BOOK REVIEW: SHOPPING OUR WAY TO SAFETY - How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves

the illusions of environmentalism

SHOPPING OUR WAY TO SAFETY - How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves by Andrew Szasz. U. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN; www.upress.umn.edu; presspr@umn.edu. 2007. 323+xi pages. $24.95 hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8166-3508-5. illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.

Szasz's twofold premise is that not only is the plethora of contemporary products touted as helping improve the environment not doing all that much, but these are also diminishing the prospect that the large-scale, systematic programs and practices required for actually improving the environment will be conceived and promulgated. To bring a focus to his premise and multifaceted argument for it, Szasz reaches back to the fallout shelter phenomenon of the early 1960s. And he also points to the phenomenon of suburbanization which accelerated about that time and continued over the following few decades. These two phenomena--the first part of a government program to deal with the nuclear threat, the latter a widespread sociological movement--are ways large numbers of Americans responded to threats and concerns in their day; similarly to how large numbers of Americans are responding to environmental, ecological, and health threats these days.

The plethora of environmentally "conscious" products and practices (e. g., recycling, diet regimens) allow individuals to devise a "personal commodity bubble for one's body". While this bubble does offer genuine physical and psychological wellbeing, collectively--even considering the millions who follow similar environmentally aware lifestyles--they bring virtually no material improvement to the environment. Nor in that they bring no improvement, do they do much to conduce to better health or a better environment for the society in general.

The phenomenon of suburbanization exemplifies how individuals--mostly more affluent individual families--make choices to improve their own lives but do nothing to resolve fundamental social problems. The fallout shelter phenomenon urged by government and enthusiastically bought into by many businesses exemplifies for Szasz how major programs devised and promoted by central institutions can, like suburbanization, be a way to avoid coming to grips with a problem, in this case the environmental problems which are worsening year by year.

The way many individuals are responding individually and in some cases by communities or groups to the environmental problems is a form of "inverted quarantine" whereby they are walling themselves off from deteriorating environmental conditions instead of acting to improve the environment permanently for the good not only of their own children but for future generations and for their own society and global society. Szasz does not argue that the environmental products and the consumer choices and lifestyles developed around them should be abandoned--even as "inverted quarantines"--but that no matter the number and ingenuity of such products and increasing numbers of individuals availing themselves of them, these are "not enough". The professor of sociology at the U. of California-Santa Cruz and author of the book "EcoPopulism" tenders some specific changes in perspective on environmental issues and some specific policies for environmental improvement. Mainly though, he argues for a society-wide approach to dealing with evident and perpetuating environmental problems which can be led only by government at all levels and social policies and practices that are different from consumerism or fancy types of escapism. Only when the "fallout shelter" mentality of dealing with a problem is put aside will relevant, effective ways for dealing with environmental problems come about.