their families. Attebery is a folklorist, and she examines the letters in her study from a vernacular perspective. Her first two chapters would be of most interest to fel­ low folklorists. In chapter 1, she analyzes the informal language of the letters. In chapter 2, she examines the letters’ forms and formulas as examples of the “informal letter” genre. For the western historian or literary scholar, chapters 3 through 7 would be of more interest. Attebery draws examples from a wide range of letters to examine work, ethnicity, religion, and regional identity, top­ ics that the Swedish emigrants in the West addressed. Some lived in Denver or other areas with a sizable Swedish population, but many were scattered in small mining and farming communities. Some had families or relatives nearby. A few were Mormons who settled in Utah or Idaho. Some were married; many were single. Together, their reports create a composite picture of people from a particular culture who came to America in search of a better life. Because she organizes her study by topics and includes only relevant quotes in her discussion, it is a bit difficult to identify individual personalities. However, in an appendix, Attebery provides short biographies and a few additional, com­ plete letters so that each letter writer takes on an individual identity. When one considers the thousands of letters that European immigrants wrote, what we have here is but a small sample. Nevertheless, the study provides a fascinat­ ing glimpse into the experiences of a particular group of people in a specific place and at an important time as thousands of settlers like these Swedes were shaping the West. ...