Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves is a bloody good read. In fact, it just might turn more than a few self-proclaimed greenies upside down. It certainly rocked our world.
It is common knowledge that many of us are worried about toxins in our food, chlorine in our drinking water, pesticides in our soil, hormones and antibiotics in meat, and the increasingly polluted air. “Food, water, air, sun. We cannot do without them. Sadly, we now also fear them,” writes author and sociologist Andrew Szasz. And indeed we do.
But he points out that rather than lobby the government for better regulations – we have responded by shopping. We buy bottled water, air filters, natural rubber mattresses, organic food, green household cleaners and pure fiber clothing to protect ourselves from environmental threats.
What we have done is create a form of individualized quarantine, where we shut the healthy individual in and the threatening world out, explains Szasz. This is a strange form of mutant environmentalism, where our efforts are focused on preserving personal well being and ignoring the common good or collective well being of our society.
Shopping Our Way to Safety is an important must-read for anyone who thinks that by buying green products they are changing the world for the better.
Sure, some of the green products help and some don’t. Szasz devotes a chapter - Imaginary Refuge - to examining water, food and air quality protection products and just how effective they actually are. Frankly, the conclusions are far from reassuring. Buying eco-products instead of lobbying governments quickly begins to seem like wasted efforts. Although Szasz isn’t advocating for gorging on pesticide-laden food, he reminds us to constantly remember that shopping isn’t a solution to the global problems we face.
Rather Szasz asks us to consider that if climate change means death for the planet then the only sane response is to do everything in our power to stop it - write letters, call our government officials, protest and lobby until the threat is stopped. Our irrational response to the threat is to buy biodegradable garbage bags, hemp underwear, recycled toilet paper and think our self-imposed quarrantine is going to protect us. “We will be able to undertake that conversation in earnest, though, only after we have thoroughly disabused ourselves of the seductive promise of inverted quarantine and are no longer partially anesthetized by the false sense of security it offers us,” he writes.
Shopping Our Way to Safety is an important must-read for anyone who thinks that by buying green products they are changing the world for the better.
Order this book from Amazon.com - Shopping Our Way to Safety
Visit: http://www.upress.umn.edu/
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
323 Pages
GreenMuze.com Rating: 
Show/Hide comment form
