Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves

Szasz, Andrew

ISBN 10: 0816635080 / ISBN 13: 9780816635085

Editore: Univ Of Minnesota Press (edition 3rd ed.), 2007

Riguardo questo articolo

With dust jacket. The item might be beaten up but readable. May contain markings or highlighting, as well as stains, bent corners, or any other major defect, but the text is not obscured in any way.

Codice articolo 0816635080-7-1-29

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves
• Editore: Univ Of Minnesota Press (edition 3rd ed.)
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0816635080
• ISBN 13: 9780816635085
• Rilegatura: Hardcover
• Edizione: 3rd ed.
• Condizione: Fair
• Condizione della sovraccoperta: sovraccoperta

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

 “Not long ago, people did not worry about the food they ate. They did not worry about the water they drank or the air they breathed. It never occurred to them that eating, drinking water, satisfying basic, mundane bodily needs might be a dangerous thing to do. Parents thought it was good for their kids to go outside, get some sun.

            “That’s all changed now.” —from the Introduction

 

Many Americans today rightly fear that they are constantly exposed to dangerous toxins in their immediate environment: tap water is contaminated with chemicals; foods contain pesticide residues, hormones, and antibiotics; even the air we breathe, outside and indoors, carries invisible poisons. Yet we have responded not by pushing for governmental regulation, but instead by shopping. What accounts for this swift and dramatic response?  And what are its unintended consequences?

 

Andrew Szasz examines this phenomenon in Shopping Our Way to Safety. Within a couple of decades, he reveals, bottled water and water filters, organic food, “green” household cleaners and personal hygiene products, and “natural” bedding and clothing have gone from being marginal, niche commodities to becoming mass consumer items. Szasz sees these fatalistic, individual responses to collective environmental threats as an inverted form of quarantine, aiming to shut the healthy individual in and the threatening world out.

 

Sharply critiquing these products’ effectiveness as well as the unforeseen political consequences of relying on them to keep us safe from harm, Szasz argues that when consumers believe that they are indeed buying a defense from environmental hazards, they feel less urgency to actually do something to fix them.  To achieve real protection, real security, he concludes, we must give up the illusion of individual solutions and together seek substantive reform.

 

Andrew Szasz is professor and chair of the department of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and author of the award-winning EcoPopulism (Minnesota, 1994).

Informazioni sull?autore

Andrew Szasz is professor and chair of the sociology department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.