Book Review

In the past three decades the environmental movement in the United States and around the world has succeeded in placing environmental issues firmly within the local, state, national, and international political discourse. An ecological culture is emerging, Andrew Jamison argues, but "concern for protecting the environment has been both privatized and commercialized" (p. 144). How the many strands of environmentalism have contributed to this development over the past thirty-five years is the subject of this intriguing book.

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As Jamison explains, this book grew out of his personal journey as both an environmental activist and as a student of environmental politics and science and technology studies. His experiences as a scholar and activist led him to wonder whether the gap between the theory and practice of environmentalism that seemed to grow ever wider from the 1960s to the 1990s could be bridged. Jamison explains how this chasm has grown as "the 'knowledge interests' that had developed within environmental movements ... have increasingly left the movement space behind" (p. 8). That is, he wants to show how green knowledge has become institutionalized in bureaucratic culture, economic culture, civic culture, and academic culture, each of which seeks to generate and use green knowledge in ways that are not always compatible.

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