We Can't Shop Our Way to Safety

Organic food has boomed in the last decade, moving from a tiny niche market to a $17 billion dollar industry. Those who can afford it are buying nontoxic and organic rugs, mattresses, and clothing. Almost half of all households in the US have purchased a water filter of one kind or another. Across the country, people are growing more concerned with the possibility that their food and water could actually make them sick -- and are responding by buying more products with labels like "organic," "green," and "natural."

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In Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves, Andrew Szasz argues that a consumerist response to environmental threats is not only inadequate, but also dangerous in the way it enables individuals to isolate themselves in what he calls an "inverted quarantine," focused more on protecting oneself in the short term than actually doing anything towards systemic change. Instead of viewing discrete sources of pollution as things to be contained and dealt with, Szasz says, we now view the environment itself -- the air we breathe, the water we drink -- as potentially hazardous, and are containing ourselves instead.

Szasz details some of the actual threats to us from pollution and environmental destruction, and makes a convincing case that we should, in fact, be worried about the water coming out of our tap and the pesticides used on conventional produce. But quarantine, he argues just as convincingly, simply doesn't work: standards for toxins in food, air, and water are too low, or aren't followed correctly; there are too many substances (and combinations of substances) that don't have any regulation at all. And even if you managed to eat only organic food and drink only filtered water (and if both of those things meant you were really not ingesting any toxins), you'd still have to deal with breathing air polluted by factories -- or get an oxygen tank.

But that's not really the point: whether or not these products work, people seem to believe that they do, and are shopping accordingly. And that's where the real danger comes in. Regarding consumer goods as an acceptable solution to environmental problems effectively takes the weight off of those responsible for creating those problems; factories can go on polluting the skies and waterways as long as we have (or think we have) adequate filters and water purification systems. We buy organic instead of doing anything to stop the dumping of pesticides on crops, buy a Brita filter instead of taking action against the factories dumping toxic waste into the streams and the power plants contaminating our groundwater.

Szasz makes an interesting and lengthy comparison of this sort of consumer-based environmentalism to a different (and more literal) type of inverted quarantine: the nuclear panic that led to the widespread construction of fallout shelters in 1961. After a frenzy that lasted a few months, people began to realize that bomb shelters wouldn't really do anything to protect them from a nuclear explosion. Even if their shelters actually held together during the blast, the chances of surviving the fallout (or the weeks of isolation in a tiny, airtight bunker) were slim. And even survivors would emerge from the shelter into a poisoned, devastated world.

On top of the fact that the shelters were useless, some argued that shelters would actually increase the potential for nuclear war. The false sense of security afforded by the shelters, they suggested, would make the consequences of nuclear war seem more acceptable, and thus the public would be more forgiving of a hawkish political stance. And that's the essence of Szasz's argument as extrapolated to the current environmental crisis. What we're doing is not only useless and "a cruel illusion," as he puts it, but it invites even greater environmental destruction to go on unimpeded, because people believe that they are individually secure. It's that false sense of security that leads people to accept greater risks, whether in the case of nuclear war or the depletion of the ozone layer.