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

Szasz, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0816635099 ISBN 13: 9780816635092

Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2009

Synopsis

What could be wrong with bottled water and sunscreen?

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.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816635099
• ISBN 13: 9780816635092
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336