der Atomenergie nicht im Weg stehen wurde. Mehr als 50 Jahre nach dem Einstieg in die Nutzung der Atomenergie kann die Bundesregierung kein Endlager fur radioaktive Abfalle vorweisen. Damit stellt sich die Frage nach den Versaumnissen der Vergangenheit. Fur die Jahre 1955 bis 1979 wird untersucht, wie die Endlagerungsfrage von Behoerden und Beratern wahrgenommen wurde. Auswahl- und Durchsetzungsprozesse, Massnahmen und Motive werden beleuchtet. Funktion und Eignung des zwischen 1967 und 1978 genutzten Salzbergwerks Asse II stehen dabei im Mittelpunkt. Trotz zweifelhafter Langzeitsicherheit sollte die Grube als Endlager bis zum Jahr 2000 dienen. Der Atomwirtschaft und den zoegernden Energieversorgungsunternehmen konnte signalisiert werden, dass die Endlagerungsfrage dem wirtschaftlichen Durchbruch der Atomenergie nicht im Weg stehen wurde.

The drive to own the natural world in twentieth-century America seems virtually limitless. Signs of this national penchant for possessing nature are everywhere - from suburban picket fences to elaborate schemes to own underground water, clouds, even the ocean floor. Yet, as Theodore Steinberg demonstrates in this compelling, witty look at Americans' attempts to master the environment, nature continually turns these efforts into folly. In a rich, narrative style recalling the work of John McPhee, Steinberg tours America to explore some of the more unusual dilemmas that have arisen in our struggle to possess nature. Beginning along the Missouri River, Steinberg recounts the battle for three thousand acres of land the river carved from a Nebraska Indian reservation and deposited in Iowa. Then he travels to Louisiana, where an army of lawyers butted heads over whether Six Mile Lake was actually a lake or a stream. He continues to Arizona to investigate who owned the underground, then to Pennsylvania's Blue Ridge Mountains to see who claimed the clouds. He ends in crowded New York City with Donald Trump's struggle for air rights. Americans' obsession with owning nature was immortalized by Mark Twain in the tale of Slide Mountain, where a landslide-prone Nevada peak turned the American dream of real estate into dust. In relating these modern-day 'Slide Mountain' stories, Steinberg illuminates what it means to live in a culture of property where everything must have an owner.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, more than 14 million U.S. homeowners filed for foreclosure. Focusing on the hard-hit Sacramento Valley, Noelle Stout uncovers the predacious bureaucracy that organized the largest bank seizure of residential homes in U.S. history. Stout reveals the failure of Wall Street banks' mortgage assistance programs-backed by over $300 billion of federal funds-to deliver on the promise of relief. Unlike the programs of the Great Depression, in which the government took on the toxic mortgage debt of Americans, corporate lenders and loan servicers ultimately denied over 70 percent of homeowner applications. In the voices of bank employees and homeowners, Stout unveils how call center representatives felt about denying appeals and shares the fears of families living on the brink of eviction. Stout discloses the impacts of rising inequality on homeowners-from whites who felt their middle-class life unraveling to communities of color who experienced a more precipitous and dire decline. Trapped in a Kafkaesque maze of mortgage assistance, borrowers began to view debt refusal as a moral response to lenders, as seemingly mundane bureaucratic dramas came to redefine the meaning of debt and dispossession.