Summary[]
Crabgrass Crucible is about how the small moments of experiencing nature in the Suburbs led to the first “stirrings” of environmentalism. The environmental movement was not born out of the Sierra Club or urban progressive reform, “but through the searches for nature along cities’ “elusive edges,” the suburbs of post-WWII society. Just as New York and Los Angeles (case studies) and their growing suburbs were the first to acquire a freeway, it also “played host to forerunning environmental mobilizations, significantly prior to the first Earth Day in 1970.” (3) The outward expansion of cities (suburbanization) was spearheaded “by quests for more natural surroundings, whether from greenery or privacy or small-town comfort or countryside,” and as a result, led post-war suburbanites to gravitate to new ecological ways of thinking. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, became the movement’s chief manifesto. By the time of this book’s publication, suburban residents of New York and Los Angeles had already began to conceive of a new form of naturalism, free of chemicals. Sellers thus writes: “The contribution of Silent Spring, along with a slew of other popular volumes that are less remembered, was to render this message more sweeping and portable.” (9) What made smog or open space or pesticides so galvanizing in the suburbs was not scientific study or policy, but “by reaching into lay experiences, by striking nerves across neighborhoods.” (9) Along the rapidly growing suburbs of the postwar period, a concern for air and water pollution also grew alongside (and logically linked to) the afflictions of wildlife and the needs for park making and better rules for land use. Concerns for public health and wildlife officials (often treated separately) overlapped in the backyards and bodies of suburbanites (shared personal experiences/local knowledge). By the 1990s and early 2000s, however, the suburban roots of environmentalism were forgotten, partly due to the excesses that came to define the suburb (big cars, excessive use of electricity, etc.), but also the result of its successes – the rise of a professional environmental activist who have become more considered with the larger, more symbolic images of environmental decay (nuclear plans, WTO, etc.). Yet, what made the environmental movement successful in its early years, Sellers argues, was its ability to take seriously the nature where most people lived (the suburbs).