Oct 1, 2012 - forcefully and convincingly in a journal article, O'Sullivan goes on to ... against horses becomes invisible, or as long as it is, anything goes.
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Shopping our way to safety: how we changed from protecting the environment to protecting ourselves Yogi Hendlin a
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University of California, Los Angeles
Version of record first published: 01 Oct 2012.
To cite this article: Yogi Hendlin (2012): Shopping our way to safety: how we changed from protecting the environment to protecting ourselves, Environmental Politics, 21:6, 1006-1008 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2012.724230
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While the, in itself plausible and very well developed, argument for the (re)discovery of internal inconsistency could probably have been made just as forcefully and convincingly in a journal article, O’Sullivan goes on to explain why internal inconsistency is so wide-spread, and illustrates her explanation with several case studies. The analysis and case studies are anything but optional extras – they lift the quality of the whole above the level of the minimum publishable unit, and demonstrate once more that there are still good grounds for the existence, indeed superiority, of books. What explains (most) internal inconsistency, says O’Sullivan, is invisibility – once cruelty against horses becomes invisible, or as long as it is, anything goes. Her largest case study, a painstakingly detailed and careful dissection of the legal instruments for animal protection in New South Wales, shows more than convincingly how degrees and kinds of visibility are linked to, on the one hand, classifications of animals not by species but by their meaning for humans, and on the other hand to their use, more precisely, to the kinds of treatment to which specific types of animals may be subjected. Roughly, the less visible the animal, the more cruel its treatment. Other case studies, such as that of the treatment of pit horses in Victorian England, add a wonderful dynamic dimension. Of course, as usual, more research is needed. Cruelty remains visible to those inflicting it or ‘forced’ to inflict it – roughly, the working classes in the pits see it, spoiled little rich girls are protected against it. There is a class and culture aspect to animal advocacy that O’Sullivan completely ignores. In addition, invisibility sometimes seems an explanation for internally inconsistent treatment of animals, and sometimes an effect. It probably is a necessary factor in explaining continued cruelty to animals but it certainly is not sufficient: it is too easy to blame the continuation of internal inconsistency on, ultimately, simply not being aware of it – a theoretical mistake that reinforces the practical mistake of believing that inconsistency is a knock-down argument in real life (cf. Jonathan Wolff in his Ethics and Public Policy (2011)). It isn’t. Marcel Wissenburg IMR, Radboud University Nijmegen Ó 2012, Marcel Wissenburg http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2012.724229
Shopping our way to safety: how we changed from protecting the environment to protecting ourselves, by Andrew Szasz, London, University of Minnesota Press, 2007, xi þ 323 pp., index, 17 black and white photos, £14.00 (paperback), ISBN 9780816635092, £18.50 (hardback), ISBN 9780816635085 Andrew Szasz’s Shopping Our Way to Safety tracks the ‘inverse quarantine’ of consumer goods citizens create to insulate themselves from the dangerous world ‘out there’. Following up on his analysis of citizen-activist responses to
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dangerous environmental conditions in his first book Ecopopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice, Szasz diagnoses the inverse quarantine as the passive, apolitical reaction to the shared problem of a degraded environment. Whereas social movements can transform a personal issue and ‘redefine it as social or collective in origin’ (p. 239), inverted quarantine consumption elides the public dimension of problems and instead places the burden for dealing with public threats on the purse strings and conscience of private individuals. Szasz examines the tendency for citizens, confronted with threats to their safety, to make individually rational but collectively disastrous decisions. Szasz’s argument revolves around two main points. First, private consumption will never furnish adequate protection from unabated environmental harms; the ‘imaginary refuge’ financially-able individuals wish to create, sealed off from a polluted environment, simply does not stand up to scrutiny (chapter 6). Second, the more people choose to depend on private solutions to public environmental problems, the worse the commons become. Not only do such solutions only work for those who can pay (leaving other citizens forced to accept the polluted default), but even for the bottled-water-drinking, organic food-eating, sunscreen-wearing citizen, these protective consumption habits provide inadequate health benefits in proportion to the complacency they produce. Locating inaugural historical cases of the inverted quarantine in ‘The Fallout Shelter Panic of 1961’ (chapter 1) and suburbanisation (chapter 2), individual responses to the threat of nuclear war and social threats like innercity crime, the book initially examines citizens forced to deal with social ills privately when public redress fails. Szasz then expands the inverted quarantine concept to commodities, staples of ‘assembling a personal commodity bubble for one’s body’ (p. 97): bottled water consumption has increased 26 times over the past 30 years and organic food currently exists as a parallel but premium food option. Echoes of environmental false consciousness can be heard in Szasz’s description of bottled water, which health-wise he finds to be on average no better than standard municipal tap water. Yet, Szasz’s research shows that while some inverse quarantine measures amount to hypochondria (drinking bottled water), he finds that others actually provide their purported health benefit (eating organic produce). A clearer distinction between what qualifies as a bona fide environmental threat rather than hypochondria would expand Szasz’s theory. While inverted quarantine consumption itself ‘indeed harm[s] the environment’, Szasz’s primary objection is that it anaesthetises individuals against political action, as the perceived urgency of the problem dissipates through the false belief that the problem is solved (p. 195). Whether payments to fishermen after the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill or iodine pills after Fukushima, Szasz’s analysis of ‘political anaesthesia’ has unfortunately proven correct (chapter 7). Those without the resources to buy into the alternative goods system are subject to an increasingly degraded default world, especially because those who
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can afford to (likely including the political class) already believe they are protected through buying their suite of premium basic goods. The book aims to diagnose rather than cure. With the exception of highlighting the success of the Montreal Protocol to decelerate chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions damaging the ozone layer, Szasz does not forecast effective government regulation against toxins. Szasz establishes a sophisticated theory connecting the ways in which private consumption of public goods leads to political complacency and inaction, yet through clear and engaging writing the book remains accessible to a wide audience. Shopping Our Way to Safety has implications for free market environmentalism, intergenerational justice, environmental political psychology, and the role of the state in liberal democracies; but most of all, it presents a strong claim for remedying environmental injustice. Yogi Hendlin University of California, Los Angeles Ó 2012, Yogi Hendlin http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2012.724230
Knowledge and environmental policy: re-imagining the boundaries of science and politics, by William Ascher, Toddi Steelman and Robert Healy, Cambridge, MA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2010, xv þ 250 pp., index, £15.95 (paperback), ISBN 0262514370 Vast improvements have occurred over the past half-century in the availability of knowledge to policymakers and the ability for decision-makers to understand received information. Why, then, have we not witnessed a similar advance in the quality of environmental policymaking? To answer this question, William Ascher, Toddi Steelman, and Robert Healy unite their extensive experience in environmental policy research with the growing literature on knowledge and expertise that has become a particular focus for interdisciplinary science and technology studies scholars. The resulting book is a theoretically rich discussion of the interplay between knowledge and environmental decision-making in the United States supported by an exhaustive sampling of relevant cases. Throughout the book, the authors achieve the difficult balance of breadth and depth, making for a fluid read that allows even readers new to the topic the ability to easily navigate this timely and comprehensive analysis. Ascher, Steelman, and Healy offer a unique framework that breaks down knowledge processes into three functions: generation, transmission and use. In the first half of the book, these categories serve as a means to untangle the complicated dynamics between diverse forms of knowledge, ranging from scientific and technical to indigenous and experiential, and policymaking on pressing environmental issues. The authors’ premise is that knowledge is always political: knowledge processes are based in social contexts that may
