One of the most enlightening books on the environment I have read is Shopping Our Way to Safety, by Andrew Szasz. It is about the ways in which people react to threats from the environment by stockpiling on products that supposedly combat them. Often these threats are man-made, and many of the products advertised to protect people against them are not even necessary. Szasz uses the term “inverted quarantine” to describe how, in modern times, our response to environmental harm is to protect ourselves instead of our environment. Szasz shows how we are locked in a vicious cycle of production that shifts the focus away from environmental conservation and onto personal safety from the toxins it generates.
He does this in a variety of ways, using specific examples like drinking water. It was not until the 1980s that a turning point happened, where bottled water was suddenly viewed as safer to drink than tap water. This happened because consumers grew worried about all the reports of industrial chemicals infiltrating their water supply. Instead of solving the problem with government regulation, the response from the public was to drink bottled water instead. Yet despite popular belief, there is no evidence that drinking tap water is a danger to health. Szasz (2007:174) states that “bottled water may taste better than tap water, but in terms of chemical or biological content it is not obviously superior to tap water, and sometimes it is demonstrably worse”. Other examples he uses to illustrate the futility of inverted quarantine are water filters, air filters, and eating organic foods. Instead of working to end the pollution that led to inverted quarantine, people are generally more content to buy these products because they believe they will be protected by them. “Environmental inverted quarantine products are often ineffective, but because people believe – falsely – that they are protected, they are less likely to feel an urge to voice support for the kind of regulatory controls that would be needed to really address the hazard” (Szasz, 2007:226).
I think Szasz accomplishes the purpose of his research with demonstrations of inverted quarantine that never came to fruition, but were solved by the proactive intervention of world governments. Two examples he uses are the possibility of nuclear war and the destruction of the ozone layer. In the 1950s, many people stockpiled products in case of nuclear war, which had the effect of making it more of a reality; that by buying products to protect against fallout, people were unconsciously encouraging it. Once the governments of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. intervened and the movement stopped, the threat became less real. Similarly, the Montreal Protocol was a global agreement that put a stop to chlorofluorocarbons destroying the ozone layer. Since then, there has been growing evidence that the ozone layer is returning to normal, especially after this book’s publication in 2007.
Of all the concepts in Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology, risk society is the one this book emphasizes the most. In 1995, Ulrich Beck created this concept to describe the changing U.S. social dynamic that took place after the 1950s. This is when there was a shift away from industrial society’s focus on the distribution of wealth to risk society’s focus on the protection of personal health. In industrial society, class inequality was the pivotal motivator for social activism, which had collectivist results; in risk society, environmental threats create consumer patterns that only protect individuals. “This fear emerges because risk is much more equally distributed across the population in a risk society than goods distribution was in an industrial society” (Gould and Lewis, 2021:46). This means that threats are distributed evenly across a population in a non-discriminatory manner, yet they result in individualist behavior because no specific groups are threatened.
In a risk society, the avoidance of toxins creates additional environmental issues to the ones being avoided. This is because the convenience of buying products allows people to forget about possible alternatives. Over time, any alternatives to the status quo are considered impractical, because a reliance on inverted quarantine has already been cemented on the public. Corporations continue to exploit the environment because there is no pressure from social or political groups to stop them. Not only that, but a risk society allows the treadmill of production (T.O.P.) to continue at ever-increasing rates. The T.O.P. is a function of capitalism; it means that ever-increasing production and consumption leads to ever-increasing environmental degradation, in cycles of increasing intensity. If people keep buying products to protect themselves, it contributes to the accumulated extraction and waste of resources, which further pollutes the environment, creating a loop of destruction that gets stronger as time goes on.
In Twenty Lessons, Gould and Lewis (2021:40) state that “capitalism’s inherent need to expand and increase its rate of profit means that capitalism will expand and intensify its ecological degradation.” Here they are describing Ecological Marxism, which is another way of looking at the T.O.P. The difference is that Ecological Marxism describes how alienated we feel from the environment because of consumption; that as we buy more products to fight its threats (let alone products that do not), we distance ourselves from any responsibility of protecting it.
Another concept from Twenty Lessons the book touched on is ecological modernism. Gould and Lewis (2021:31) state that “ecological modernization theory proposes that the economic growth needs of capitalism can be reconciled with ecological principles in a win-win situation…”. Technology is widely espoused by these advocates as the holy grail of reconciliation. The problem with this is that a reliance on technology would just create more inverted quarantine as potentially toxic products are created to combat old ones. “Clean consumption is compatible with, even requires, dirty production. It is an amazing contradiction” (Szasz. 2007:197). An example that Szasz uses to illustrate this point is how the chlorination of water had the “unforeseen consequence that when we shower, we inhale trihalomethanes” (Szasz, 2007:161). Trihalomethanes are toxins that can be inhaled when taking a hot shower; they are only a threat because of the technology used to chlorinate water. This is just one example of inverted quarantine gone wrong.
I believe the problems above point to a cultural veil the U.S. has involving science denial. The lack of attention on sustainability can be attributed to social constructionism, where people develop knowledge of the world in a social context, based on shared assumptions that are not always factual. Some of these assumptions “deny that there is an environment independent of human perception… or at least that we can have reliable knowledge of the natural world” (Gould and Lewis, 2021:115). Thus, a large amount of people in the U.S. serve the political interests of corporations, who lobby for this veil to stay covered over their eyes. Climate change, genetically modified organisms, the harm done by tobacco: these issues all have powerful companies campaigning against their regulation, and most of them are successful. Likewise, the affect our waste has on the environment is largely ignored by corporations and the media, who work together to increase each other’s profits via advertising. That is why we hardly ever see evidence of the impact pollution is having on the environment in the news. Conveniently, we only see it in reports that scare people enough to buy products in the inverted quarantine sector.
It is important to read this book because the deregulation of environmental monitoring may continue at its current rate. The Trump administration probably did more than any other to shift focus away from the environment. Conditions now are far worse than they were when this book was published 15 years ago, except for the destruction of the ozone layer, which only improved due to an international coalition that banned the use of CFCs. The U.S. would be wise to take a page from the international community’s ongoing efforts to combat ozone depletion and climate change.
Despite some of its dated information, I would still recommend this is as essential reading. It helped me as a student understand key concepts in our sustainability class, like risk society and the T.O.P. The concept of inverted quarantine was also useful, as it appears to be a symptom of capitalism that is harder to see than others. This book opened my eyes to the fact that as our industrial society transitioned to a risk society, we shifted our focus away from protecting the environment onto protecting ourselves.
A new shift is needed, one that does not rely on technology to save us. The only way to fight the T.O.P. is through government facilitation of the expanded accumulation of wealth. Ecotaxes and incentives can be used to strengthen investments in clean energy and research alternatives to ecological modernization. Social movements and radical journalism need to reach more people, because I believe that if more people knew what was going on, they would stop to think twice about buying the latest iPhone from Apple. Inverted quarantine would transform into proactive social change, as it did in the past, lest the treadmill of production turn into one of destruction.
References
Szasz, Andrew. 2007. Shopping Our Way to Safety. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gould, Kenneth A., and Tammy L. Lewis. 2021. Twenty Lessons in Environmental Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
