In the popular politics of hazardous waste, Andrew Szasz finds an answer, a scenario for taking the most pressing environmental issues out of the academy and the boardroom and turning them into everyone's business. This work reconstructs the growth of a powerful movement around the question of toxic waste. Szasz follows the issue as it moves from the world of "official" policy-making, onto television and into popular consciousness, and then into neighbourhoods, spurring on the formation of thousands of local, community-based groups. He shows how, in less than a decade, a rich infrastructure of more permanent social organizations emerged from this movement, expanding its focus to include issues like municipal waste, military toxics, and pesticides. Szasz identifies the force that pushed environmental policy away from the traditional approach - pollution removal - toward the superior logic of pollution prevention. He discusses the conflicting official responses to the movement's evolution, revealing that, despite initial resistance, law-makers eventually sought to appease popular discontent by strengthening toxic waste laws.
In its success, Szasz suggests, this movement may even prove to be the vehicle for reinvigorating progressive politics.
- ISBN10 0816621748
- ISBN13 9780816621743
- Publish Date 1 April 1994 (first published 25 February 1994)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 12 February 1999
- Publish Country US
- Imprint University of Minnesota Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 232
- Language English