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Podcast: New Books in Environmental Studies
Episode: Traci Brynne Voyles, "The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism" (U Nebraska Press, 2021)
Description: Can a sea be a settler? What if it is a sea that exists only in the form of incongruous, head-scratching contradictions: a wetland in a desert, a wildlife refuge that poisons birds, a body of water in which fish suffocate? Traci Brynne Voyles's history of the Salton Sea examines how settler colonialism restructures physical environments in ways that further Indigenous dispossession, racial capitalism, and degradation of the natural world. In other words, The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (U Nebraska Press, 2021) asks how settler colonialism entraps nature to do settlers' work for them.
The Sa...