Title: The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health. By Jennifer Thomson
Abstract: Jennifer Thomson’s The Wild and the Toxic is a concise, pointed, and sometimes provocative intervention into the history of environmentalism. Thomson examines how an amorphous and shifting discourse of health has shaped environmental politics over the past half century. In four main chapters—each a case study of individuals and organizations well-known to environmental historians—Thomson illustrates how the tension between ecological and human health played out in several important campaigns and issues. As Thomson shows, environmental activists and scholars conceptualized health in different ways and drew different lessons about how individuals and governments should act to achieve desirable environmental health outcomes. Focusing on Friends of the Earth, the Love Canal Homeowners Association, bioregionalists and Earth First!, and James Lovelock and Bill McKibben, Thomson sets out to “illuminate how health entered environmental politics and what claims about health offered to political activists” (11). As she demonstrates in her chapter on Friends of the Earth, conceptions of health and the environment did not always remain consistent or static, even within one organization. Throughout its first decade or so, FOE took a holistic approach toward environmental health and argued that a regulatory state should be responsible for protecting society from the pollution and environmental despoliation that results from industrial capitalism. By the mid-1980s, however, FOE gravitated toward a more reductive and individualistic framing of health that was in line with the rise of neoliberalism. Similarly, Thomson argues, renowned environmental thinkers such as James Lovelock and Bill McKibben found it difficult to develop a vision of ecological health that was not influenced by, in Lovelock’s case, his work with NASA and Shell, and in McKibben’s case, his white, middle-class liberalism.
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot