The Wild and the Toxic

In this well-written monograph, Jennifer Thomson aims to interrogate and trace changes in the idea of health as it was understood within the environmental politics of the late twentieth century. Organizing her analysis around four case studies, Thomson examines the ways health was mobilized by distinct representatives of environmentalism in the 1970s and early 1980s: the organization Friends of the Earth; the Love Canal Homeowners Association; a loose group of California-based bioregionalists along with the activist organization Earth First!; and the scientist James Lovelock and supporters of his Gaia hypothesis. The book draws on secondary and archival sources as well as more than a dozen interviews conducted by the author. While the individual cases will be familiar to many, Thomson offers a new perspective through her focus on health and through her interviews. The chapters covering Friends of the Earth and the Gaia hypothesis stand out as particularly interesting, offering new material and perspectives. Yet Thomson's real focus is not health in its traditional sense as an attribute of the body but the rhetorical move that environmentalists made to apply the term health to the planet at large and to craft a biocentric politics. Accordingly, she has the most sympathy for the bioregionalists, of which the poet and activist Gary Snyder is her exemplar. The book seems to trace two discourses rather than one—a discourse about human health and the environment (Friends of the Earth and the Love Canal Homeowners Association), and a discourse about planetary health (the bioregionalists and Lovelock)—and it is not clear why these particular cases should be brought together. Although both discourses use the same term, they do so in distinct ways, and, moreover, each has its own historical trajectory. While the discourse of human health and the environment has been tracked historically by several authors, far less has been said about the discourse of planetary health and its history—and this is one of the book's principal contributions. Yet even though she recognizes Aldo Leopold and his concept of “land health” as an important precursor to the idea of planetary health, Thomson has relatively little else to say about its antecedents

Archaeology · Art · Craft · Environmental ethics · Environmental movement · Environmentalism · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Sympathy · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Climate Change Communication and Perception · Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Smoke on the Water

  Open Access•Dario Fazzi•Journal of Transnational American…•2024

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