From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century

406 Pages·2003·1.82 MB·English

by  Frederick Buell

From Apocalypse to Way of Life
From Apocalypse to Way of
Life
Environmental Crisis in the
American Century
Frederick Buell
ROUTLEDGE
New York London
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Copyright © 2003 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Buell, Frederick, 1942–
From apocalypse to way of life: four decades of environmental crisis in the U.S./
Frederick Buell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-93407-9 (Hardback)
1. Environmentalism—United States. 2. Environmental policy—United States. I.
Title.
GE197 .B84 2003
363.7'00973—dc21
2002012439
ISBN 0-203-48493-2 Master e-book
ISBN 0-203-57533-4 (Adobe eReaderFormat)
To Nicholas, Alexander, Jill, and Andy
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vi
Preface: The Decade of Crisis v iii
Part I: Contesting Crisis
1. The Politics of Denial 2
2. Taking Crisis Seriously? 34
Part II: Elaborating Crisis An Introductory Caution 61
3. Natures in Crisis, Part 1: An Inventory of the External 65
World
4. Natures in Crisis, Part 2: Deepening Intimacy 1 01
5. Environmental Crisis as a Social Crisis 1 31
6. Crisis History: From Prophecy to Risk, from Apocalypse 1 63
to Dwelling Place
Part III: Imagining Crisis
7. The Culture of Hyperexuberance 1 94
8. Representing Crisis: Environmental Crisis in Popular 2 27
Fiction and Film
9. Taking Crisis Seriously: Environmental Crisis and 2 61
Contemporary Literature
Appendix 2 96
Notes 3 06
Index 3 52
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to a number of my colleagues for their encouragement
during the years I worked on this book. In particular, I am grateful to
Nancy Comley (whose consistent help and support I especially appreciate),
David Speidel, and Steven Kruger. I also have significant intellectual
indebtedness to a large number of people who shared their expertise,
interests, and commitments with me. A multiyear interdisciplinary seminar,
“The Human Place in Nature,” sponsored by the Nathan Cummings
Foundation provided an ideal forum for exploring the impacts of recent
environmental changes on politics, philosophy, and culture; I owe much to
its convener, Charles Halpern, its moderator, James Hillman, and its
members, including Mermer Blakeslee, Jackie Brookner, Edward Casey,
Sandy Gellis, Jeff Golliher, Ned Kaufman, Julie Mankiewicz, Paul
Mankiewicz, Margot McClean, Andrew McLaughlin, Gene McQuillan,
Nina Sankovitch, and Mark Walters. I owe similar debts to Stanley
Aronowitz, and Michael Menser and the C.U.N.Y. Center for the Study of
Culture, Technology, and Work, and to Burton Pike, friend and colleague
for many years. I am grateful to John Barry for his generous and
illuminating comments on a version of this manuscript, as I am to my
brother, Lawrence Buell, for his unfailing encouragement, generous
intellectual exchange, and comments on one chapter of the book—all parts
of a relationship much richer and more multifaceted than most siblings
enjoy. David McBride, my editor at Routledge, has far exceeded this
author’s hope for meaningful collaboration on this project; I am indebted
to him not just for his steady encouragement and expertise but also for his
insightful commentary on several versions of the manuscript. My deepest
debt is to Andrew McLaughlin not just for reading and valuably critiquing
drafts of this book but for years of collaborative work and dialogue on
environmental and environmental-political issues, specifically on
globalization and the environment; with him I enjoy a rare connection, one
that couples intellectual passion with genuine personal friendship. My most
personal debts are to my children, Nicholas and Alexander, who are
knowledgeable about and living through the issues raised in this book, and
to my wife, Jill, who has made them a part of her teaching for years.
vii
I have received important institutional support from a number of
different sources. I thank Queens College and the City University of New
York for supporting my research through a number of different programs,
including their collaborative incentive and scholar incentive programs. I
thank the American Council of Learned Societies and the Nathan
Cummings Foundation for support on a project that proved relevant to this
book. And I gratefully acknowledge support from the National
Endowment for the Humanities that allowed me to complete the book.
Portions of this book have appeared previously, and I thank the journals
and their editors for permission to use this material. Material from
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 appeared first in symplok 9:1–2 (2001), pp. 45–73,
and are here reprinted by permission of the journal. Portions of Chapter 2
also appeared in “Nationalist Postnationalism: Globalist Discourse in
Contemporary American Culture,” American Quarterly 50:3 (Sept. 1998)
and are here reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
Portions of Chapters 1 and 7 and the Appendix appeared as “Conflicting
Conceptions of Nature in Popular Discourse, Environmentalism, and
Social Theory,” Found Object 9 (Fall 2000), and are here reprinted by
permission of the journal.
PREFACE: THE DECADE OF CRISIS
In 1962, Rachel Carson warned of ecological disaster in progress. Though
