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  • Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America by Christopher C. Sellers
  • Kristoffer Whitney (bio)
Crabgrass Crucible: Suburban Nature and the Rise of Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century America. By Christopher C. Sellers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. $42.

What is American environmentalism, and where can historians rightly place its creation and development? In Crabgrass Crucible, Christopher Sellers's convincing and nuanced argument places the birthplace of the U.S. environmental movement in the suburbs of its largest cities. The book proceeds in three substantive parts, focusing on a handful of suburban developments on Long Island and in the Los Angeles basin during the two decades following World War II, and connecting these case studies to the development of a national discourse and politics surrounding "the environment" more generally in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the empirical material, Sellers successfully maintains a creative tension between competing narratives about the urban fringe: the disparagement of "sprawl" by critics as "nature-erasing," the perspectives of suburban residents themselves of these same fringes as places to encounter "nature," and his own "ecological" framing of suburbs as their own distinctive hybrid spaces and a diverse "mosaic of microenvironments" (p. 55).

Chapters 2 through 4 present this hybrid perspective of Long Island, detailing the postwar changes in the built environment (generally along class and racial lines), alterations and persistence in the region's flora and fauna, and the suburban experience of novel forms of pollution: phosphates in Long Island aquifers, synthetic industrial chemicals, and DDT used for mosquito control. This combination of issues mobilized a grassroots synthesis of nature preservation and public health discourses that would become known as environmentalism by the end of the 1960s. Chapters [End Page 426] 5 through 7 loosely mirror the New York chapters, detailing the distinctive proto-environmentalism of the Los Angeles basin stemming from the aesthetic and health effects of air pollution and smog. Sellers distinguishes his story from the more declensionist narratives of historians and cultural critics who have painted the suburbs as places of environmental destruction in which environmentalism was an exogenous, top-down phenomenon. Sellers's environmentalism is a populist movement, emerging from the experiences of suburban residents and reanimating earlier understandings of the connections between place, pollution, and human health. A decade before Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring, "lay experiences" on the fringes of Los Angeles and New York were a source of knowledge and political action that writers and activists like Carson would later harness and synthesize.

These "lay" experiences are among the most powerful and innovative sources at Sellers's disposal, and interview material figures largely in his discussion of what it was like to live in suburban nature in mid-century America. This subject-position is also, however, the source of occasional gaps in the narrative of Crabgrass Crucible. In this story, almost without exception, pollution and its associated health threats are things that happen to suburbanites, rather than things that they participate in. At a pivotal moment in the argument, and using empirical materials from a 1957 DDT lawsuit on Long Island, Sellers draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "habitus" to explain what he calls "chemical naturalism": the "lay and experiential" understandings of chemistry, environment, and health that would help to create a larger environmental movement a decade later (p. 127). This narrow form of habitus, however, is a culture of reaction to pollution, leaving little room for a suburban population that is, in part, also complicit in the creation of pollution (one thinks, for example, of Paul Robbins's 2007 Lawn People—"turfgrass subjects" whose social identities as suburban residents outweigh their environmentalist misgivings about maintaining chemically manicured yards). As a correction to the larger historiography on the origins of environmentalism and the often one-sided portrayal of suburbs as places of nature-destruction, Sellers's emphasis is understandable. It does, however, tend toward a one-sidedness of its own.

This issue aside, the accomplishments of Crabgrass Crucible are significant. After presenting the New York and Los Angeles examples, Sellers moves to the maturation of the political environmentalism born in the postwar suburbs, and the nationalization (and globalization...

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