Allitt, Patrick (Author)
Penguin
Publication date: 2014
Language: English
Physical Details: xv + 384 pp.; ill.; notes; index
In a real sense, Allitt shows us, collective anxiety about widespread environmental danger began with the atomic bomb, when the apocalyptic possibilities of human technology became terrifyingly real. Then, as the urbanization and industrialization of the postwar years transformed the American landscape, more research and better tools for measurement began to reveal the environmental consequences of economic success. Scientists shared their findings; convinced that their research was significant and their findings potentially ominous, they had an incentive to cultivate relationships with journalists and politicians to mobilize public interest. A climate of anxiety became a climate of alarm. In the early sixties works such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring catalyzed a growing awareness that chemical pollution was threatening the natural world. A series of environmental disasters in these years, including the massive Union Oil spill in California and a fire in Cleveland's Cuyahoga River, heightened the sense of panic and underlined the fact that industry was indeed producing high levels of pollution. These ideas resonated with and drew energy from the counterculture movement, which protested conspicuous waste and the falsehoods of consumer society. The sixties generation was largely responsible for the transformation of environmentalism from a set of special interests into a mass movement. By the end of the sixties, journalists and politicians alike were recognizing the connection between the many forms of pollution and the need for an effective response to the public's concerns. The work of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency and a series of clean air and water acts in the 1970s from a responsive Congress inaugurated a sustained and largely successful cleanup. Political polarization around environmental questions after 1980 had consequences that we still feel today. Since then the general polarization of American politics has mirrored the polarization of environmental politics, as advocates of environmental concern and their critics for decades have attributed to each other the worst possible motives. Environmentalists see their critics as greedy special interest groups that show no signs of conscience as they plunder the earth, while counter-environmentalists see their adversaries as the enemies of economic growth, whose plans will stop social progress and stifle initiative under an avalanche of bureaucratic regulation.
...MoreReview Zelko, Frank (2015) Review of "A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism". Environmental History (pp. 160-163).
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