Book Description
 

Canaries on the Rim is Chip Ward's firsthand account of how lessons learned from local sickness and death along the edge of the Great Basin Desert wilderness were later applied to building opposition to toxic waste disposal, chemical weapons incineration, industrial pollution, and nuclear waste storage. The secret holocaust that is unfolding along the toxic shadow of America's Great Basin Desert is grim, but Ward's colorful and often-humorous story is not. Canaries on the Rim is a warning and a call to arms, but it is also a compelling drama and a lively primer on environmental activism. If civil action took place in Edward Abbey's West, this is the book that would result.
 

Reviews
 

Chip Ward came to one of the planet's most unforgiving deserts, the flat salt pans west of Salt Lake City, Utah, to drive a bookmobile. He has emerged from it, years later, as a spokesman for that forbidding landscape, the repository of decaying plutonium, retired biochemical weapons, and other manifestations of what he calls the "ecocidal schemes" of big business and government. Ward, working with other concerned Utah citizens, has been fighting an uphill battle not only to remove such threatening substances from desert dumps, but also to prevent new lethal trash from being hauled in from other parts of the country. That struggle has not been universally popular among his fellow desert dwellers: while across the country voters have rejected plans for proposed toxic-waste incinerators for toxic wastes, in that part of Utah, he writes, "we had a tradition of trading environmental quality for jobs and revenue"--and there is, he acknowledges, money to be made in lethal detritus, from which substantial fortunes have been born.

Ward documents his group's efforts to clean up their corner of the American desert, a quest that took him into the halls of Congress and before voters across the country. The struggle is ongoing, with no end in sight. He pleads his cause in the pages of Canaries on the Rim to good effect. Above all, he emphasizes that the desert should no longer be seen as a wasteland fit only for hiding our mess. "It is not desolate at all," he insists. "Desolation is what we have carried to it." --Gregory McNamee
 

Canaries on the Rim is not just a memoir but a manual for citizen activism. It may be a manifesto, but its humor and informality - in and among the hair-raising details - make it an entertaining one. --Amanda Heller, Boston Globe, 26 December 1999
 

Canaries on the Rim calls to mind such groundbreaking environmental exposes as Silent Spring, Refuge and Our Stolen Future ... Ward's lyrical and witty descriptions of life on the rim of the Great Basin recall Abbey's writing in Desert Solitaire ... His book succeeds in its ambitious undertaking, demonstrating that nature is not as regenerative or transformative as we have historically perceived it to be. --Lea Aschkenas, San Francisco Chronicle, 9 January 2000
 

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. --Publishers Weekly, 13 December 1999
A highly readable addition to the growing body of writing on the toxicity of our environment. --Kirkus Reviews, 15 October 1999
 

Inside the Beltway, indeed inside the newsrooms on both coasts, flourishes the stereotype of the rural Westerner indifferent to air and water pollution, an independent cowboy battling federal regulators who want to curb his freedom in the name of the environment. In the real West Chip Ward vividly portrays a very different reality; of the rural west as a sacrifice zone for callous government and private interests who find the wide open spaces a useful place to hide their toxins from the public, and of rural westerners who fight back for their communities and their future. --Carl Pope, Executive Director, The Sierra Club
 

The Great Basin is military terrain: testing ground for bombs; burial ground for obsolete weapons; laboratory for biological and chemical warfare. Chip Ward blows it all up as he exposes the dark secrets and mythology maintained in the name of "national security." He is a local hero who has found his greatest defense for the landscape he loves is his pen. This local history becomes a document of deceit. Canaries on the Rim is a deeply patriotic book. --Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place
 

Chip Ward has written a lesson on how not to live downwind in the American West and how to think about living without burning up the natural world at the same time. Bravo! --Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poet Laureate Of San Francisco
 

This is the new classic tale of American heroism that not enough people are telling: how ordinary citizens in small towns, reservations, and remote regions take on the military and industrial sites contaminating us with a free hand and how sometimes the little guys win. With modesty, humor, proportion and a fine mastery of the scientific and political intricacies, Chip Ward tells of how he became one of these unintentional heroes and of the battles he took on. --Rebecca Solnit, author of Savage Dreams and A Book Of Migrations
 

Chip Ward's evolution into an activist fighting to protect the Utah desert is a lesson for all those who want to stop the poisoning of their communities. His description of the land and the grassroots efforts to protect it from those who would turn it into a sacrifice zone are inspiring. --Lois Gibbs, Leader of the Love Canal Effort and Founder of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice
 

This book is a must read. For the beauty of the nature writing, for the humor, the intelligence, and the details on a community organization becoming a national power. My only criticism is the short length. The experience of Chip Ward needs a series of books detailing his successes and failures. We could all learn from him. --Sierra Club Books in Review, October-November 1999
 

If you have compassion for our landscape and care about your physical health, acknowledge yourself as a downwinder--because you are-- or if you just want a great story with all the nuances of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, then Canaries on the Rim is well-worth reading. --Andrea Malouf, City Weekly, 25 November 1999
 

Chip Ward has done what at times appeared to be the impossible: he has become a voice for conservation and thought in the West Desert, an area Ward, in his book, calls 'the most extensive environmental sacrifice zone in the nation.' --Jeff Schmerker, Tooele Transcript Bulletin, 9 December 1999
 

Chip Ward has become a witness to the ongoing struggle between the inhabitants of the West desert and those who seek to turn this land into a toxic graveyard for military waste. His is a voice we need to hear. --Sandra Steingraber, author of "Living Downstream"
 

Chip Ward is a local hero of moxie, vision, and passion. --Salt Lake City Weekly

About the Author

A mild-mannered librarian by day, Chip Ward who manages Utah's public library development program moved to Grantsville, Utah in the late 1970s so he and his wife could raise their children in the classic setting of small-town America. There, on the edge of the Great Basin Desert, disturbing tales of local sickness and death interrupted an idyllic life. In a seven-year quest to understand a hidden history of ecocide, Ward has cofounded West Desert HEAL, Families Against Incinerator Risk, and the Citizens Against Chlorine Contamination, and is a national spokesperson for the Chemical Weapons Working Group, an umbrella organization for grassroots groups opposing chemical weapons incineration.