not the first to raise the specter of imminent human-made environmental
crisis, Carson’s book, Silent Spring, had a decisive effect. It led the way in
making concern about environmental crisis a national issue. By the 1970s,
Robert Gottlieb writes: “the mood of environmental crisis seemed more
and more overwhelming.” Environmental crisis seemed to be written for
all to see “in such disparate events of the late 1960s as the burning of the
Cuyahoga River in the center of Cleveland, the eutrophication of Lake
Erie, and the dying birds washed up on the oil-slicked shores of Santa
Barbara.”1 In exactly this spirit, Senator Gaylord Nelson, originator of the
idea of the first Earth Day (1970), argued that the environmental crisis
“was the most critical issue facing mankind,” making “Vietnam, nuclear
war, hunger, decaying cities, and all the other major problems one could
name…relatively insignificant by comparison.”2
Concern about environmental crisis, however, was just part of the
postwar environmental movement that Carson helped inaugurate and the
1970 Earth Day helped celebrate and consolidate. In that movement,
utopian enthusiasm and optimistic reformism overshadowed
environmental apocalypticism. People committed themselves to a wide
variety of causes, such as “ecology,” green lifestyles, ruralist back-to-the-
land movements, and wilderness appreciation and protection: concern
about environmental crisis in no way canceled out exuberance and hope.
But neither did hope nullify concern about crisis; in fact, the two motives
intensified each other. New perceptions of nature’s potentially irreversible
deformation intensified peoples’ impulses to experience, protect, and
cherish nature and work to ensure a viable future for human society.
Historians of the post-Carson environmental movements’ political
activism and cultural enthusiasms have concentrated, for the most part,
on the hopeful or the hope-bringing side. As is only natural, commentaries
on the environmental movement seek, while chronicling challenges and set-
backs, to direct the movement toward solutions.3 But just as important as
telling the story of changing forms of activism is a second story: that of
how environmental crisis and alarmed human concern about it has also
ix
developed and substantially changed since the time of Rachel Carson.
Though much has been (and is daily being) written about what constitutes
environmental crisis, most of it is devoted to urgent present assessments
and warnings. Little has been written that surveys how and why these
assessments and warnings have changed over time. The result is that people
tend to speak of the environmental crisis—as if “it” were a clear, stable,
and ahistorical concept. To do so, however, is unfortunate, because it
suppresses the complexity, diversity, and dynamism of accumulating
environmental problems. It also obscures an equally important story: that
of how the impact of these problems on U.S. society has changed—and
dramatically deepened—over time.
The truth is that, since Rachel Carson, environmental crisis has rapidly
evolved and substantially changed in form, not just in nature, but also in
human discourse about it. Announcing itself as apocalypse, environmental
crisis has been debunked, has resisted debunking, has been reworked, and
has been dramatically diversified and expanded, resurfacing in unusual new
forms. The world (as of the writing of this sentence and presumably also the
reading of it) has not ended; eco-apocalypse hasn’t happened. Yet people
today also accept the fact that they live in the shadow of environmental
problems so severe that they constitute a crisis. And this shadow is in many
ways far larger than the one Carson described. Carson’s small-town-
American “silent spring” has become the much more diverse and
comprehensive set of problems known, ominously, as the global
environmental crisis. A history of crisis thought that fully incorporates both
the apparent failure of previously forecasted apocalypses and the
continuance and even deepening of alarm is a necessity today. This book
seeks to fill that need.
Though far narrower in focus and findings than today’s sense of crisis,
responses to proliferating environmental problems in the 1960s and 1970s
were fiercely urgent and apocalyptically final. If the ecology movement had
led people to a new kind of appreciation of nature, analyses of what
threatened nature were clothed in fearful and sensational terms. Carson’s
book started this trend off: it was anything but understated in its pictures of
environmental catastrophe. Her book’s famous preface, “A Fable for
Tomorrow,” depicts a “small town in the heart of America” which has
been mysteriously “silenced.” This is a place from which birdsong and
animal cry have been mysteriously erased; a place in which a mysterious
blight has swept away the farm animals, killing chickens, cattle, and sheep
and leaving the remaining ones virtually barren. What brings all this death
is the pervasive poisoning of the environment with synthetic chemicals in a
process Carson pictures as creepily silent: everywhere a “white granular
powder” still lies on the land in patches, weeks after “it had fallen like
snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and the streams.”4