Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780816525812)

In this thoughtful and highly readable book, No l Sturgeon illustrates the myriad and insidious ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as "natural" and how our images of "nature" interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all. Why is it, she wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often "naturalize" themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world? And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like "green" businesses, recycling programs, and the protection of threatened species?

Although there are other books that examine questions of culture and environment, this is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work, and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions. Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural, and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world. She investigates the persistence of the "myth of the frontier" and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity (and occasional controversy) of penguins (and penguin family values) and questions assumptions about human warfare as "natural."

The book is intended to provoke debates--among college students and graduate students, among their professors, among environmental activists, and among all citizens who are concerned with issues of environmental quality and social equality.

Author: No? Sturgeon
ISBN-10: 0816525811
ISBN-13: 9780816525812
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Language: English
Published: 12/12/2008
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.86h x 5.94w x 0.49d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 05/15/2009 pg. 19
Reference and Research Bk News 08/01/2009 pg. 71