| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. By Frederick Buell. New York: Routledge, 2003, xviii + 390 pp. Notes, index. $29.95.

Frederick Buell's ambitious study chronicles a dark chapter in recent environmental history, as he traces the myriad ways in which environmental crises have settled into the fabric of everyday life. He begins by reviewing the place and reception of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), particularly the apocalyptic rhetoric that accompanied expressions of environmental crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. As his title suggests, Buell contends that the notion of crisis has shifted from the apocalyptic to the mundane over the past generation even as actual crises have increasingly intruded into the lives of growing numbers of people, particularly in the Third World. In the process of coping with degraded air or water sources, for example, these numbers or their governments engage in a range of postures: denial, rationalization, resignation, even enthusiastic acceptance in the face of current corporate spin control or popular cyber fiction or art. From Apocalypse to Way of Life suggests T. S. Eliot is correct at the end of "The Hollow Men": The world will end not with a bang, but with a series of half-hearted whimpers. Buell describes a brave new world characterized by apathy or accommodation already upon us. There is little geography of hope inscribed in this cautionary tale.

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