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

Szasz, Andrew

 
9780816635092: Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves
Tapa blanda
ISBN 10: 0816635099 ISBN 13: 9780816635092
Editorial: University of Minnesota Press, 2009

Sinopsis

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.

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Acerca del autor

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).

"Sobre este título" puede pertenecer a otra edición de este libro.

Editorial
University of Minnesota Press
Año de publicación
2009
Idioma
Inglés
ISBN 10 
0816635099
ISBN 13 
9780816635092
Encuadernación
Tapa blanda
Número de páginas
336
Contacto del fabricante
no disponible
Persona responsable
no disponible

Otras ediciones populares con el mismo título

9780816635085: Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves

Edición Destacada

ISBN 10:  0816635080 ISBN 13:  9780816635085
Editorial: University of Minnesota Press, 2007
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