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

by Andrew Szasz

 “Not long ago, people did not worry about the food they ate. They did not worry about the water they drank or the air they breathed. It never occurred to them that eating, drinking water, satisfying basic, mundane bodily needs might be a dangerous thing to do. Parents thought it was good for their kids to go outside, get some sun.             “That’s all changed now.” —from the Introduction Many Americans today rightly fear that they are constantly exposed to dangerous toxins in their immediate 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. Andrew Szasz is professor and chair of the department of sociology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and author of the award-winning EcoPopulism (Minnesota, 1994).

Genres: Sociology, Environment, Nonfiction, Sustainability

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Meg Box · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be honest not sure why this book has the title cause it goes into sooo much more interesting things. I also have only read about half this book but alas the whole thing was not a requirement for my course.
I could not recommend an e-sci book more. This book actually makes you think so much about the planet and the environment and I thoroughly enjoy every second of reading it.

[Catherine Wicker · Rating 3 out of 5]

While we continue to get slammed with different theories on how to protect ourselves, and the environment. Andrew szasz takes the reader through the history of what got us to these points.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I give this book 4 stars because it helped me synthesize together information that I've been contemplating for years... Like one of several missing puzzle pieces. I am thankful to now how a term for something I've known existed for quite some time: inverted quarantine. I appreciate also that so much emphasis was put on the wealth inequality gap. It was laborious to read at times.

[adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title is misleading but the book was still good. There is almost no history of the environmental movement. The book is actually an interesting study of three instances of American's individual response to obviously collective problems, why that's a bad idea, and what we should do about it.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

A badly written book on an important topic. Redundant and full of stupid sentences like, "Not only do hot showers feel great, they are good for you."

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fine story about how the rich keep themselves healthy and away from the black and poor...

term for discussion: inverted quarantine.

[Jennifer]

Just starting it.

[Jenny · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is partially a description of the concept of "inverted quarantine" and partially an environmental tract, and unfortunately, the second part undermines the first. The non-environmental examples, fallout shelters and the suburbs, worked better. In the final chapters, the author ends up falling back on "I believe" statements, as in he believes that inverted quarantine practices detract from environmental progress, but he can't demonstrate this. The suburb example, possibly focusing on public/private schools and their impact on local education policy & budgets, seems like a much better place to study inverted quarantine more rigorously (not that doing so would generalize to environmentally-related inverted quarantine). But the author's interests are in the environment, so that's the direction the book goes in, and it ends up only making a superficial case.

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

WHAT AN AMAZING BOOK!!!!!!

My favorite bit is his concept of reverse quarantine. When a disease/problem breaks out our response as a society has shifted from quarantining the disease/problem, to now quarantining ourselves (gated communities, bottled water ect..).

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for a class. i found a lot of interesting information in this book and enjoyed having discussions about sustainability and the inverted quarantine!

[M · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well it was a book.

This was repetitive and didn’t make particularly interesting arguments. I think the biggest issue at this point is that it’s already dated. We know drinking bottled water is trash for the environment- everyone has water bottles we lug around and Starbucks stopped using straws…this was probably great in 2007 but in 2022 you should probably find a new take on environmental issues.

I will say this- it does do a great job of situating Americans within our economic system and how that alone is causing a lot of the harm we see and making it worse by ruining the environment by selling us “safer” but equally bad products.

Really not looking forward to reading 60 essays about this book next week 😬 the professor needs to pick a different book next year because yikes.