Stanford Scholar Explores Humans’ Complicated History with Earth’s Mineral Riches in New Book
With the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, Gabrielle Hecht will research and write a new book about the mineral riches humans have turned the world inside out to unearth.
Gabrielle Hecht sees the world differently from most of us.
The Stanton Foundation Professor in Nuclear Security, she reviewed the standard story of nuclear weapons – that they divide the world into haves and have-nots, countries with and without the bomb – and rejected the dichotomy.
In her award-winning book Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, Hecht expanded the definition of nuclear places to include both the most powerful countries on Earth – those with nuclear warheads – and the least powerful – those where people mine the uranium that make nuclear warheads possible. Hecht peered into the Earth to understand mining and came away with a view of the planet in its entirety. We are, she realized, turning our world inside out.
Read the rest at Stanford Today
