Diagnosing an Ailing Earth

What does a healthy planet look like? Scientific studies relentlessly document how ecosystems from the Amazon to the oceans are under stress. Journalists and the public translate these scientific findings through popular understandings of “sickness.” A polluted planet is thus diseased and in need of a cure. Jennifer Thomson’s The Wild and the Toxic: American Environmentalism and the Politics of Health meticulously traces the intellectual history of how “claims about health of ecosystems, the health of the planet, and the health of humans within the environment” (p. 1) came to be and, most significantly, the implications of these claims in U.S. political life.

Although discussions of the environment’s relationship with health may now seem ubiquitous, Thomson argues that this relationship was born in a particular time (the 1970s and 1980s) and with politics that reflected the prevailing notions of their times and ideological contexts. Environmentalism and associated health claims and anxieties transformed from radical and collective visions to more individualistic versions in the 1990s under prevailing neoliberalism. Health and environment—and invocations to both—are inherently “political projects” (p. 1). The Wild and the Toxic is full of surprising details from stories that are well-known to environmental historians as well as those not as well-studied. Thomson’s retelling of iconic battles situates their stakes intellectually and politically. She serves, in other words, as a guide through deeply contested ideological debates. Thomson’s revealing histories that link health and the environment, especially in the Love Canal case, are illuminating and bracing. Her argument elucidates the broader significance of environmental history to American political culture, focusing on histories of medicine and health, and environmental justice, anti-toxics, and radical ecologies more broadly.

The book is centered on four case studies: Friends of the Earth, Love Canal, Biocentrism, and the Gaia hypothesis/climate change. Within each chapter lies a detailed account of the interrelationships between “ideas, tactics and activists” (p. 9). In tracing these links, Thomson disputes what has since become the standard account within environmental justice scholarship of environmental organizations in the US in the post-1960s era. These portray mainstream environmental organizations centered around Washington, D.C. focused on lobbying, in opposition to grassroots environmental justice groups with more diverse membership and a concentration on direct action. Thomson begins her introduction with social justice struggles connecting health and environmental conflicts in capacious ways, from the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike to United Farm Workers organizing in California to the free health clinics of the Black Panther Party. Although her introduction begins by arguing against the division between social justice and health/environment, Thomson moves rather quickly to get to her case studies. On the one hand, this choice reflects her engagement “with activists who constitute the mythology of Anglo-American middle-class environmentalism” in order to “clear space” for more integrative and critical cultural analyses (p. 13). Her recontextualization of lionized figures and movements parallels earlier research that environmental historians did in understanding John Muir in particular, and late-19th- and early-20th-century preservationists and conservationists in their historical and ideological contexts. However, given the richness of the existing scholarship on race and sanitation strikes, the UFW, and the Black Panther Party (Wanzer-Serrano’s 2015 The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation; the large body of work on the UFW such as Laura Pulido’s classic 1996 Environmentalism and Economic Justice, Alondra Nelson’s 2011 Body and Soul, to name just a few related to the cases she mentions), her contextualization of the lionized Anglo-American environmental leaders and actors would be strengthened by acknowledging this scholarship. Her category of “Anglo-American” is also puzzling. The stories she tells are U.S.-centered, whereas a truly Anglo-American environmental and intellectual history would have taken readers to Australia, the U.K., and Canada, for example. There is an Anglo-American story to be told about health and environment, but Thomson’s is...