Razing Kids: Youth, Environment and the Postwar American West by Jeffrey C. Sanders (review)

Razing Kids, by Jeffrey C. Sanders, is a collection of accounts about the ways in which children's concerns drove various parts of the environmental movement in the American West. This is not a book about children's concerns as imagined and articulated by children; it is told from the viewpoints of adults and their concerns, as these played out in children's lives. The topics Sanders addresses are diverse. He begins with the concerns generated by the World War II–driven development of west coast instant cities. The communities developed by defense contractors were often slapdash and entirely devoid of amenities that would have made life for their young inhabitants more pleasant. From these communities, Sanders moves to the nuclear West and the health problems generated by nuclear testing. Many of the downwinders' fears originated in the miscarriages, stillbirths, and childhood leukemia cases clustered in areas close to blast sites in Utah and other western states. From there, Sanders jumps to the War on Poverty and the Youth Conservation Corps, which took young men, often minorities, out of degraded urban environments and sent them to work the rural West, an environment that was often unwelcoming. At the other end of the environmental spectrum was Sanders's other story from the 1960s, that of youngsters who ran away from their homes and took over Bay Area neighborhoods, wallowing in dirt, disease, and other environmental conditions that shocked and disturbed their elders. Sanders's final story is of agricultural chemicals, and the damage they did to young farm laborers. Urban Americans, however, became more concerned about the issue, however, when pesticides and other contaminants made their way into the food supply and especially into foods most often served to children.

As mentioned, this is a collection of histories rather than a single, unified narrative. There is no central thread tying together the various stories in this volume other than the shared concept that concerns about youth led adults to think about the quality of various environments, sometimes in new ways. It is also a book about adult anxieties about how the various environmental forces at work in the wartime and postwar America West would adversely shape children's experiences and bodies. The degree to which the majority of people worried, however, was often mediated by race. The answer to environmental degradation in urban environments was not necessarily to improve those environments, but to ship young people out of them to have supposedly healthful experiences in other places. The push to remove potentially dangerous chemicals from food was not the greatest when Latinx children were hurt in the fields, but when middle-class children ingested that food in the form of apple juice and apple sauce.

Each of the individual stories is interesting and probably worthy of book-length treatment on its own. The chapters about teenagers and young adults would be strengthened by including more of the perspective of the young participants. In some places, stories would be improved by linking the postwar story to pre-war antecedents. For example, in the discussion of Youth Conservation Corps camps, the author often references the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), but in somewhat superficial ways. The CCC was far more problematic than Sanders acknowledges, and many of the complications of poorly constructed camps and disgruntled young men existed in the 1930s as well as the 1960s. The discussion of the history of youth and agricultural labor could also be more fully fleshed out. Concerns about child labor in agriculture were not new in the 1960s and 1970s. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Children's Bureau and critics of child labor argued, largely unsuccessfully, to get children out of the sugar beet industry and other paid agricultural labor. There, the concern was not pesticides, but labor that bent children's backs and kept them away from school. Although labor laws did eventually come to cover...