Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45.2 (2002) 302-305

Book Review

Environmentalism Unbound:
Exploring New Pathways of Change

The environmental movement has tended to turn a blind eye on issues of public health and food security. For reasons buried in the historical development [End Page 302] of environmentalism as some rural, natural resource subject, vital issues affecting everyday life, such as workplace safety, urban waterways, and city planning, have been written off the environmental action agenda. The goal of Robert Gottlieb in writing this fine book is to reintegrate the urban environment and issues affecting city dwellers into the conception of environmental quality. The book provides yet more evidence that Gottlieb is among the truly visionary thinkers and writers in the environmental field today.

The environmental movement is characterized by any number of schisms and rifts: between conservationists and preservationists; between deep and reform ecologists; between ecocentrists and ethnocentrists; and between grass-roots and the mainstream environmental groups. Conflicting voices have been raised urging the environmental movement to become more pragmatic or more radical, more global or more local, more ideologically pure or more practically relevant. Gottlieb avoids the tedious repetition of such debates by urging a change of discourse that reintegrates the social and ecological. The pathways for change identified in this book abandon the clash between nature and growth and development to focus on healthy lifestyles and ethics of
place.

In the first part of the book, Gottlieb explains how the language of environmentalism was forged in the latter half of the 19th century, during the reaction against the excesses of industrialization and urbanization. Nature, the thing worth saving, came to be perceived as rural and apart from the despoliation of human activities, including mining, grazing, logging, and agriculture. Nature was located away from people and the traffic, noise, and consumer sovereignty of modern life. The environment as a place within which people live and work was characterized as something separate and generally threatened by too much waste and pollution.

Cities become places to escape from, since it was widely held that the soul could be reclaimed only through a return to the natural. Such ideas fueled the suburbanization that dominated the second half of the 20th century, and the industrial city came to be conceived as "anti-environment." Along with the downgrading of cities as unworthy but necessary settlements, the workplace also became constructed not as a center for social interaction or the development of craftsmanship, but as a site for efficient production. Workers became cogs in the industrial machine. Interestingly, farmers were constructed very similarly, even though their workplaces were not in cities. Industrial agriculture was the idealized model in which the fewer numbers of people involved, the greater the efficiency.While farms were rural, they certainly were not natural.

Environmental cleanups mainly followed the industrial model. Effluent was to be disposed of properly and efficiently through the installation of technologies such as scrubbers or waste treatment plants. Environmental pollution was measured in terms of parts per billion and the reduction of waste streams, rather than by the presence of attractive and healthful surroundings. Gottlieb [End Page 303] agrees with Mark Dowie that the turning point for the environmental movement came with the rise of environmental justice as an important political agenda. Community oriented, environmental justice and industry-focused environmental groups turned to issues of how to produce better places to live and work through citizen engagement rather than technological fix.

The last two-thirds of the book explores the different pathways through which environmental quality as a social, people-oriented goal can be achieved. The author introduces several stories of people working together in networks that transcend consumer and producer and rural and urban cleavages. In the case of dry cleaning, Gottlieb illustrates how dependency upon dangerous chemicals can be reduced while at the same time maintaining high-quality service. The use of perc, a volatile organic compound, in dry-cleaning operations is...