Nuclear Gaia : Media Archives of Planetary Harm

The book analyses new media archives on nuclear violence toward humans and the environment in the context of the ongoing project to transform Earth into Nuclear Gaia as a consequence of a confluence of political, military, economic and scientific decisions made back in the 1940s, related to the development of nuclearity. 24 b&w illus.

Describes the transformations we have witnessed due to the development of nuclear science and technology, accelerating policies interdependent on energy, and military procedures that have led us to make a provocative claim that, in many respects, planet Earth is getting closer to the embodiment of the project we call Nuclear Gaia. The book examines media archives and online platforms that recover data and memory and shape community knowledge of nuclear events from the distant and nearer past. These are the pieces of evidence that we are on the eve of creating new forms of social justice, carried out by open-source investigations (OSINT) groups, independent researchers, artists, media makers, activists, local communities and civic groups. Thus, analysing nuclear processes and their social and environmental consequences is no longer the exclusive domain of experts, scientists, politicians and the military. The authors hope that such communities’ practices and decolonial discourses, combined with the critiques within our methodology as post-nuclear media studies, can also change the fate of nuclear industry victims by creating media space to discuss and regain justice as socially sanctioned and shared rules for understanding and using nuclear energy both in past and the future.