Friends of the Earth and Environmental Health

This chapter discusses the long first decade of environmental organization Friends of the Earth (1969-1984). Founded by David Brower, FOE's central contribution to environmentalism was to move from the Sierra Club's understanding of wilderness as a retreat within which certain individuals' health could be regenerated, to thinking of human health as a litmus test for the health of the environment. Although the more systemic and anti-authoritarian of these approaches faded by the early 1980s, others pertaining to consumption and individual health persisted within mainstream environmentalism. The result was a politics in which the primary subject position was held by an undifferentiated, globalized, non-place-specific consumer in need of governmental protection yet also responsible for ensuring her own health through proper consumer choices. FOE's development during its long first decade illustrates the growing importance of individualized, consumer-based conceptions of health to the consolidation, in the early 1980s, of the environmental lobby in Washington, D.C.

Conclusion

The concluding chapter assesses why many environmentalisms premised upon health failed to achieve the results they sought. It reflects upon the continued usefulness and relevance of health for environmental politics, and places health in the context of climate change, climate justice, and the Anthropocene.

You’re Murdering Us

This chapter examines the activism of residents of Love Canal, New York, in response to the 1976 discovery of 21,000 tons of buried toxic waste in their community. It concentrates especially on the work of the Love Canal Homeowners Association. Love Canal residents understood the health of the human body through an assemblage of epidemiology, toxicology, and personal experience. They perceived the individual as the marker of community health, environmental reality, scientific legitimacy, and government responsibility, in the process coming to see the entire world as environmentally vulnerable. Their conflicting interpretations of citizenship rights illustrated how they were torn between the conviction that everyone had the right to environmental health, and the belief that the needs of national citizens should be prioritized.

Biocentrism and the Health of the Wild

This chapter discusses the biocentric perspective on health, focusing particularly on bioregional activists and radical environmentalist organization Earth First! Following the 1972 UNCHE in Stockholm, biocentric activists endeavoured to protect the health of the wild in a way that did not begin and end with human welfare. They developed interventions as varied as ecological restoration, land medicine, and re-inhabitation. Their vision of the health of the wild held an aspiration for human-ecological integration in tension with pronounced anti-humanist tendencies.

Planetary Health in the Age of Climate Change

This chapter details physicist James Lovelock's lifelong work on the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia postulated that the Earth was a single living entity whose health was threatened by human-induced changes in atmospheric composition and planetary biodiversity. Arguing that humans had overstepped their ecological niche, Lovelock developed a planetary medicine by which humans would treat the planet as a doctor would a sick patient. Gaia, as well as Lovelock's diagnosis of the Earth as having a fever, found renewed life in the 1990s, as activist Bill McKibben called for drastic checks on the greenhouse-gas emissions threatening the health of the planet.

Introduction

The introductory chapter reinterprets Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and its historiographical legacy. It begins with an exploration of lay and expert conceptualizations of the relationship between health and the environment in the United States in the pre-WWII period. It then situates health and environmentalism within both the broader political culture of liberal and progressive activism in the post-WWII period, and the legislative and regulatory trajectory of health and the environment. From these broader histories, the chapter argues that the widespread lionization of Carson’s work and person, by embracing an influential yet bounded reformism for which health was a matter of personal choice and individual boundaries, has impeded a more wide-ranging scholarly engagement with the centrality of health to environmental politics.