Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties

by Betsy Hartmann (Editor), Alan Goodman (Contributor), Jeanne Guillemin (Contributor)

Today we live in times of proliferating fears. The daily updates on the ongoing 'war on terror' amplify fear and anxiety as if they were necessary and important aspects of our reality. Concerns about the environment increasingly take center-stage, as stories and images abound about deadly viruses, alien species invasions, scarcity of oil, water, food; safety of GMOs, biological weapons, and fears of overpopulation. Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties addresses how such environmental and biological fears are used to manufacture threats to individual, national, and global security. Contributors from environmental studies, political science, international security, biology, sociology and anthropology discuss what they share in common: the view that fears should be critically examined to avoid unnecessary alarm and scapegoating of people and nations as the 'enemy Other'. In these highly original and thought-provoking essays, Making Threats focuses on five themes: security, scarcity, purity, circulation and terror. No other book has systematically examined the proliferation of fear in the context of current world events and from such a multidisciplinary perspective. It consolidates in one place cutting edge research and reflection on how the contemporary landscape of fear shapes and is shaped by environmental and biological discourses. By uncovering the linguistic tools that make fear resonate in the public consciousness, by identifying the interests that create or are sustained by fears, in short by giving fears histories, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties engages with some of the most potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Author, educator, and activist Betsy Hartmann addresses critical national and global challenges in both her fiction and nonfiction writing. Her recently released novel, Last Place Called Home, is a political thriller about the opioid crisis and war on drugs in a small Massachusetts mill town. It is a finalist in the 2024 International Book Awards mystery/suspense category and a finalist in the 2024 American Fiction Awards political thriller category. Readers' Favorite calls it a "beautiful literary creation with a setting that feels like a a character in its own right."

Betsy is also the author of the feminist classic Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and of The America Syndrome: Apocalypse, War and Our Call to Greatness. She is the co-author of A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village. Eerily prescient, her previous political thrillers, The Truth about Fire and Deadly Election, explore the threat the Far Right poses to American democracy.

Betsy did her undergraduate degree at Yale University and her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is professor emerita of Development Studies at Hampshire College, where she taught for twenty-eight years. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.