Nature and the City: Making Environmental Policy in Toronto and Los Angeles (review)

Even though the city seems to represent the ultimate separation of society and nature, the environment has become an important aspect of urban politics. Gene Desfor and Roger Keil use Toronto and Los Angeles to depict a new era of urban policy in which ecology and economy are intertwined. In exploring the assumption that both can be enhanced through "ecomodernization," their analysis takes us through a complicated mix of social activism, institutional prerogatives, corporate privileges, and global economic restructuring.

During the past twenty-five years, both cities experienced the dismantling of their industrial core; both are now involved in attempts to re-naturalize urban spaces; both are confronting the legacy of industrial pollution and issues of environmental justice. Desfor and Keil weave their comparisons around the strategies of ecomodernization, using discursive analysis to probe the relative effectiveness of various players. Competing interests—environmental and social-justice groups, community organizations, unions, businesses, and governmental agencies—each advance their own discourse of urban environmentalism. Beginning with a rather dense discussion of urban policy theory, the book analyzes the rhetoric, actions, and influences of various coalitions. Ecological modernization, the authors conclude, has the potential to create win-win situations, but there are pitfalls: it dilutes the ecological critique of capitalism and embodies an inherent elitist and technocratic bias.

Desfor and Keil begin their narrative with the re-naturalization of Toronto's Don River in the 1990s. Here and elsewhere, environmental reform served a neoconservative economic agenda; clean water, bicycle trails, and parks transformed the Don into a marketing tool in Toronto's bid for global-city status. Still, the project brought together a wide variety of interests, serving as a positive example of how the energies of science, engineering, and environmental advocacy can be incorporated into urban ecological issues. Like the Don, the debate over the Los Angeles River involved two discourses, one advanced by the Corps of Engineers to further "concretize" the river and the other by ecologists and other activists seeking to improve habitat and encourage recreation.

Soil and air pollution provide similar stories, additional benchmarks in the development of ecomodernization politics. In Toronto, officials used risk-assessment analysis to determine the degree of toxic cleanup necessary in areas slated for manufacturing and office space. Desfor and Keil suggest that this ecomodernist tool can mediate impasses, but here again they find the strategy problematic. Air pollution in Los Angeles presented another brand of ecomodernization, this time dictated as a top-down exercise and shaped by the rhetoric of globalization. As in Toronto, the debate on urban policy broadened, but in Los Angeles economic hard times encouraged a turn away from participatory solutions to free-market mechanisms based on tradable emissions permits. Ecomodernizing set limits on what both cities could afford in terms of a healthy environment by legitimizing industry's right to pollute and instituting technocratic or marketing solutions as a means of resolving environmental problems.

While these issues have brought together diverse publics, they raise serious questions about the current state of urban environmental reform. The authors conclude from this complicated and nonlinear history that ecological politics can either reinforce or challenge power relations—an important insight at this juncture in the history of environmentalism. Still, the point could have been made more forcefully. Given the importance of these trends, the authors might have cast their study as a guide to activism by rendering it accessible to a broad spectrum of readers. Instead, they obscure these critical theoretical insights in abstruse language and passive constructions. Had their actors been given greater voice, the book's key point—that language and discourse are essential to understanding the outcome of urban ecological debates—would have been more compelling. Much is lost, despite the conceptual superiority of the authors' approach to that of the many journalistic accounts of recent social-justice campaigns. Their book does, however, drive home the central message that the way...