An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity. Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways in which harm from oil is entangled with daily life and the tensions surrounding efforts to verify and redress it in practice. Attempts to address harm from the oil industry in Ecuador have been consistently confounded by narrow, technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators’ work to contest state and oil company insistence that harm is controlled and principally chemical in nature, Fiske shows that it is necessary to refigure harm as relational in order to reckon with unremediated contamination of the past while pushing for broad forms of accountability in the present. She theorizes that harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place, a contingent understanding that is needed to contemplate what comes next when living in a toxic world. Reckoning with Harm paints a vivid and distressing picture of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the entwining of oil and life has left an enduring impact on both the environment and the people who call this place home . . . The lessons within this book are immeasurable. ― Latina Republic Published On: 2023-10-24 Reckoning with Harm is an exceptional study of the production of socioecological suffering arising from predatory oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon...[Fiske] skillfully weaves scholarship across disciplines, presenting a novel exploration of how such forms are being attended to, verified, and contested...[ Reckoning with Harm ] poses crucial questions about responsibility and the long shadows of resource extraction while offering nuanced analysis of the complexities. A must-read for students and scholars of Latin American history and environmental injustice in contexts of resource extraction. ― CHOICE Published On: 2024-01-01 In sum, Amelia Fiske’s historic and ethnographic study includes oil harms to local indigenous forest residents but clearly introduces and details many colonists’ poorly-known lives…many with critical local and long-term health suffering, amidst defensive corporate explanations.  As with the broad human rights demands now linked to forested Amazonian Indigenous groups, many poor and recent colonists deserve similar international support. ― ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America Published On: 2023-12-14 A refreshingly nonprescribed approach to a contentious environmental history...offers a nuanced and complex understanding of oil extraction that adeptly communicates why remediation and resolution are difficult but overdue...reminds us that even if the injustice seems remote, we cannot extract ourselves from the toxic trauma occurring in the Amazon. ― H-Net Published On: 2024-06-01 Fiske’s refusal to limit her study to a compilation of data and facts recorded by authorities, even to limit it to the accounts of human voices, is what makes this book such a rich and illuminating text on the complexity of the environmental issues readers encounter in our era. Oil touches bodies in a sticky and almost impossible-to-remove way and forces us to reckon with our vulnerability and that of others around us. And to learn about it this way, to be forced to listen to this chorus of voices offered by Fiske, makes it palpable to the point that her questioning and discoveries stick as well to our brains. ― Revista de Estudios Hispánicos Published On: 2024-10-01 Reckoning with Harm  disarms, revealing that the wounded worlds that issue from oil extraction are deeply relational. A keen ethnographer, Amelia Fiske demonstrates in moving prose how the unbounded, yet embodied, effects of oil operations on everyday lives confound techno-industrial-scientific logics that seek to contain contamination. -- Suzana Sawyer, University of California, Davis, author of The Small Matter of Suing Chevron Published On: 2023-08-23 Reckoning with Harm paints a vivid and distressing picture of the Ecuadorian Amazon, where the entwining of oil and life has left an enduring impact on both the environment and the people who call this place home . . . The lessons within this book are immeasurable. ― Latina Republic Published On: 2023-10-24 Reckoning with Harm is an exceptional study of the production of socioecological suffering arising from predatory oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon...[Fiske] skillfully weaves scholarship across disciplines, presenting a novel exploration of how such forms are being attended to, verified, and contested...[ Reckoning with Harm ] poses crucial ques